No More Demonizing

Assignment 46

People of religion will also protest teaching other religions’ texts in schools I know. My own people in the Christian persuasion love to demonize any view point that does not come from the Bible itself. I imagine some groups in Islam feel the same way about Christian Bible’s teachings that Christians feel about teachings of the Quran. I personally believe that my religion is the right one, but I think it is very foolish to say that no other people of another faith can be good or live under good moral or ethical principles. We need to value each other’s moral wisdom because I have always found that when another view point suggests the same idea that my faith suggests even without requiring faith in a deity that makes it all the more valuable to me. I can see that people do have ways to figure out what is right and wrong on their own and we can take this knowledge from many places of both faith and places of without faith to strengthen and validate the ideas that we value for living a good life full of moral and ethical behavior.

Islam in Schools

"One of Islam’s five pillars is to give generously to the poor, which our government embraces with things like Social Security and Welfare and can be a basis for understanding why we pay that in our taxes. Now, I know that our culture has not been as strongly influenced by Islam as other faiths and I hold no illusion of our culture being based on Muslim philosophy. Regardless of this I wish to convey that there are many places where morals that we value come from and with the conflicts our culture has had with Islam in recent years I think it is valuable for us to see places where we can agree on ideas that are valuable to us. The idea of charity and philanthropy for those in need are ideas that our culture values very highly. We can see this in nearly every natural disaster that occurs around the world. The United States is almost always the first person on the scene ready to offer aide just like in the recent tsunami disaster in Japan. Both of our cultures value giving to the needy and I believe that The Five Pillars illustrates that idea clearly for our children."

This is assignment 45 I guess. This is what I have written for today. I don't really need any comments on it. I think I would like to wait until the rough draft of the paper is done before beginning any comments or editing.

It Proves Nothing

"The Rise of Standardized Educational Testing in the U.S.: A
Bibliographic Overview" by Torin Monahan

I don't make straight A's. When I was in elementary school, I always got into that coveted top 1 percentile of students' scores on standardized tests. You would think by that indication alone I should be one of the smartest people in the country right? For my age way back when I was. I think standardized testing proves only one thing, that you can take a single isolated basic test well. I was never a straight A student all the way up through Highschool. I had a good GPA and all, but it had nothing to do with my test scores.

The American Education system should take a hard look at why it continues to do standardized testing. Each year classes stop for a few days so children can take tests, taking away from their learning time, costing millions in paper to print out all those tests and their test answer booklets, while offering nothing to the learning experience. Although standardized testing may seem of concern to only the education system, it should in fact concern anyone who cares about the performance of our children in school. Because let's face it, life is not like passing a test, it is much more like passing a class. If a child can succeed in their classes there is no need for these kinds of tests.

Essay I Agree With

C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man

In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis postulates that modern educational methods are the downfall of mankind. I agree with his views on education because in my opinion education is often buying the rights to be able to work in fields that allow you to make more money than if you did not buy that education. Both C.S. Lewis and I feel that education should be more about personal, spiritual, and mental growth that encourages well-roundedness in a person instead of forcing them to be a laborer in one field or another.

Blood Gods

C.S. Lewis once asked: "Why are holy places always dark places?" The temples of our many human gods have always been places shrouded in mystery, secrets and of course darkness. Do the gods hide from us in the shadows for a reason? Are they shy? Are they too terrible for the eyes of man to view? Maybe the gods are just simply something that the average person could not understand if they were to look upon them.

The Literature of Video Games

It is my honest opinion that someday people will consider some video games' writing and writers on the same level as many of their contemporary novels and novelists. This may not be something that happens in the near future, but it is something that I would personally abdicate. The main reason people are so skeptical of video game literature is that most people don't realize that there are hundreds of genres of video game. They are not all Call of Duty, Mario, and World of Warcraft.

Bushido and Chivalry

I grew up in two different cultures. Now when most people say this they are in fact referring to how one of their parents was white and the other was some other race, but not so for me. Both of my parents are white. I simply was exposed to something that is well outside of the traditional western values my parents associate themselves with. I almost don't know if to this day they fully realize how much of a profound impact on my personal philosophy studying martial arts in the very traditional school I attended had on me.

The Death of the Martial Artist

There are some people that when you meet them you cannot help but think to yourself: if this man were to die the world would have lost something irreplaceable. This man that I have the pleasure of knowing is not famous, though that is mostly of his own choice. His teaching and actions have shaped a large part of my life and shaped my understanding of many things from the body, art, philosophy, combat, respect, integrity, and discipline. I owe this man much of what I am today.

An Interpretation of Mythology

I sometimes wonder if all the gods anyone has ever heard of really do exist. I doubt they are all exactly as we are told they are supposed to be. Sometimes I wonder if all the gods we've heard of aren't Christianities demons masquerading as deities to trick people into doing their bidding. If nothing else they could make people break the first commandment. I cannot prove this, but it seems as good an answer as any.

Instruments of the Kitchen

I am no stranger to the dishes. I have long since been the family member who donned the enormous yellow gloves, wielding the purging sponge to make dishes clean enough to eat off of. I have long contemplated the meaning and symbolism of these various items as I spent hours of my curious and imaginative youth in the kitchen with the pots and pans. And after careful thought there is one particular piece in my parents kitchen that defines me better than any of the others.

