Project #1

 

Christianity Through Different Times 

Religions and How they Impacted in Different Readings.

With over 2 billion followers, Christianity is the most widely practiced religion in the world. The Christian faith is based on beliefs about Jesus Christ’s birth, life, death, and resurrection. While Christianity began with a small group of followers, many historians consider the spread and adoption of Christianity throughout the world to be one of the most successful spiritual missions in human history. Christians are monotheistic, which means they believe in a single God who created the heavens and the earth. This divine Godhead is made up of three parts: the father (God), the Son (Jesus Christ), and the Holy Spirit.

The essence of Christianity revolves around Jesus’ life, death, and Christian beliefs about his resurrection. Christians believe that God sent his son, the messiah, Jesus, to save the world. They believe Jesus was crucified on a cross to atone for sins and was resurrected three days later before ascending to heaven. Christians believe that Jesus will return to earth for the second time in what is known as the Second Coming.

The Holy Bible contains significant scriptures that outline Jesus’ teachings, the lives, and the teachings of major prophets and disciples, and provide guidelines for how Christians should live.

Christians and Jews both believe in the Old Testament of the Bible, but Christians also believe in the New Testament.

The cross is a Christian symbol.

The most important Christian holidays are Christmas (which commemorates Jesus’ birth) and Easter (which commemorates the resurrection of Jesus). Early in colonial times, Christian religious groups rejoiced in influential roles in each of the British colonies, and most attempted to impose strict religious observance through colony governments and local town rules. Although the majority of colonists identified as Christians, they did not live in a religiously homogeneous culture. Instead, various Christian groups frequently believed that their practices and faiths provided unique values that needed to be protected from those who disagreed, resulting in the need for rule and regulation. Catholic and Protestant nations frequently persecuted or outlawed each other’s religions in Europe, and British colonists frequently imposed restrictions on Catholics. The Protestant Anglican church in Great Britain had split into bitter divisions between traditional Anglicans and reforming Puritans, contributing to an English civil war in the 1600s. Differences between Puritans and Anglicans remained in the British colonies.

 Between 1680 and 1760, the main organized denominations in the majority of the colonies were Anglicanism and Congregationalism, an offshoot of the English Puritan movement. However, as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries progressed, the Protestant wing of Christianity constantly gave birth to new movements, such as the Baptists, Methodists, Quakers, Unitarians, and many others, who were sometimes referred to as “Dissenters.” In communities where one existing faith predominated, new congregations were frequently viewed as disloyal troublemakers upsetting the social order. Even though everyone thought the colonial era was the worst, the Christian religion continued to have an impact while doing the worst. As I always say, every good thing has a bad side to it. As my mother always says to me, there is no such thing as a beautiful person who does not have a flow. Every good thing has people who take it out of context and use it to massage their egos and emotions. I kept returning to the idea of religion and faith that Rowlandson exhibited during her imprisonment while we watched Mary Rowlandson A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. Rowlandson’s religion is clearly what allows her to survive despite her brutal treatment as a hostage. Rowlandson writes in the Fourth Remove about how the spirit of God helped restore her spirit: “My head was light and dizzy (either through hunger or hard lodging, or trouble all together), my knees feeble, my body raw by sitting double night and day, that I cannot express to man the affliction that lay upon my spirit, but the Lord helped me at that time to express it to Himself.”(Rowlandson ) In this instance, the Lord serves as an audience for Rowlandson to express her sadness as well. During the twentieth removal, Mary had the opportunity to flee captivity but instead chose to wait for God to rescue her. When given the option, Rowlandson says, “I told him no: I wasn’t willing to run away but wished to wait God’s time, so that I might go home calmly and without fear.”(Rowlandson).

