Journal of Oct A

Oct 2
By sharing opinion on an early-written America poem, the problem about race is re-considered.
I remember that we talked about word power before. This time, we mixed them together. How do “black” and “white” have relative gaps of position? “White” does have a meaning of “holy, clean” in America. The reason is that the original Americans were taught language by Europeans, or white people. At that time, the Americans were enslaved, so their skin color became an insulting word. As far as I am concerned, the racial problem still exists because we are still using the definitions. We’ll work on that, definitely.

Oct 3, 4, 5&8
These days we are learning about the early American literature. The topic is mainly about religion. We talked about Cotton Mather, who wrote something on witchcraft.
We can see that religion did play a significant role in the human society. Besides the obvious influence on literature, it is most likely to have something to do with our community. In the good side, religion can be a common belief. When having a common belief, members in community are more likely to be united. They are led by the same religion to the same direction, and will be more enthusiastic about it. Another good aspect is that it helps them to improve their qualities. The God is anthropomorphic; he is an ideal human being. That is, he has the best qualities of human: tolerance, brilliance, reliability and vigor. People who believe in god regarded him as an idol, and what they will do is to be more like him. Religion also gives people hope. They believed that god will save them in the end, so they won’t give up easily.
Although providing abundant advantages, religion has serious negative effects as well. The evidences are apparent—frequent religious wars in the Middle East. Although seldom religions contain the element of intolerance, some people who practice it have. As what I stated above, religion unites community, thus, when some people opposed to another religion, the prejudice spreads rapidly. With increasing level of conflicts between ideas, it wound eventually reach a high level, which the conflicts are practiced with severe violence. It’s such an interesting phenomenon that religions create tolerance as well as tolerance. More surprisingly, other aspects of the disadvantages have the similar relationship between their references in the advantages. For instance, religion gives people hopes as well as makes some people lazy because they think that god will help them.
To conclude, if the power of one thing reaches a certain altitude, it will easily acts in 2 very opposite ways. That’s why somebody says: More power, more responsibility. You’ll have more responsibility to your community if you have more power in it.

Oct 9
After several failures in trying to open the google earth, we started to talked about the guys on the American bills. We talked about Benjamin Franklin, however, the only 2 things I know about him is the kite experiment and he is very famous in the US.
Unfortunately, I cannot come up with anything important about today. Maybe, I need more sleep.

Oct 10
The google earth is finally done. It is so funny to move the earth by mouse as if moving a ball with hand. How is geography or does it affect your community? The answer is positive. The most apparent instance is food. It is so surprising when the teacher said banana is one of the most-eaten foods in the world, which is my favorite fruit. As a Chinese saying goes, “Foods are the sky of citizens”, we can see that foods are playing a fundamental and crucial role in the human society. No food, no community. However, there is something else. Geographic separation results in cultural differences. Although we are in an era of combination of cultures, as an international student, I can still witness the great difference between the east and west, and even within the same country.
Oct 11
Last night’s homework was to find out the similarity among what we had learnt so far. In this case, today’s discussion mainly combined these elements together: community, responsibility, environment and religion. Honestly speaking, it is the environment that generating the most fundamental influence in the society. First, the relationship between individuals in the community depends on the environment. We there are rumors, depression, lack of food or other bad conditions, it is usually hard to keep the harmonious relation rather than destroy it. Secondly, the environment controls the religion. Although many religions have something in common, different social condition and culture determine the form of religion and eventually makes diversity. Totally, the underlined statement can be demonstrated by the Marxist philosophy view of substance determined consciousness.