Christinity and Culture Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Christinity and Culture - Essay Example Kierkegaard, in his book 'The Sickness unto Death' likens the fears of the Christian to those of a non-believer in the Christian religion to the fears of an adult and those of a child; children fear things that might not be harmful to them like darkness and some creations of their minds, while the adult fears what is really terrifying. It is evident from this that Kierkegaard believes that the world view of Christianity is different from that of other religions, cultures and philosophies, and - according to Kierkegaard - is superior. Kierkegaard is a Christian who is not willing to compromise any aspect of his religious belief. Some Christians however, either for making their religions more popular and applicable or for a conflict within them between their cultures and their religions, have sought to bring Christianity's view of the world closer to their cultural one. There has been many tries to do this while maintaining harmony with the Christian view, such as arguing that culture is the creation of God and so it is not against his will to follow it. All these views however fail to maintain logical consistency for a simple reason; Christianity claims to be from an all-wise God and thus claims perfection, it also claims that every human has free will but is required to follow the path set by God. To argue that man is imperfect and should follow his imperfect path is at bottom saying that Christianity is a perfect law that has no use to us humans, that for some reason God asked us to follow this law and rewards and punishes based on the following of this law, and in the same breath saying; God wants us to ignore this law. Nietzsche's famous quote 'Only something which does not have a history can be defined' means that something that has evolved over time and will probably continue to evolve cannot be limited to a certain definition since it is in constant change. Morality is one such thing, and so, for Nietzsche, the Christian - or any religious - attempt to define the morality of all time fails. This can be contrasted with Kierkegaard's view that Christianity is superior to any other philosophy, morality or culture. There is no middle ground, and trying to seek in holy books a hint for going against them is like asking God to give us orders and ask us not to follow them. What if these tries do succeed, and so one of the orders given to us by God would be 'don't follow my orders', what then should we do Back to the problem that initiated this ethical religious problem, if Catholicism is to be taught in Catholic schools, then a kid with lesbian parents will definitely suffer in that school from hearing that his own parents are going against the very teachings of his religion. If, however, Catholicism must be changed to suite the needs of people who both want to claim to follow a religion and go against it then we are left with something that is not Catholicism but that has the same name. Some people act as if one should be given the right to be Christian and have a belief system that goes against Christianity, but I believe that if someone has a belief system that goes against a religion then he is, by that fact alone, not belonging to

inquery project :: essays research papers fc

The question I choose to investigate was if beans needed soil to grow and if a bean which was soaked in water will grow faster than one that was not. The first step was to soak several dry beans in water overnight. Put four soaked beans on a wet piece of paper toweling and four dry beans on a piece of wet paper toweling. Then I labeled two plastic cups with the start date and soaked or dry, and put the toweling and beans in the appropriate cup and placed them on the windowsill. Everyday I checked the moisture level of the toweling and added water if needed. In the middle of the second week I noticed mold forming on three of my dry beans. I choose to discard of those beans. By the beginning of the third week someone suggested keeping the beans in an open Ziploc bag to keep moisture on the toweling so I switched. At the end of my inquiry I saw that neither the soaked nor the dry beans had extensive growth and I couldn’t understand why. Below I have charted my observations and then gave possible explanations as to why this did not work properly. Observations: Week 1: July 08, 2004: Start project. Leave beans in cups on windowsill. July 10, 2004: No change. July 12, 2004: Start to see sprouts come out of 2 beans in soaked cup. July 14, 2004: No Change Week 2: July 16, 2004: Mold is starting to form on 2 beans in the dry cup. 3 beans in the soaked cup have sprouted. 1 bean in the dry cup has sprouted. July 18, 2004: Mold is on 3 beans in the dry cup. July 20, 2004: Threw out 3 molded beans. Sprouts and roots are seen in the soaked cup. Week 3: July 22, 2004: Changed from a cup to Ziploc bags. Changed paper toweling. July 24, 2004: The bean from the dry cup has noticeable roots and a sprout July 26, 2004: The roots in both bags are attaching themselves to the paper toweling. My Research:   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  While researching this experiment I realized that I did several things wrong. First, the beans should have initially gone into a plastic bag, this would keep in the moisture, helping the paper toweling to keep the water. Second, the beans should have been placed side by side and laid flat.

