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Religion in White Noise and The Handmaid's Tale

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History has proven to repeat itself, which may be one of the more complicated and troubling parts about history. There is a certain aspect of society that has changed our society for better or for worse: religion. As society has evolved, our competence of religion changes, from the Big Bang to the definition of religion depicted today. There have been many sociologists that have tried to reason with the definition of religion making it more of awareness of an alternative reality rather than a belief in a god or superhuman being, making beliefs in something associated with activities of life. This new understanding religion leads one to believe that there is a completely different life that others live. The texts that were most recently read in class provide evidence of this unconventional definition of religion. After reading the two novels of White Noise and The Handmaid’s Tale religion is redefined by being guided through two completely different lifestyles that worship routineness and a corrupted government, which encourages a whole new meaning of, “the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods,” each showing how forms of worship can diverge from the historical religious principles. Looking back into history, religion has been one of the most powerful definers of society. Religion started in the 300th millennium BCE being a tribute to those that had passed away, performing an empathetic ceremony for them that gave their death some sort of meaning whether tribes thought this was the right idea or not. For many years burials were the only sort of religious tendencies because there was no structure of what someone should do; however, that changed around 950 BCE when the Torah was believed to be given to Moses by God, which provided the core structure of Judaism and a future foundation of Abrahamic religions. Shortly after that, in 551 BCE Confucianism was born, and the earliest manuscript of the Hebrew Bible was written in about 150 BCE. These provided the base of almost every religion that has emerged into society today. The most surprising part about all of this that people of society believe ideas that are older than anything that they could imagine, based on concepts that were thought of by prophets that many do not know the name of. Without these ideas founded, society would be lost without “rules” that they are supposed to follow from the Ten Commandments to what foods that they can eat on certain days of the year. There are religions that are almost older than dirt, however as time passes by, there are “religions” created all the time. For example in 1954, scientology, a religion of sort, was created and teaches that people are immortal beings who have forgotten their true nature and seek self-knowledge through graded courses of study. This became a major turning point in society because a religion was created off a single scientist fiction writer’s belief that was born in a current century and not the 300th millennium BCE. Now, 61 years later, the concept of religion has morphed into almost anything that you want to believe in, from a sports team or a form of government. There have been many authors that have written novels that foreshadow what the future of the world might look like when society becomes dependent on technology and the government to rule over what they believe and participate in everyday. Most of these novels were written in the 1900s before there was even surge of technology usage like the world that society lives in today; the fact that they were able to foresee how technology has become as dependency for most leads me to believe that the authors of, "White Noise," and, "The Handmaid’s Tale," could not be far off from what they pictured society being like when they were writing them in 1985. Realizing that they could be incredibly true, leads to the confidence that society is predictable because of the way that history repeats itself in a more dramatic matter than the cycle before. It is very hard to disagree with the fact that over the history of the world, wars have lead to even more intense wars, revolutions have lead to absolute power that end in horrible dictatorships, and more simply people who do not learn from their mistakes often do not mature to understand what they should be doing right. Contradictory, the saying of those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it, can be flipped on those who do learn history and continue to repeat it. Humans are dependent of patterns in life and these two novels depict how the two protagonists continue patterns in their life because that is what is most comfortable. If they were to go out of the ordinary and do something new, they would have no parts of their life it copy form the past which leaves them in an unsure situation. In, "White Noise," Don DeLillo presents a society that is completely reliant on advanced technology, but embodies very unsophistica

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