Midterm

Religious Studies 302i
Midterm
Fall 2007
Abdullah Juma Alaraimi
SID#005916493




1. I did not post anything’s.
2. I missed 2 days and three days late.
3. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=992901635889636728

4. To read or not to read, this is the question: Be honest. How much of the following book did you read? Not A Genuine Black Man? Required readings from the Reader?
One of the my best habits I have is reading. Fortunately for me, yes, I was able to read Not A Genuine Black Man and the required readings for this course. I set apart two hours every evening for me to isolate myself in a library or a quiet place to read. Knowing this course required a lot of reading, my intent was to slowly over the weeks read all the required material and carefully reflect on the deeper meanings.
5. Give an example of consilience explanation to one specific religious phenomenon.
In the United States of America, and especially here in Southern California, instead of people worshipping snakes, people are worshipping money. This is a false god for sure among so many people in this society. People are worshipping money because of their full inner consciousness attention being paid to it. How many people do you know that think about money constantly and consistently over the course of any given day? This worship of money as a false god has consequences, of course, just like when people worship a snake as a false god. For money worshippers, the consequences are clear. They become arrogant, prideful, greedy, and selfish. Money as the god means a human being must do what it takes to get more of it and morality becomes suspended away from traditional concepts and origins. Money worshippers become hard hearted, cold blooded, and vicious people when they begin to buy mansions, luxurious things, and hang around other wealthy people all the time. Money worshippers engage in the practice of debasing, dehumanizing, and degrading others considered subordinate and inferior in every way.

6. How can the theory of memetics help in understanding why certain religions are more successful than others in terms of popularity in the USA? Be sure to explain how memes are different than genes.
The theory of memetics is fascinating for me to help explain why certain religions are more successful in terms of popularity in the USA than others. For instance, the Mormons are one of the fastest growing religious organizations in the USA with huge new increases in membership around the country because of their hard working missionaries who for two years go knocking on doors to spread the Mormon memes. The theory of memetics in explaining the rise of popularity in this Mormon religion is interesting to me.
Here is what new believers are told as representing the memes. First and foremost, the prophet of the Mormon religion is an American man from upper New York named Joseph Smith. Second, he claims to have been visited by Angels and one of them led him to the ancient gold plates buried in a hillside near his family home. Third, rocks on a breastplate were buried with the ancient plates and these rocks were used by Joseph Smith to translate the gold plates into the Book of Mormon. This Book of Mormon tells the story of an Israeli tribe coming to Central America and this tribe was visited by Jesus Christ after his resurrection, where he taught his Gospel among them. This guy who wrote the gold plates buried them in the New York hillside until Joseph Smith found them. Mormonism has spread so much because of the memes being distinctive from the old-time Christian religions. It distinguishes American Mormons from other Christians and gives Mormons an American bent and character. Mormons claim to be the real, true Americans because they are following the real, true American made religion and American born Prophet. It is a classic example of how powerful memes can be. Although replication and imitation is involved in the same sense as genes, the memes of religions are distinguished by the fact that they are external made up human knowledge rather than genetic information that controls proteins and other building blocks for cells.
7.` Describe how evolutionary theory via natural selection as first presented by Charles Darwin and later by Richard Dawkins helps in understanding human migration, cultural development, and social identity.
The natural selection mechanism in the evolutionary theory does help explain human migration, cultural development, and social identity in today’s vast, diverse human world. Evolutionary theory is all about organisms adapting to their ecological habitats around them and adapting their physical selves to the environmental pressures, forces, and opportunities. Human beings are living organisms that can consume vast amounts of food and wreak havoc on ecological habitats when overpopulation occurs. Obviously, human beings have an advanced intellectual capability and consciousness compared to most mammals to understand how to migrate great distances to find better, more ample space and resources to prosper. The human migration patterns traced by anthropologists out of Africa demonstrate this exact motivation. People move to go find more resources. The natural selection does play a role in this migration because of the struggle for survival eliminates the least fit and allows only the strongest, best adapted organisms to survive and continue to breed. Human slavery can be used an example of how humans exemplify this natural selection mechanism in cultural and social ways. These stronger, better adapted, and more powerful human groups degrade, debase, and humiliate the inferior, less adapted groups by enslaving them for their own benefits. The Jim Crow system in the American South after slavery is a great modern example of how one group of human beings upholds principles and beliefs of racial superiority due to natural selection. To this day many Southern whites believe they are more fit, stronger, and better adapted than the Southern blacks who are still considered inferior, less intelligent, and less fit.
