Research Paper 2 Appiah.
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Florida International University *
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Religion
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Dec 6, 2023
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REL2011
Research Paper 2 | Appiah Analysis, Part 2 - Essay
This time I will read the paper written by Appiah again after reading the opinions
from other students about the reaction paper I wrote for the last homework assignment and
write a summary of my previous opinion and the final opinion that deepened it. The
opinions from my classmates were very accurate and gave me new insights, in addition to
being supportive of my own opinions. I would like to thank them for helping me
understand more about Appiah's writing.
First of all, in our last discussion, I compared my opinion and Appiah's opinion
about the role of religion so that we could see the difference. He said that religion is
something that preserves cultural values and traditional awareness and can be passed on to
future generations. And it is true that sometimes this ark of religion, the ark that carries
culture and values to future generations, itself becomes a spark of conflict among the
people. Including this he recognizes that when contaminations occur in cultural values,
clashes of beliefs and practices can occur. However, he also argues that religion has the
ability to adapt and evolve in response to cultural change. He also says that this change
itself is a gradual transformation from the mixture that exists in the first place to a new
mixture with the addition of new things. To summarize his opinion, he says that religions
can incorporate elements from other cultures while maintaining their core beliefs and
values. And now I have found an opinion that allows me to dig a little deeper into this
explanation. They say that culture is made up of maintenance and change. They also say
that a society without change is not a real one, but a dead one. My classmates also quoted
this part of the article and commented on it to me. This is because, in my opinion, I believe
religion should be more stable and consistent, with immutable teachings attached to its
foundation. In response, several members commented on Appiah's quote earlier.
Considering this, I read this section again, examining it. I felt that these two opinions
succinctly and accurately capture the role of religion as espoused by Appiah. He says that
religions incorporate change, and those that can still be maintained are passed on to future
generations. He also said that if a religion does not change with the people, it will be
difficult to sustain itself and will die.
But I still have my doubts that change is necessary to maintain. Then it still seems
to me that it is only a total philosophy created by humans for humans. So, what about
culture, which is supposed to be complemented and maintained by religion? Appiah says
this about it. I believe that we also need a system that can preserve the culture that can be
preserved under the current civilized society without losing it. I am very close to this
opinion. I also feel that this system that can be preserved should be the basis of religion.
However, after he spelled this out, he wrote that the culture could not afford to express the
identity it wanted to preserve. This sentence moved my heart when I read this part again. I
felt that on a smaller scale, it is like a majority vote in a classroom when deciding
something. I think we Japanese are particularly obedient to a sense of community-mind. As
for myself, I have a personality that is the opposite of that, so I often had times when I was
looked at coldly. The example in Appiah's text was about fabrics for traditional costumes.
The fabrics that were originally used were imported from other countries and sold at a
lower price, eliminating the traditional use of the fabrics. The identity of traditional fabrics
is being crushed by fabrics that are mass-produced and sold at lower prices due to
economic considerations.
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When I first read his essay, I interpreted Appiah as adapting religion itself as an
appropriate form for this society. I thought he saw religion as something flexible that adapts
to the human world. In fact, religion is a human creation, but Appiah's opinion of religion
told me that he questioned the stability of religion. However, when I came to the idea in the
previous chapter, it seems to me that religion itself is not flexible and that the numerous
innovative opinions of the times in which the believers who support it live have crushed the
original conservative opinions, forcing change to occur. In this light, it is conceivable that
religion serves to supplement the changes of people's times and maintain them until the
next change. During this whirlwind of change, the core religious beliefs may have a role to
play as tradition or history to be handed down to future generations.
I strongly feel that reading this text twice has deepened my understanding of the
role of religion: the first time, I thought that religious beliefs should not be something that
should be easily changed by humans or society, that religion should be something that
transcends our world and should be a strong and stable concept that guides people. Religion
transcends our world and should be a strong and stable concept that guides people. This is
my personal opinion, and part of me wishes it were so. I thought that if God is involved, it
is not right to artificially change beliefs and ideas. Therefore, at first I disagreed with
Appiah's opinion, but as I thought more deeply about his words and thoughts, I realized
what he really wanted to say. Religion is something that man began to worship and
continues to progress. In other words, it can be taken as something that people have created
over the years, since it is something that humans have continued to talk about God's
teachings up to this time of their own volition. If we try to maintain it as it is without
incorporating changes in the world in which we live, people with new ideas will leave
religion, which is like a content. It is only by adopting values and culture in line with the
times that we can preserve and pass them on to future generations. We can also retain the
ideas that form the basis of the ark as traditions and carry them on board this ark without
changing the shape of the ark, and together we can continue the course of the future. The
view from the boat may be different, but the crew will still love the boat, and they will still
travel into a future that is yet to be seen.
Citation:
Appiah, Kawame Anthony. “The New York Times.”
The Case for Contamination
, Jan.
2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/magazine/01cosmopolitan.html?e…
eb5e1741c&ex=1293771600&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=print.