Religion To Game

To respond to this passage, I actually begin outside of Othello and refer first to what has become of organized religion in our world today. Man is inherently too weak to take responsibility for his own actions, and, voila, religion was born. Religion is just used as man's way of justifying his actions, and allows an easy way out for self-forgiveness after a wrongdoing. Furthermore, it is used as a means of control, with an elite few telling the masses what to believe and how to believe it, as a means for subduing the public from rebelling against their rule. While I do believe in a higher power than that of man, I do not agree with religion as it is practiced today. Way back in the day, even before TV, there was a series of Crusades in which a bunch of Christian dudes killed a bunch of other Christian dudes in the name of God. After that, indulgences were sold by the church, effectively absolving someone of their sins... for a monetary price. And more recently, families of sexually abused children have been paid by the church to stay silent, rather than the priests having to be responsible for their abhorrent actions. All of this is to say religion has come a long way from what I believe to be its noble intentions of teaching man to respect and love one another, to become almost a game to be played by those struggling to gain some sense of control of their and other people's lives.

Iago is a classic example of the type of person that really exemplifies the major problems with religion today. His intentions started well, a lieutenant under Othello, doing what he thought was right, going to war for his country. However, the evils of jealousy and envy eventually overcame him. Thinking that Othello was cheating with his wife, Iago allowed his good intentions to be shadowed by the easier goals of pretty much screwing everyone else over to meet his means. Just as in the case of religion, his life and his intentions turned into a game, in which he was able to manipulate everything around him to reach his diabolical plans. His morals turned into nothing but fuel for his fire against the people around him, hence the appropriate metaphor of "the moral pyromaniac"

About Me

"At times like this, it is important that we look back at the people and the events that got us to where we are today, for, in the words of a very wise dead person, 'A nation that does not know its history is doomed to do poorly on the Scholastic Aptitude Test.'" -- Dave Barry Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of The United States

"But then, obsessives have no choice: they have to lie on occasions like this. If we told the truth every time, then we would be unable to maintain relationships with anyone from the real world. We would be left to rot with our Arsenal programmes or our collection of original blue-label Stax records or our King Charles spaniels, and out two-minutes daydreams would become longer and longer and longer until we lost our jobs and stopped bathing and shaving and eating, and we would lie on the floor in our own filth rewinding the video again and again in an attempt to memorise by heart the whole of the commentary, including David Pleat's expert analysis, for the night of 26th May 1989. (You think I had to look the date up? Ha!) The truth is this: for alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron." -- Nick Hornby Fever Pitch

Walking Away

After reading Oedipus Rex, I walk away with a greater confusion of life as I know it. Are we really fated to fufill our destinys, or do we live life the way we want to, free to make our own decisions and our own path in life? This play really made me think about that topic, but I still feel that we are free to make our own choices in determining our course. No prophecy can truly be fulfilled, for everyone and anymore can easily avoid the fate they are "destined" to have, and cannot be tied down by the word of the gods. Also, I felt that the play was actually very repetitive. How many different metaphors did Socrates find for the dramatic irony that Oedipus killed his father and slept with his mother, all the while trying to find the culprit? All of his wordplay and illusionary writing really just repeated the same thing over and over. I am not one of those teenage students who just hates everything he reads in school, but this play was truly boring. Lastly, the themes in the play were not applicable in my life today, seeing as how I have no fate to be fulfilled.