8. Why is the notion of ‘race’ biologically obsolete yet culturally viable?
I was reading this amazing book about how mitochondria in the DNA-RNA complex of every human being in the whole human world ties us to the same common human parents at the very beginning of the human race emerging on this planet. That’s amazing to think that we are all one family despite our racial and cultural distinctions. At one time in our ancestral past, our family trees are all joined at the same root. The biological evidence therefore makes us all the same organism and that racial distinctions once upheld as scientific fact are exposed as false. Yet, you go down into the American South, as I did last summer, and yes, these people have not found out about the recent biological evidence. In fact, in one town in Alabama, there is nobody in my opinion there that has learned we are all one family. The blacks in this Alabama town are clearly considered inferior by the whites who see themselves as superior. Racism is culturally viable in this town so that the white people can justify their superior cultural and social status to the blacks even though there is no biological basis for it. In the White House, President Bush and Vice President Cheney are clearly members of the wealthy, white elite establishment in the USA. They see themselves as very much superior, powerful, and better than the rest of Americans from other income classes, as well as other races, based on their political records and history of their political behavior as politicians. They are no different than the white people in the town of Alabama in their basic racist beliefs, in my personal opinion, but they keep those white racist beliefs to themselves and never try to air them out on public record.
5. Explain how a religious idea, ritual, or practice gets transformed on American soil?
One of the religious rituals that changed in its North American environment is that of baptism among the Christians. I researched the ritual of baptism to find out that the Roman Catholics practice the medieval version of it. In the Roman Catholic churches, infants are brought to the church in a ceremony involving the priest chanting prayers, blessing the newborn baby, and putting holy water on his or her forehead. There is a formal basin in the back of the church for this ritual to take place. The parents, godparents, and priest as well as family members participate in the short ritual in a private ceremony. In North America, the formal Baptism ritual done in a church was thrown out by many of the evangelist and revivalist movements. Instead of having this ritual done in such formal circumstances, these emotion-based Christian groups began to hold group baptism rituals down by a stream or river. Full immersion in the river was done by the believers in the imitation of Jesus being baptized by John the Baptist in the River Jordan a couple of thousand years ago. These river baptism ceremonies were accompanied by singing, dancing, and praying in group fashion very different than the formal medieval baptism ceremony. Recently, I attended a Christian evangelist style church with a friend here in Southern California. The head preacher was asking people to give up their lives for Jesus Christ and be baptized into the Christian faith. Believe it or not, this church had a full on Jacuzzi with the bubbles bubbling and the spotlight on it, and these new believers would go in a back room and return dressed in a white robe like Jesus the preacher said and then each would be immersed into this Jacuzzi by him. This is the baptism ritual in the evangelist Southern California church in 2007 which has changed the ritual from the river baptism ceremonies from the 19th century. However, there was a lot of singing, chanting, and praying going on when these baptisms were done in this Jacuzzi. The whole church was participating in it like the evangelist and revivalist groups in the river baptism events.