While reading the remove, I was triggered by the things she said from the bible and her actions. For example, in one of the readings, she was really hungry and she stole food from a child because the child was so hungry to eat the food as fast as she. I believe she ate it because she was hungry, but when I looked at it, faith and beliefs can sometimes be challenging. Faith is a deep conviction in God or in religious beliefs that are founded on spiritual perception rather than proof. Belief is the acknowledgment of a statement’s truth or the existence of something. When someone does something terrible, many people are startled and remark, “I thought you were a Christian,” the same thing I believe in doesn’t change my negative behavior because we as humans are capable of the worst things we may have faith in and still not know a way to manage it. The last days of Socrates are described in the book The Last Days of Socrates. Plato’s dialogues are used in The Apology to describe the tale of Socrates’ trial, in which he vigorously defends himself against allegations of heresy and corruption. Socrates rips at his accusers, methodically proving his thesis that each individual is responsible for his acts. However, he exhibits the arrogance that has earned him enemies, and as a result, he is convicted and condemned to death by hemlock drinking. Corruption is accused of two things: first, corrupting the youth, and second, rejecting the Gods. But Socrates is attempting to pose difficult problems; he did not want people to live an examined life that is not worth living.

He told everyone how much they worry about their reputation and how little they care about wisdom. He was attempting to teach them the importance of asking difficult questions and gaining knowledge, as he was accused of not believing in God, which he did because he believed wisdom comes from the gods, but he still asked difficult questions. Has it always been challenging for many religions to ask hard questions and gain an understanding of their beliefs? Sam Harris wrote a book titled The End of Faith. He claims that beliefs organize our behavior, but in our society, it is taboo to recognize our religious differences. He also claims that the diversity of our religious doctrine has rendered us powerless, that we are free to question everything except faith, and that it is taboo to recognize that our religions differ and that some of them bring a lot of violence to the table. For this, asking difficult questions provides us with knowledge, and God provides us with wisdom. Like Equino’s conversion to Christianity, he was motivated, and he views himself as doing it better than those who converted him. In 1759, Equiano was baptized as a Christian at St. Margaret’s Church in London. In his Narrative, he describes how a female relative of his owner frequently informed him that until he was Baptized, he would not be able to enter Heaven. He requested Miss Guerin to have him christened, and she persuaded his master to do so. She then proceeded to teach Equino to read and to train him on Christian values. Six years later, he heard George Whitefield, the famed preacher of the Great Awakening, preach in Savannah. He becomes a Christian missionary. Equiano arrived in Nicaragua as a Christian missionary in 1775. He was following Dr. Irving, who planned to build a plantation on the Mosquito Coast. Equiano attempted to Christianize the local Indian population. Equiano petitioned Queen Charlotte for an end to slavery in England in 1788, after gaining a key position in the British Abolitionist Movement. The next year, he released his Interesting Narrative in England, with Dutch and American versions following in the following two years. Susan Cullen, an Englishwoman, married him in 1792.

Death and the King’s Horseman is about more than simply a collision of cultures—about it’s a conflict of religions as well. Yoruba mysticism and Elesin’s struggles to confront mortality and the afterlife are central to the plot, and Soyinka himself regards the play’s spiritual difficulties as the main thing going on. The play certainly makes us think about other religions and customs and how they cross and clash, with references to Islam and Christianity as well as extensive discussion of Yoruba religious rituals. Soyinka exposes the emptiness of British customs and religion by depicting the richness of Yoruba traditions while failing to depict the British characters fully involved in any form of religion. The greatest theological misunderstanding in the drama is between Elesin and himself, not between the British and the Yoruba. Religion has always been in belief and faith we carry with changes and it’s similar in a sense we don’t know the ways we refuse to ask questions and we all walk about knowing it all in all the books and discussions we’ve done. We don’t want to open up to knowledge is knocking and wisdom is here for us as time goes on Christianity changes and grows but we can also ask hard questions to ourselves and others as Socrates says when you harm others you are also harming your soul in the process hiding behind religions and hurting others is still harming your soul in the process colonialism and postcolonialism, you may witness a pattern of how Christian ideas alter yet remain similar. I described how each reading speaks about it differently. But, in today’s culture, we raise difficult questions and can be atheists without feeling compelled to adhere to a single faith.