Donne as a Metaphysical Poet Essay

Introduction During the past forty years there have been two major theories of language learning by children. But there are two major schools of thought known as, ‘Behaviorists’ and ‘Mentalists’. One school is of the view that language learning is entirely the product of experience and that our environment affects all of us. Others have suggested that everybody has an innate language learning mechanism. Let us discovery with the help of these two schools of thought that how do children acquire their mother tongue. How do they grow up linguistically and learn to handle the stylistics varieties of their mother tongue? How much of the linguistics system they are born with and how much do they discover from their exposure to language? a) The Behaviorist School B.F. Skinner and his followers are known as behaviorist. According to them language learning is process known as operant conditioning. Conditioned Behavior is behavior which is the result of repeated training. Operant means that it is voluntary behavior, it is result of learner’s own free will, and it is not forced by any outside person or thing. The learner demonstrates the new behavior first as a response to a system of reward or punishment, and finally as an automatic response. In order to prove their theory they conducted an experiment. EXPERIMENT They put a rat in a box containing a bar. If it presses a bar, it is rewarded with a pellet of food. Nothing forces it to press the bar. The first time it probably does so accidentally. When the rat finds that the food arrives, it presses the bar again. Eventually it finds that if it is hungry it can obtain food by pressing the bar. Then task is made more difficult. The rat only gets rewarded if it presses the bar while a light is flashing. At first rat is puzzled. Eventually it learns the trick. Then the task is made more difficult again. This time the rat only receives food if it presses the bar a certain number of times. After initial confusion it learns to do this also. And so on, and so on. Operant condition can be summarized thus STIMULUS RESPONSE REINFORCEMENT REPETITION In operant conditioned, reinforcement plays a vital role. There are two kinds of reinforcement: A) Positive Reinforcement Praise and rewards are positive reinforcement. Experiments have shown that positive reinforcement works much better in bringing about good learning. B) Negative Reinforcement Rebukes and punishments are negative reinforcement. The behaviorists also claim that we learn language by imitation and association. For example, a young child hears the word â€Å"water† with the actual thing. He then makes this sound himself, imitating what he has heard. His parents are pleased that he has learnt another word and so his response is reinforced. The thoughts of behaviorist school can well be understood according to following tree diagram. The Behaviorist School Language learning is Positive Imitation Operant conditioning and and Negative Association Reinforcement Noam Chomsky explicitly rejects the behaviorists’ position that language should be thought of as verbal behavior, arguing that it should be thought of as knowledge held by those who use language. Chomsky suggests that the learner of any language has an inbuilt learning capacity for language that enables each learner to construct a kind of personal theory or set of rules about the language based on very limited exposure to language. b) The Mentalist School Chomsky and his mentalist followers claim that a child learns his first language through cognitive learning. They claim that language is governed by rules, and is not a haphazard thing, as Skinner and his followers would claim. According to Chomsky, the child is born with a mental capacity for working out the underlying system to the jumble of sounds which he hears. He constructs his own grammar’ and imposes it on all the sounds reaching his brain. This mental grammar is part of his cognitive framework, and nothing he hears is stored in his brain until he has matched it against what he already knows and found a ‘correct’ place for it within this framework. Chomsky argues that language is so complex that it is almost incredible that it can be acquired by a child in so short a time. He says that a child is born with some innate mental capacity which helps the child to process all the language which he hears. This is called the Language Acquisition Device, and he saws it as comprising a special area of the brain whose only function was the processing of language. This function, he argues, is quite separate from any other mental capacity which the child has. When Chomsky talks about ‘rules’, he means the unconscious rules in a child’s mind these rules enables him to make grammatical sentences in his own language. Chomsky does not mean that a child can describes these rules explicitly. For example, a four or five year old child can produce a sentence like I have done my work; he can do that because he has a ‘mental grammar’ which enables him to form correct present perfect structures and also to use such structures in the right and appropriate situations. But he is unable to define the formation of present perfect tense. The thoughts of Mentalists can well be understood with the help of the following tree diagram. The Mentalists School Language learning Input Mental grammar Is an (own rules) Innate ability LAD Grammatical Output sentences Both the schools have said significant things, yet neither is perfect. The mentalists’ emphasis on the rule-learning is over enthusiastic, and the behaviorists’ rejection of meaning is entirely unjust. Language acquisition seems to be a process both of analogy and application, both nature and nurture. The differences between the empiricists approach and that of the rationalist can be summarized in the following manner: BEHAVIOURISTS APPROACH MENTALIST APPROACH Conclusion This comparative study makes one thing clear: nature and nurture, analogy and application, practice and exposure are important. Innate potentialities lay down the framework. Within this framework, there is wide variation depending on the environment. The kind of language that children ultimately grow into shaped by the culture-based responses of the family, if not in a way that can be called imitation, then at least in terms of things the child chooses to do with its language. But we should be wary of the idea that all children experience the same practices and follow the same development path as they grow into their language. Having been exposed to a small number of utterances, the child begins to extract the principles underlying the utterances and compose new utterances of his own. This is the way every child grammar to communicate in an intelligent manner. He makes mistakes and produces ungrammatical sentences. His elders correct him; he feeds the information into his mini-grammar, modifies some of the rules, and again produces new utterances. In a period of about four years, he is able to master and internalize all the essential rules of language. This is a proof that a child’s own rules of grammar are more important to him than mere imitation.

Evaluating Naft Was It Worth It - 1229 Words

George Boujaoude Instructor Maureen Meyer Geography 102 5 May 15 Evaluating NAFTA: Was it worth it? In 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was enacted between two industrial countries and a yet still developing nation. This was an agreement that was the first of its kind due to the relationship that the countries had and the investment opportunities that it presented. The United States, Canada, and developing Mexico decided to work towards eliminating most tariffs and non-tariff barriers between the three in order to increase the flow of trade in goods and services. Since its enactment NAFTA has led to the providing of over 40 million more jobs throughout the countries, and it has also tripled merchandise trade between the three participants to an astounding $946 billion USD in 2008 (NAFTA Now). However even then it is still not very clear whether enacting NAFTA was worth the time and effort and in fact the United States may have been better off not having joined NAFTA. Talks about a free trade agreement between North American countries were already being discuss ed prior the North American Free Trade Agreement. Beginning in 1985, President Reagan and the Canadian Prime Minister, Mulroney, exchanged letters of resolution to negotiate a Free Trade Agreement. This FTA would then be drafted, ratified, and eventually enacted in January 1989 between the two countries. At the same time, trade was at an all-time high between Canada and Mexico. So much so that aShow MoreRelatedCase Study20441 Words   |  82 PagesNetworks---------------------6.2 The Off shoring Decision: Total Cost--------------------------------------------6.3 Risk Management in Global Supply Chains------------------------------------6.4 The Basic Aspects of Evaluating Global Supply Chain Design--------------6.5 Evaluating Network Design Decisions Using Decision Trees----------------AM Tires: Evaluation of Global Supply Chain Design Decisions Under 6.6 Uncertainty---------------------------------------------------------------------------