10. Explain Peter Berger’s concept of heretical imperative and how it applies to religious pluralism in general.
The heretical imperative is a fascinating concept that can be used to help understand and explain religious pluralism in general. In the USA, the number of religious groups and organizations is simply astounding to me. In my home country, there are a few different sects of Islam and that’s it. There is very little religious pluralism. Very few Christians and Muslims are found anywhere in the little towns and villages in my country. Here in the United States, there are so many different sects of Christianity that I can’t count them and in the urban areas, there are diverse kinds of different religious groups because of the large, diverse number of immigrant groups who have settled here. Particularly here in Southern California there is just a tremendous diversity of religious groups. All this diversity and pluralism is brought on by the people splintering up into different religious groups holding onto distinctive, unique beliefs different from other religious groups. The lecture we had on inductive, deductive, and reductive in relation to Berger’s concept of the heretical imperative was especially valuable for me in understanding how religious pluralism proliferated here. Religious groups diversified because they were given the freedom and permission to diversify. Any religious group can freely practice their distinctive beliefs no matter how heretical that they may seem to mainstream, powerful religious groups. The USA allows people to practice the heretical imperative and form their own religious groups when any like-minded group decides that they are distinctive and unique enough to do so. My research exposes so many smaller cult groups in Southern California that are the ultimate practitioners of the heretical imperative by their select, unique beliefs usually surrounding a central cult leader who proclaims special visionary powers or knowledge of the future that separates them from everyone in mainstream religions.
13. Take one religious movement and describe its influence in North America.
I have to select the Puritans or Pilgrims who are romanticized in the American history books as being the first English settlers who came over to escape religious persecution in the Massachusetts Bay area. These Puritans arrived to build their utopian Christian community and bring God’s Kingdom down to Earth among humans. The Puritans believed that every person had great potential to become an optimal performer. Puritans believed in maximizing their potentials as Children of God. When Puritans began to prosper, accumulate wealth, and grown socially prominent in their communities, these were graces, blessings, and benefits shed on them by God Himself. This was the reward for their good works. The profit motive and profit maximization that became the central driver of the American capitalist economy can be rooted for certain in the Puritan ethic. Although American capitalists are not Puritan Christians, this Puritan ethic is the same thing as the profit motive but stripped of all religious attachments. The Puritans were influential because they were proclaiming that they were the purest Christians and that maximizing potential and accumulating wealth were simply desirable ends that God blessed as good and beneficial for human beings. By being industrious, hard working, and seeking rewards monetarily and materially, the Puritans set the course for the development of modern American capitalism.
14. How would Nietzsche describe the death of God and the rise of new religions?
Nietzsche would describe the death of God and the rise of new religions as fundamentally necessary for human beings to improve themselves and their future generations. The Judeo-Christian God is dead according to Nietzsche. This was a made up, big lie orchestrated by human beings to control others. This reward-punishment, Heaven-Hell arrangement, and God-Devil rivalry are all false teachings to people to control their inner consciousness and control their lives. Nietzsche said humans had the responsibility to become the new moral supermen. Humans had to take it upon themselves to denounce these false teachings and accept the reality that the Judeo-Christian God was a big sham. The rise of the new religion involves intellectual, rational, and reasonable men setting the new moral standards and criteria based on what is necessary to advance the human race from this deceptive, decrepit way of the old religions. The moral supermen will no longer be held back by the restraints, rules, and doctrines of these old time religions because these new moral supermen no longer believe that we are under the burden in this life and in the afterlife of dealing with this human like, angry, wrathful God. The death of this God only means that this God doesn’t really exist at all. This was a great lie. This was a false dogma. Humans made up this human like, angry, wrathful God to scare humans and control humans. The death of this God means that humans have to take responsibility to become moral supermen who achieve their potential in this life and try to do what is right based on what is right rather than what a religious frames is right. The new moral supermen make their own moral rules, principles, and boundaries in the wake of this death of this Judeo-Christian God and the whole scam of heaven-hell, God-devil, and everything else about the Christian religion being extinguished and thrown in the dustbin of human history.
15. How does Stephen Wolfman’s ‘new kind of science’ support Stephen Jay Gould’s notion of spandrels or unintended consequences complexities?
