Jayden Huang, Period 7, 12/14/21

Jayden Huang

Period 7

12/14/21

Modern Mythology 2022

Write about your thoughts regarding any of the fiction or non-fiction covered in class. Reflect on any new information you have learned in English class by considering how that learning influences your critical perception. How is what you’re learning applied to any other classes/the world around you?

Recently, we’ve been covering the bible, specifically: Book of Job, Revelation, Noah’s Ark, and shorter stories presented in groups. I had never read the Bible up until this point, and my perception of it was that of a dense, religious text teaching people to live by God. After reading stories like Noah’s Ark or Book of Job, I feel that my perception of morality has changed, that there is no right or wrong.

In the story of Noah’s Ark, I had been aware of the story prior to reading, but not of its meanings. I thought it was outlandish how the entire Earth could just be covered in water appearing and disappearing from thin air. While I still do find this part and other parts of the story hard to believe, after reading I can agree with and appreciate the value of the moral. Noah stayed true to his own judgment even when everyone else around him lived sinful lives. He never faltered, supposedly being six hundred years old at the time of the great flood. While I don’t think such an occurrence to be possible, I still agree with it in a figurative sense, staying true even when it seems your “great flood” is never coming.

In the Book of Job, while Job and his friends shared the karmic idea that God rewards the faithful and punishes those who sin, they had completely differing views on Job’s punishment, because of their point of view. Job felt he was being punished for no reason, because he knew he had never sinned, and God only punishes sinners. His friends, applying the same logic that God punishes sinners, were certain that Job was being rightfully punished. His friends aren’t him, and while they could take his word for it, they could never truly know that Job has never sinned. In Noah’s Ark, Noah sticks to his moral compass even when everyone else’s compass seems to point the opposite way. His judgment is validated when the flood comes and wipes out everyone and everything but his ark. But what if Noah’s judgment was never validated and would spend his entire life waiting for a flood that would never come?

These stories in tandem have entirely blurred morality for me. We may never know what is truly right or truly wrong for us or others, like in Job’s case. You could apply the exact same chain of reasoning as someone else and arrive at completely different conclusions. Even then, you and that someone else may be entirely wrong from the start, because the only “correct” chain of reasoning is completely out of our comprehension. I found this worrying, that you might be living your entire life wrong, and that there is no right way that we can even understand. But going back to the question I posed earlier about Noah’s Ark, I believe that the most right thing that we can do is to stick to our guns. We may never be right, but at the very least we can be rightly wrong by staying true to ourselves. Noah could have been wrong, and he would have been seen as a maniac with a boat full of animals for a flood that would never come, but he stayed true to what he believed in, and I find that admirable.