It was a small brown glass pot with a handle. This was my favorite piece of glassware in the world while living at home with my parents. It was just large enough to make enough food to appease my appetites. I would fill this pot with a pair of ramen noodles packets and macaroni and cheese just for me.

I used to use this pot almost every day. I would come home from school and the first thing I would do was throw on a pot of water to boil so I could eat my pasta dish before I had to go to work as a lifeguard, which was the job I did all through high school and into the first year of college. Ramen was about the only thing I would eat during those days. I'm not really so sure why I enjoyed those simple noodles so much in those days, but for some reason I loved them back then. They got me through the day.

It was also nice to be able to make food only for one. I have always been a loner my whole life. The only change that has ever come about to this has been when I got married, but before that I was almost always perfectly content with just sitting alone to read, write or play a video game by my lonesome. This is why the single serving nature of this pot is so perfect for me. It was as content as being alone as I was. It was sufficient on its own to make meals and I was content to eat that small portion alone.

Cold Raviolli

One of my favorite foods in the whole world is eating Chef Boyardee pastas straight out of the can without warming it up or doing anything else to it. Most people cringe at the very idea of eating food at room temperature, but I love it.

Interesting fact about myself, my tongue burns really easily. I don't know why this is, but I really cannot enjoy hot foods because my taste buds almost always get burned right off. It's really not any fun at all. Whenever someone serves up some soup, coffee, or really much of anything I am almost always forced to let it cool for several minutes before I can even think to enjoy it. This is the origin of the room temperature food habit.

I started eating food this way when I was in elementary school. It was partially because even at this very young age I was relatively lazy. I was a very bookish child hardly ever coming up for air from either a book, my Lego creations or a video game. Often I just simply lacked the patience to take the time to microwave my food and then wait for it to cool back down to the right temperature. There were times when I simply would not eat anything if there wasn't something I could just pop open and eat.

Another cause for this habit is that one of my chores growing up was doing the dishes. Which I personally was not fond of. I believe that I was also fairly mindful of how wasteful it was to have to wash all those plates and bowls out after using them only one time. So to save myself time, whenever possible, I would eat foods straight out of their containers anything from pastas, soups, chips, or beef jerky. I was always quite pleased with myself for finding a way to get out of doing more dishes. I thought that I was being extremely efficient which is something my laziness has bred in me.

I think the main reason why I love eating my Chef Boyardee straight out of the can is the flavor though. I know almost everyone in the whole world will disagree with me on this, but some things just taste better before you heat them up. This is because the way these foods are packaged they have very dense amounts of flavoring in the can so that when they are heated up if some of the liquid precipitates and takes some of the flavor with it it can still taste like the intended flavor. But, if one does not heat these foods up the flavors are intensified and that is why they taste so good.

Other foods that taste superb straight out of the can are the overwhelming majority of Campbell's soup. Anything from chicken noodle to tomato. These soups are generally meant to be watered down, but again since I like the highly concentrated flavors it tastes much better to me.

Five Essays I'd Write

Blood Gods
The Literature of Video Games
Bushido and Chivalry
The Death of the Martial Artist
An Interpretation of Mythology

The Flawed Friend

In high school, I used to have a friend whose name starts with the letter K. I'm pretty sure the only reason we kept him as a friend was because of how easy it was to make fun of him. And it was so easy. I almost feel bad about typing this up on the internet, but the sad thing is K wouldn't even be able to deny any of this or even be able to defend himself in anyway against the comments I'll make here.

K had extremely bad grammar. I think it was because he had a family in which three different languages were spoken. Frankly I think it would be cool to have that kind of exposure, but it seems that while he was in his formative years attempting to straighten out how to speak in any of the languages his family spoke he seems to have failed to learn how to speak very well in any of them. Friends of ours that tried to speak to him in languages other than English claimed that he was even harder to understand in the foreign languages than in English.

As you can imagine some really odd an humorous things came out of this boy's mouth and he had no idea that he'd said something absurd. One specific example I can think of off the top of my head is that he would call hoodies, hoedies.

K used to make this ridiculous over the top hand gestures almost every time he talked. He would point at you and wiggle his finger around in your face the whole time he was talking to you if he thought he was saying something important. He would also do that point and wink thing all the time.

K was also really gullible. You could convince him of almost anything if you tried hard enough. It didn't help that he really was fairly ignorant about a great many things. He also didn't like people to know that he didn't know much so he would lie about things to make it seem like he was smarter that he really was.

Another thing about him that was easily ridiculed was that he liked to draw Japanese anime style art pieces. But of course the only thing he would ever draw were female subjects. If you watched him draw he would spend about 90% of his time on the drawing working on the female's curves. It was really hard not to point this out to him, of course he would deny it a hundred times.

Perhaps the thing that takes the cake on his list of mock-able tendencies and habits was that he used to write fan-fiction. Which for the sake of this discussion is when you make up a story for something that you watch, play, or read usually at an extremely lower level of quality than the thing you are attempting to emulate. He wrote his about some mech fighter game and made himself the main character and basically proceeded to try to make himself seem really cool and sexy killing robots and hooking up with over the top gorgeous women.