Stephen Wolfman’s ‘new kind of science’ supports Gould’s notion of unintended consequences complexities because of the way that something simple does evolve into something complex as most evident by the computer revolution example. The first personal computer built by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs in a garage in the late 1970s was so simplistic compared to the personal computers today. The complexity of the personal computer’s capabilities today is so beyond the complexity of the first one. The laptop computer is so powerful today because of the way the simple first machine spawned so many people trying to improve on it and advance on it . The unintended consequences were what people innovated to make the personal computer better from Bill Gates to those college guys that innovated Google. Wolfman’s ‘new kind of science’ is following this Gould’s notion that unintended consequences always result when humans innovate, imagine, and visualize newer, better improvements on already existing things. Another great illustration of it is the advancement of the airplane since the Wright brothers flew that first one in the early 1900s. Today, the B-2 bomber of the USA makes it very clear how something simple turns into something so complex over time due to squandrels which result from humans innovating, creating, brainstorming, and advancing already existing molds and structures into improved, more effective ones. In one hundred years, the airplane has gone from a thing that barely lifts off the ground to this B-2 bomber that can fly undetected by radar and drop huge bombs on anyone anywhere without any defense against it. The scary thing is that the B-2 bomber is already outdated and that there are faster, better airplanes already being produced and proliferated in the USA production facilities.
16. Why does religious diversity almost always start with its founder?
The founder of every religion is always stepping up, speaking out, and proclaiming a new, distinctive, and original message and therefore establishing a new, distinctive, and original relationship with the Higher Power or God. In every single religion, from one end of this world to the next, the founder is always a revered, sacred, and holy figure who is seen as distinctively better, improved, and existing at an elevated plane of existence compared to ordinary humans especially after he or she is gone. For instance, my family religion of Islam started with one man - Prophet Muhammad. He was called by God in the hills of Mecca and the Angel Gabriel began recite the new Book of God that we Muslims consider written by God Himself - Holy Quran. Prophet Muhammad denounced all the different cults and pagan religions in Mecca at that time and proclaimed that a new religion had been born for the purpose of cleansing away and getting rid of all these false religious belief systems. This new religion began to be called Islam which means ‘to submit’ and of course this submission is to the one and only Allah (God). This started a new religion in the middle of the desert and it was completely different from any other religion. It was creative, original, appealing, and attractive as Prophet Muhammad was the central figure and the Holy Quran was the centerpiece of the new faith. In the case of the religion of Buddhism, the Buddha did the same thing as Prophet Muhammad. He announced a new religion based on a new set of truths and beliefs that came to him while in deep meditation alone. Buddha came up with the basic doctrines while in this state of pure enlightenment. Buddha came to full awareness and broke his own cycle of death and rebirth by extinguishing his human wants, needs, and appetites in a total sense. He was able to achieve a state that is called Nirvana. It is a total blissfulness with all human wants and appetites being extinguished. The Buddha nature is pursued by all these religious followers today because of this one man’s mission to find the real truth. In both the cases of Prophet Muhammad and the Buddha, these religious groups are so different but their founders are very similar in declaring themselves separate and apart from all other religious faiths preceding him and all those around him at their respective time periods while alive.
17. What was the tipping point in Brian Copeland’s life which prompted him to want to commit suicide?
Copeland was stressed out so much because he couldn’t feel comfortable in his own skin. He couldn’t come to terms with the situation facing him. He was an outcast. He was considered and socially deemed as inferior to white people. He felt this cultural stereotyping in a significant way that made him feel so alone and isolated and finally he hit the depths of despair in the racist San Leandro. He had a tipping point where death seemed to him to be a better, happier prospect than living life in this kind of humiliating, dehumanizing situation all over skin color. The racial and cultural stereotyping wherever he went and socially interacted with others was what I felt built up that huge resentment which resulted in him falling into this major depression which triggered his suicidal thoughts. He saw life as something so cruelly unhappy for him to live that death was something more attractive in every way. He saw that it would be better for him to be dead than alive.
