Reflective Essay The World As I know It A Reflection of LBST 2212 By Mercury Arteaga I am a twenty-year-old woman with an anthropology major

and women studies minor. I am also mixed race and have never really felt a sense of belonging. The world around me disgusts me and depresses me. I cannot understand how people who claim to be religious end up doing some of the worst things and committing the worst crimes. I myself am not a religious person. Nor do I consider myself as a good person. I do not attend church, or read the bible, or beg my God for forgiveness every night. However, I do hold a personal, spiritual relationship with a higher entity. I believe that it is important for you to understand a little about myself, so that you can understand the rest that I will write in this reflection. For You can not love anything you do not understand.(The Education) I do not expect you to love me, however I do expect you to please change your default setting to unbiased and have an open mind. As an anthropology major, I came into this class already reflecting most of the themes shown in the novels by Daniel Quinn; Ishmael and The Story of B. I had my reasons for believing that the world was doomed and so was everyone who inhabited. Since freshman year I have been exposed to case studies that speak about the horrible things that religion has caused, such as; Wars, murder, death, and created an unfair social class. In addition I have also learned about violence and what it represents in many cultures. Now as a Junior I have learned to understand that different people require different cultures, because after all, there is more than one way to do things right, more than one way to survive. This does not mean that I love the culture, or agree with it. Nevertheless I do respect it. The works that we viewed in this class not only strengthen

my foundation in what I believe in practice, but they opened my mind to other ideas as well. I want to begin talking about Religion. This idea of Religion is a truly difficult one to speak about, mostly because I do not wish to offend any one, or start a fight. I will tackle this theme through the books. In Ishmael, the treatment of religion is a controversial issue in his eyes. He does not believe that it actually enforces arbitrary laws on how to live, but instead it gives humans license to do whatever they please with the world and to blame God, or gods for their problems. My thoughts on this are that is it true. I have witnessed people willingly disobey the law by driving faster than needed and crashing, then later screaming to the Heavens and Blaming God for the crash. Why God?! Why? Why did you let me crash? The Bible provides definite models for life, however those who teach it or advertise it tend to miss the point, allowing humans to ignore the more important laws. Those laws are the laws of nature. God did not cause the car crash. The car crash was caused by the nature of physics. The individual had exerted too much speed and forced than necessary, therefore causing a collision. If the person truly believed in the existence of God, then he would have thanked him rather and reproached to him about surviving the car crash. A novel that truly grasps the way I feel religion should be followed is Left Behind. The entire point of this book, in my opinion, is the way that people practice religion. I believe that the authors of this novel wanted to show how people misunderstood the meaning of religion and drifted away from what was important. Instead of worshiping God and thanking the entity for allowing them to live another day, they focused more on their self worth and image. The glorified themselves rather than

glorifying their lord, and at the end, they were left behind. Personally I do not know whether or not to believe in the rapture. I do however, believe that religion should not elevate the worth of one person or culture, but rather praise the said creator or creators of all things on earth. Human Supremacy is another subject that I will touch on. This idea was first presented in Ishmael and then later on showed up again in The Story of B. The basic theme was that although humans may be the most evolutionarily advanced species on Earth, it does not entitle them to rule over all other species. Humans are still entitled to the peace-keeping law which allows for competition but not elimination of another species. This idea is an amazing one. If we (humans) were to get this idea through our thick skulls, the world would be such a better place. We may even increase our health and happiness, and the length of our lives in the process. If we were to take into consideration all the other live forms on our planet, we could probably find nirvana. The story of B speaks about human supremacy in a different way that Ishmael did. It spoke about how the live of a human is not worth more than that of an animal or a plant. Personally I believe that humans are a type of animal. I do believe that the live of a human is not worth any more than that of another animal. If a mouse were to die and so was a human, it would make the same difference to the planet. However, I do believe that as humans, the death of another human is more important than that of animal. I say this because our human experiences give us relationships and connections to other humans. The loss of them would be horrible. We love our dogs and cats as pets, but if we were to lose our pet dog or our sibling. Chances are that we would cry more about the sibling

then the dog. What I am trying to say is that in our human culture, our deaths are important, but to the natural processes of the Earth, any death is simply a death. Why did the Authors decide to write these works? I may not know their answers. My opinion is that they saw how disturbing the world was becoming, that they could not turn on the news any more without crying and feeling hopeless about the world that they live in. Maybe they were past the point of being angry and sad and decided to talk about it in a way that every one could understand. They wrote books and created movies in hopes that some one else could share their frustration. Hopefully one of those people would start a wave of change and eventually every one else would follow. If that is what they were aiming for than they have achieved it with me. In this course we explored the various ideas of humanity and what it means to be human through different kind of literature and films. What I found in the end as more beautiful than what I expected. Between the works and This is Water. I have realized that I needed to change my default setting for the better of myself and the people around me. Instead of being angry and disgusted with the way that humans treat the world, I will begin to change myself and do good on my own. I will stop on being frustrated and angry with every one else around me, because even if the majority of the world may be appalling, there are still those of us who are not. This is my water, this is my default setting. It is no better than yours, and no better than the authors of the works we studied this semester. This is water.