Awfully Good

By
As I consider this week’s reading, I’d first like to give Voltaire some mad props on his creativity with the way he names things. But it is also extremely annoying. Plot aside, when we look at many of the “religious” characters within this first section, it becomes clearer as to why Candide would stick to Philosophy rather than so called religion. The men who claim religion literally dump poop on his head and own sex slaves, as opposed to the philosophy that, while it may not maintain a certain moral law, gives him a positive outlook on a terrible, awful, disgusting story (at least for a little bit). Eventually at the points where life literally gets so awful that he has to question his beliefs (which basically tell him to suffer through everything with a rainbow like smile), we get the sense that maybe not every effect has a positive cause as his teacher would have liked to believe. At many points throughout this first section people tell their life story, and they are made up of horrible things that happened to them and their family. In fits of survival, we even witness Candide kill his own brother! So far this book is really awful, but not literally, just rape and murder everywhere kind of awful if you get what I mean. But that is a part of life that we honestly avoid for good reason, and Candide (the book) is just a reminder for me that detestable acts happen even today (maybe even more so) and that the way we react and treat people who are affected is important.

 Commented on Natalie's and Zelda's!

Comments

  1. Ethan LafontSeptember 25, 2017 at 10:14 PM

    I really like the realistic approach you have to gathering your own moral from this story! I think the beauty with philosophy is, while Candide was getting his own point across, we can still go from there and get our own ideas and concepts!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Noah PalframanSeptember 25, 2017 at 11:17 PM

    With this book being a satire from the get-go, it may be a safe assumption that the book focuses a bit on the optimistic viewpoint in life can sometimes not work out in the end no matter how much one thinks for a positive outcome. Optimism can be dangerous, and this book seems to aim a bit in that direction as a joke to those who view life as all gumdrops and sparkles. I love optimism, it's what keeps me out of a state of depression, but I can at least understand when there is no good from an action. For instance, if a murder were to occur for no other reason than the culprit admitting it was just for fun, it would be easy for (I hope) all of us to say this was a terrible event and no good can be found in the action. Candide, however, might say that it was the victim's job to be killed at that moment so the murderer did not kill the individual who would someday create the cure for cancer. That's exceptionally far fetched, and I believe one of Candide's focus points are on the over optimism this world can produce and how it is unhealthy. But hey, keep your head up, things will turn around.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An Honest Reaction to Reading "Honest to God"

By
Originally I said in my last blog post that I liked this book, but I have sort of changed my mind. It is not that I hate it or anything, it is just weird and I don’t really agree with what John Robinson is saying most of the time. I appreciate that he is trying to write something different and new, but my problem is that some of the ideas are just a little too radical for my taste, and I disagree with him a lot. In the seventh and last chapter of the book, Robinson himself acknowledges his radicalness and writes about how he knows that this type of thought on religion is controversial. He goes on to write how all great thinkers were seen as controversial when they first started and says, “Every new religious truth comes as the destroyer of some other god”. To further prove this point, he uses the example of how Socrates was condemned as an atheist for not believing in multiple gods, and while it is true that Socrates was a great philosopher who was not seen as so when he was alive, I ...
Read more

Raphael and a man walk into Eden...

By
I'll just start off by saying Raphael is one of the three named archangels in Scripture we hear the least about, and I thoroughly enjoy just reading and seeing his name pop up. Regardless, I want to touch on Adam's recounting of his own..."birth". Take that with a grain of salt as Adam was not physically born, but rather he simply became. In truth, we should all be able to give a similar account to their first memory of consciousness and fully aware. Adam was created, but he realized he could walk, talk, and speak without first learning. Imagine being able to think clear thoughts in your native language and be a functioning individual right out of the womb. It's an incredible thought, and Adam can give a recall of this like it were yesterday...which it might have been, who knows? Aside from that, Adam could even give an account to Eve's creation. The Bible says nothing pertaining to this matter so this is where Milton does a bit of adlibbing and writes around ...
Read more

Extra blog

By
OK so, honors project! Honestly I really loved it as a whole. I said this already in the video, but I feel like I personally could've done better. I just feel like I didn't have enough time to completely process some questions and be able to give my best responses. I really enjoyed reading the O'Connor piece, which I think was everyone's favorite anyway. I love narrative stories like that, but honestly I'm glad I got to be in the Russell group. I feel like that group was the easiest to argue and answer from, honestly. As a whole, I would love to do a project like this again in later semesters. It was a lot of fun and time FLEW by.
Read more