18. What were the more subtle forms of racism that Brian encountered while growing up in San Leandro?
Stereotyping is something that is subtle but apparent when the victim feels anxiety, tensions, and negative emotions over it. The stereotyping done by white people towards black people is almost automatic in San Leandro. This white racist stereotyping done here is that black people can’t be trusted, black people are potential thieves, druggies, and criminals, and that black people are inferior and unintelligent. The white people view black people as not equals. They are scum. They are dirt. They are less than human. These are the nasty, evil sentiments in white racists’ consciousness towards blacks. These subtle forms of racism that Brian Copeland encountered were as small as glances, the way white people conversed with him, and the way that his same age white peers talked to him and treated him as someone different; an outcast.
19. How does Brian’s experience of racism dovetail with the experiences of Malcolm X? How are they different?
Malcolm X experienced much more violent racism than Brian Copeland did. In Lansing, Michigan, when Malcolm was a little boy the violent, racist group known as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) murdered his activist father. As a consequence, the whole family was broken up and Malcolm ended up in Detroit and then Boston with relatives. All the children were forced to go live with different family members and nobody ever was convicted for the father’s murder in Lansing. Malcolm X’s violent episode in childhood involving white racism and race hatred was far and beyond anything that Brian Copeland encountered for sure. Also, Malcolm X had to go through a whole period of being a hoodlum in the streets dealing drugs, running numbers, and burglarizing white people’s homes. This landed him in jail for many years where he converted to the Nation of Islam and became a devotee to Prophet Elijah Muhammad who wrote letters to him and guided him to this path he would take after his jail release as a major minister in the religion. The racist hatred that Malcolm X encountered as a child was translated obviously into a racist hatred for white people through the Nation of Islam platform that upheld a religious doctrine that white people were blue-eyed devils void of any goodness and any moral conscience. The incredible speeches delivered by Malcolm X against white people are very different from the responses towards white people conveyed in Brian Copeland’s story.
20. In what ways did certain North American Indian religions absorb and integrate Christianity into their own religious ideas and rituals?
As evident in the reader, the North American Indian religions in some cases did absorb and integrate Christianity into their own religious ideas and rituals. The figurehead of Christianity, Jesus, became a saint like, holy, and revered figure in some of the North American Indian religions as an honest, powerful shaman who walked in the path of the Great Spirit. The Native American Indian religions basically hold that a holy force holds all things together and this holy force is commonly referred to in most as the Great Spirit. Native American life and their religious practices revolved around this centralizing holy force. The key goal was to maintain harmony with this holy natural power and move in rhythm and tune to its cosmic pulse. Harmony was the way to ensure the success of the tribe in social life, in hunting, and in war. The Native Americans firmly believed that disharmony with the holy force resulted in disaster for tribe and individuals. The Native American religious groups saw in Christianity a common tie in the monotheism doctrine on God and the Great Spirit doctrine of a centralizing holy force holding everything together and in harmony. The Jesus Christ figure was also a common thread in Native American religions as we find the Christ-like Hiawatha among the Iroquois oral traditions and the Christ-like Sweet Medicine over in the Plains’ Sioux tribes. The integration of Christianity and some of its rituals were very much synthesized and integrated through their matching symmetries and qualities to Native American beliefs and rituals. The same path towards moral goodness, moral love, and moral brotherhood was visualized by the Native American shamans in some of the groups and Christianity was simply interpreted as another way to the same holy force; the Great Spirit; God.
21. In Laverne Jacobs’ narrative, he speaks about how he felt conflicted about his Native American religious identity and his newfound faith in Christianity. How did he attempt to reconcile the two?
Laverne Jacobs feels a conflicted feeling when becoming a Christian because he doesn’t want to separate from his own Native American religious identity. Jacobs is able to try to reconcile the two faiths because of his realization that most of his Native American rituals are about intimacy with a benevolent supernatural power which in the Christian faith is called God. The Christian faith holds that Jacobs must seek God through his personal relationship with humanity’s Savior or Messiah, Jesus Christ, who must be accepted in his heart in whole to make the conversion and transition into a full and faithful Christian believer. This religious pressure to accept Christ into his heart and life full force and full faith in order to harmonize his life and relationship with the holy, supernatural force or God becomes a pivotal point of awareness for Jacobs. He comes to see the reconciliation is maybe possible that his Christian conversion is indeed his vision quest as a Native American. He is finding his path and direction to walk. This is where he is going to live a life of full purpose as advocated by the Native American religious traditions and beliefs of his family and tribe. He is finding this awareness as he deals with the conflict between the two since his Native American religious identity places the most emphasis on harmony with the supernatural power evident in all of nature and humanity as well. He is finding that Christianity is just another path to that harmony that he is walking because this is his chosen fate. This is his vision quest towards a fulfilling, meaningful life in the future.