I think the saddest thing about all this is that I went along with all the ridicule. Most of the things he did weren't his fault. He was a very trusting person who really was just content being himself even if he was what most of us would consider to be odd. He was a good guy and I hope I, nor my friends didn't cause him too much harm emotionally. Honestly though he knew that we made fun of him and I think in some ways he enjoyed being the joke that we told over and over again. He always got to be included in everything our group did and despite anything we said about him we had a lot more fun having him around than we would have without him.

The Type that Suits Me

Frankly, I'm not sure I make it into the personal essayist mold as well as many of the others in the class. I don't know if I'm really cut out for that sort of thing, but if I was I believe I fit into category X probably better than most. That is the category of writing based on learning and one's own readings.

I have always assumed that if I ever took the time to write much essaying it would be either philosophy or theology. Much of both of these subjects requires reading other texts and either responding to them and offering one's own opinion or attempting to create one's opinion by blending ideas from many sources, which are both things I try to do often.

I've always been somewhat fascinated with the idea of the monomyth. Which is in a way a blending of all kinds of mythology to see which are true, or at least which are the most universal. I've always wanted to try and trace through myths and connect them in one way or another to my own Christian faith. Not so much to debunk or discredit other beliefs, but more to see how similar they really are at the core to better understand others and perhaps help them better understand me and my beliefs. I think that's important.

I'm far more interested in writing fiction than essays, but even my fiction is often based much on things I've read before like the Bible and many of C.S. Lewis' works as well as some influences from Don Quixote, Hemingway, Tolkien, and other various writers. So more likely than not they would be influences on my personal essays as well.

The story of myself in brief is the following:

Once upon a time there was a young boy who wanted nothing more than to create something. As a child he would invent games for himself, his brother and his friends to play. Some of them were fun. Others not so much. When he wasn't doing this he would scribble images on paper with captions in his young English or build things out of stackable blocks. Needless to say he was imaginative.

As he grew older he forgot about these things being lost in his studies. He did start a new hobby though. An old man from the Far East ran a different kind of school just a few blocks away. This man taught the art of combat with one's hands feet and with the blade. He was a wise old man, who despite being a cripple was fiercely fast with hands like lightning.

This wise old man and his disciples taught the young boy much about life and respect and of course how to defend himself if he should ever have need of such skills. It made him grow confident in himself and stronger. It was a place the boy loved very much and misses even to this day.

During the years the boy spent studying at school and learning life lessons from his wise old master the young boy remembered the stories and games he used to make up as a child. Then one day he had a dream. In his dream the Lord came to him and said, "boy, write me a story." The young boy felt something stir deep within himself. For some reason it felt like he'd known all along that he was meant to write a story, perhaps even an important story to someone.

The young boy rose up the next morning and tried to think of what the Lord had wanted him to write about. He sat through his classes that day and scribbled away on paper, for he liked also to draw things when his mind wandered. On this particular morning he was drawing on a piece of paper and got tired of what he was drawing and crumpled the paper up and pushed it to the corner of his desk.

He continued to listen to the lectures, but eventually that ball of paper caught his eye again. It looked like something to him. Sort of like a pill bug curled up on itself. So he drew another picture of what that ball of paper resembled and then when he looked at what he had drawn he knew exactly what to write about. How a drawing of a pill bug monster with a gun and a shield leads to what follows is unknown for that creature makes no appearance in the story the boy writes, but it is the spark that did begin the adventure.

So the boy went home and purchased a large writing book and began penning the words that came to his mind. He began to write of the distant future in a time where men fight for their lives against a threat that is greater than anything they have ever faced in our time. The boy grew up with this story in his heart. It slowly made its way to the pages of his writing book and to this day he still continues to scratch and make permanent copies of his work that he may one day share it with others once it is complete.

Photos of Me

I have to say I find the trend of teachers at ECU to take pictures of their students a bit odd. I attended university at Mid-America Christian for almost two years and not one of my teachers ever asked for a picture of me to help remember my name. Granted, the class sizes were a bit smaller so the need for it was probably considerably reduced. I suppose the even curiouser thing about it is that I even attended ECU for a year before anyone even asked for my picture there either. This semester I have two teachers that want to have my picture taken so they can remember my name.

Maybe you're just more like me and can't remember names as well as you can remember faces. I have the hardest time remembering names, but I can hardly ever forget a face. People I haven't seen in years I can sometimes pick out of a crowd if we end up at the same place at the same time. I've found that the easiest way to remember someone's name to match their face is if they have a story they like to tell or if I remember a story with them in it.

This could just be the writer part of me poking out, but I almost think it would be more fun to write a brief story either about ourselves or to write a story that defines ourselves; like a little hypothetical story that either defines our personalities or just gives a sense of what we do and how we do it.

First Post by Monday

I started out wanting nothing more than to write fantasy. Turns out I was no good at it despite that being my favorite genre to read and watch and play video games from. Ultimately I ended up writing a sci-fi series. It's still going on and soon this year I hope to have my first book published.