22. What is the Native American Church of Jesus Christ? How did it evolve?
The Native American Church of Jesus Christ is one of those religious organizations that evolved from this concept that Jesus Christ was a great shaman from the East, a great holy man, a great holy teacher, and one who had achieved intense, intimate harmony with the supernatural holy power; the Great Spirit. Jesus Christ found the harmony and taught about his experiences and times in the harmony state according to the Native American Church of Jesus Christ. One of the most particular rituals of this Native American Church is the use of peyote. A body of rituals developed around peyote when it was introduced in the late nineteenth century and it was incorporated into the Native American Church to help and assist young men in their vision quests to find themselves and find their life’s direction and responsibility. This Church evolved around the belief that Native Americans and Jesus Christ are connected in the harmony of the ultimate supernatural, holy power; the Great Spirit; God. This intimacy with the spiritual center of the Universe and all of life is so crucial to the Native American Church of Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ had achieved it and resonated in it, vibrated in it, and taught many great things while one with the Great Spirit.
23. Detail Frederick Douglass’s critique of slavery via his autobiography. In what specific ways did it criticize conventional religion?
The critique of slavery given by Frederick Douglass in his autobiography is insightful, stunning, and dramatic. His description of some of those torturous beatings endured by the slaves, as well as the rapes of the young black girls on these slave plantations by their white masters, is just nauseating at times. He is able to show how really dehumanizing, sick, and degrading slavery really was when being practiced by these white slave owners in the American South. The specific ways he criticized conventional religion was in relation to how the white slave masters and families pretended to be good Christians. These white Christians even quoted biblical verses to justify the institution of slavery and cast the whites as a superior race on Earth second to none. The conventional religions allowed the white slave owners to justify their slavery institution and these religious leaders in the South did nothing to denounce and expose slavery as immoral to the slave owners at Sunday services. Slavery was justified, upheld, and called beneficial to the poor, unintelligent, and brutish slaves from the forbidden continent of Africa.
24. What are the major differences between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. when it comes to liberating blacks from oppression?
The major differences between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. was clear in regards to liberating blacks from oppression. Martin Luther King Jr. came along in the mid-1950s with his activism against Jim Crow racism in the American South with his leadership being noted first in the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955. With a doctorate degree in Theology, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. upheld the doctrine of non violent civil disobedience. He taught his followers to stand up morally strong and non violently to their oppressors and take their brutality by turning their other cheek like Jesus did and proving that standing on the higher moral ground will win out in the end. King said that by taking the moral higher ground the white racists already have lost and they can’t kill every black and be violent when the blacks are standing arm in arm and only being non violent in their methods. King was extremely successful in pressuring the national government to change the Jim Crow situation in the American South through direct action and change the racial segregation system forever. In contrast, Malcolm X preached a doctrine that the white people were blue eyed devils that were offspring of an ancient genetic experiment gone bad and that they were incapable of being good, moral people and therefore the blacks must have their own nation and society separated from the whites. Malcolm X called out for black separatism and wanted blacks to avoid contact and interaction whites whenever possible and become self-sufficient and dependent only on each other until they could carve out their own all-black nation. Malcolm X said that blacks have arm themselves and defend themselves whenever appropriate. He mocked King’s nonviolent civil disobedient doctrine as totally ineffective and causing the black people only to remain oppressed.
25. Why is genealogical disassociation a key factor in understanding the emergence of new religions in America?
Once people break away from their original gene pool, like the Africans and Europeans did when they came to America, the emergence of new religions was inevitable. These migrants no longer participating in their traditional village, town, or family religious rituals, ceremonies, and events as when they were back in their homelands. In the Africans’ situation, they were cut off from their African homeland against their wills and dragged here to be forced to toil as slaves on huge plantations. The Europeans came to find cheap land, new economic opportunities, and new religious opportunities as well. The proliferation of religions of such diverse nature across the United States has always been connected to this original disassociation from the Old World cultures in Europe for the white Europeans and the African culture for the Africans. These people were soon developing new religious rituals, ceremonies, and events based on their new interpretations and new approaches to going about their religious activities. In this sense, the diversity of religion in America was begun at the very start when the original white settlers and black slaves arrived here.

Extra Credit
26. Write your own analysis of the arc or overall theme in the Reader for either the American Indian experience or the African American experience.
The American Indian religious experience is really fascinating for me as an international student raised and groomed in a strict version of Islam among a population of one hundred percent Muslims in my home country. Islam is the only religious belief system I had ever really known and practiced in any fashion. I had never touched upon any of the other religious belief systems because my society and culture is very inward looking and insulated from the outside world in many ways for a long time in history because of our vast deserts splitting us from other people. We have been Muslims for hundreds of years with very remote influence from other religious systems for long stretches of time. The North American Indian section was so interesting for me because I have come to terms with the truth about their central belief being this state of harmony with the singular, most powerful, supernatural force that holds everything together as well as creates everything at the same time. The Great Spirit. Is this Allah of my religion? This question has been on my mind since learning so much about how the American Indians were deep believers in being in harmony with their natural environment and with this supernatural holy force at all times and in all aspects. The key effort was to remain in harmony in spirit, mind, and body with this Great Spirit or Allah. American Indians were in the religious mood of trying to enjoy the beautiful earth around them as well as each other in a harmonious, peaceful existence if possible with the supernatural force of all supernatural forces; the Great Spirit. Tragically, the coming of the white Europeans with their drive to acquire land, accumulate wealth, and create dynamic, complex economies based on many types of economic activities were too overwhelming for the North American Indians to overcome. The most important thing for the Indians was seeing the spiritual side of life rather than accumulating material things and possessions.
27. Compare and contrast one reading from the American Indian section with the African American section. Be sure to illustrate the differences and the commonalities.
The two different readings chosen for this comparative analysis is the one about the Native American Church of Jesus Christ and the reading by Martin Luther King, Jr. and his argument for the use of Christian principles and Christian morals to face down racism and Jim Crow in the American South. Both of these readings are connected by Christianity. Both African people and Native American people adopted, integrated, and synthesized some of the Christian teachings, rituals, and figures in their own religious activities, practices, and rituals. Over time, this integration process of Christianity into the lives of African Americans and Native Americans becomes something naturally acceptable to these African Americans and Native Americans that follow these Christian principles. By the time Martin Luther King, Jr. was preaching nonviolent civil disobedience based on Christian principles, the vast majority of blacks in the United States were Christian believers. By the time that the Native American Church of Jesus Christ was established, less Native Americans than African Americans were Christians because of absence of any genealogical disassociation like experienced by African Americans. The reaching out to the African Americans with Christian beliefs connected Martin Luther King, Jr. to these black folks and they became a powerful, unified force for those years during the height of the civil rights protests in the 1950s and early 1960s. Martin Luther King, Jr. would use biblical metaphors in his great speeches and underscore the importance of Jesus in his life and his faith in the principle of Christian unconditional love. In contrast, the Native American Church of Jesus Christ does not have a huge number of Native American members attracted to it. This Church evolved with integrated beliefs of Christianity and Native Americans but in terms of numbers, Native Americans do not flock to Christianity like the African Americans did in the South. These readings demonstrate to me how important their original religion is for Native Americans in North America because they are connected here geographically, historically, and religiously. The white Europeans and black Africans came here and became disconnected from their cultural and social pressures to uphold religious systems and beliefs as their ancestors did.