Spiritual Argumentative Essays Samples For Students

One of the traits that is commonly associated with the writing of Southern storyteller Flannery O’Connor is the use of shocking violence in order to advance her rhetorical arguments. One of the more ironic uses of violence occurs when she chooses to use it for the representation of salvation, frequently through the use of characters who are physically and/or spiritually grotesque in nature. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is one of O’Connor’s most popular stories, and it demonstrates this principle. The Misfit is a murderer who shocks a Pharisaically pious grandmother into authentic spiritual awareness even ...

Abstract

Harry Ashfield and Danny Gospel languish in empty, meaningless lives. Both experience “tipping points” that inspire them to seek the Kingdom of God. Rejecting their pasts, they embark on spiritual journeys that lead them to sublimate everything to their quests for salvation. What follows are uniquely intimate and personal experiences that bring them to an understanding of salvation and the healing love of God.

Seeking Salvation in ‘The River’ and ‘Danny Gospel’

For Christians, salvation is a product of constant striving for a boundless and divine source of love. It is a spiritual phenomenon in perpetual motion. In Flannery O’Connor’s ...

Buddhism and Confucianism are two of the most important schools of Chinese philosophical thought. The basic tenets of both religions deal with the well-being of the soul but they differ from each other in certain aspects. The topic of happiness is a major point of difference between the teachings of Lord Buddha and Confucius. Happiness in both philosophies is a spiritual state and not the result of material pursuits. However, while Buddhism seeks to attain happiness by forsaking all worldly desires, Confucianism provides an easier to follow path to spiritual happiness.
Gautama Buddha achieved “nirvana”, enlightenment. The process freed him ...

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Religious rhetoric has been very influential in the contemporary world in different aspects. We acknowledge religion uses both the spoken and written words to convey the intended message. We also observe religion relies on language to enable people converse with God or gods, talk about the sacred, show divine intervention and understanding. All these are in rhetoric form for they aim at convincing people to adore the sacred power in their life undertakings. According to Liguori in the book Uniformity with God’s Will, he appreciates that,
“Perfection is founded ...

When the first congress on alternative medicines was organized by the Faculty of Medicine in the University Of Rome in the year 1973; private practitioners from across the world presented more than one hundred and fifty brands of alternative medicines (Whistler 14). The congress, which sought to establish the validity and effectiveness of alternative medicines established that most of the alternative therapies were indeed functioning and that they could be tested and proven scientifically. Some of the therapies were found to be common in more than one community with most of the communities coming from the Asian continent. The ...

Argumentative essay

Christianity as a religion has many teachings, which relatively differ in their teaching and how each perceives, obey and acknowledge its leadership. The Roman Catholics and other protestant denominations, for example, differ in the number of books that the bible contains; the Catholics include the Apocryphal books (The Scots Confession A. D. 1560). The differences, however, accept the canonical books that makeup the Old and the New Testaments. However, these differences do not represent an outright disagreement or difference on their faith and believe in the true living God. They represent the holiness and the source of the regulation, foundation ...

ABSTRACT

Ancient Greek philosophers had very different concepts of happiness and pleasure from the more materialistic and hedonistic ideas of the modern world. For this reason, many contemporary students read their books without really being able to comprehend their main message, which really viewed philosophy as a kind of religion. Indeed, Plato’s followers did start their own religion, which lasted for centuries and was incorporated into Stoicism and early Christianity. All of them rejected the idea that happiness came from money, material success, sex or physical pleasure, which are the basis for the modern mass consumption economy. That simply did ...

Holiness can be defined as the state of being holy, pure and sanctified. From this definition holiness assumes an evangelistic approach making it more precise in terms of purity and sanctification. It is used in many religious settings making it a common word used for a universal description across all religious faiths. Therefore, holiness is a universal religious word used to mean a state of sanctity and purity way from sins or evil. In many religious settings, holiness comes with self denial and total submission to a supernatural power and divine law of the supernatural being, common described as the Only Holy and owner ...

The Lord of Death, in the Indian epic of Mahabharata, asked his son about the most astounding aspect of the present world. The boy responded, “It is that all around us people can be dying and we don’t believe it can happen to us” (Halifax 6). Such typical refusal to accept death’s inevitability is particularly common in the modern Western society. Generally, the mainstream philosophers shunt any interest in paranormal matters like spirit possession, extra-sensory perceptions, spirit mediumship, reincarnation, and out-of-body experiences into the dark corners of their profession (Hales 335). Eminent philosophers like Antony Flew and ...

Henry David Thoreau is the founding father of American Liberation Thought. He is among the most influential and beloved writers of the 19th century. His writings have influenced and inspired millions of people across the world for over 150 years. It is for this reason and many others that he should be studied in high school. This paper will determine profound reasons why Thoreau should be taught in high school.
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(Gruenewald 14) according to Gruenewald, Thoreau made great contribution with his encapsulate environment stewardship. He was always awake to his surroundings, he saw things in ...

The way society has been impacted by materialism, the dominating sense of yearning to pursue wealth, is a complicated subject. According to research, young people are suffering from disillusionment when it comes to jobs and money. Studies also show that as young people become more and more materialistic than ever before, pro-social values and worth ethic are reaching an ultimate low. While materialism has made the youth greedy for money, it has also drawn them away from their potential to pursue a vocation that will bring meaning to their lives. Instead, a majority of the youth choose high-paying jobs where they can ...

The story of young Francis Tarwater is as old as the tale of Jacob from the Book of Genesis, struggling with God to find his own identity; it is as timeless as Young Goodman Brown’s exploration of his own darker sides. It is the story of the collision between the spiritual forces of good and evil and their own resolution in the tale of each of us. Just like many of us, Francis Tarwater has to make his own decisions about his spiritual future, and the influence he receives from his various father figures in the story is ...

Muhammad Al- Ghazali was considered one of the most celebrated scholars in history for exploring the concepts of reality and reasoning in Islamic thought. Ghazali’s unexpected abandonment of his professional position at the Nizamiyyah College and subsequent departure from Baghdad, came to be known in modern literature as the spiritual crisis of Al-Ghazali. At the very peak of his career he began to question his knowledge and power of reasoning as a way to truth. This essay examines the nature of Ghazali’s spiritual crisis and his approach to finding certainty and true human self.
He elaborates about ...

Before explaining on my moral codes, the understanding of moral codes is essential to ensure that while explaining or putting across my moral practices I understand what I am talking about in this context. Moral codes area system of morality that a particular persons or people who may be united by a common religion or practice believe in, and somehow dictates on how they envision things in life. Thus, according to the environment that I happened to be brought up in, there are certain acts that I perceive as good or bad. Consequently, according to my religious practices, there are also ...

Involvement of family members in the healthcare decisions for children is a debatable issue. Parents’ engaged in the decision-making of their child’s health care, poses challenges to the American bioethical system, which regards the patient sovereignty as the fundamental ethical principle in the medical decision making policy .
American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has established certain recommendations pertaining to the child’s decision-making and categorizes children based on their level of maturity and decision-making ability into three groups: those that lack the ability to take decisions, those with a premature developing capacity and those that are mature enough to ...

Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail remains one of the most famous essays written by Dr. King, and demonstrates his mastery of rhetoric as well as ethics. Dr. Martin Luther King penned the letter while in jail for protesting segregation and Jim Crow laws in the South, and for equality and over all civil rights for African Americans in the rest of the United States. King has always been considered the most important of the civil rights leaders of that period, and the eloquence and his masterful use of rhetoric and other persuasive techniques on display ...

Religion has been the foundation of arrangement and strife of social orders, where both viewpoints make a noteworthy commitment to our comprehension of society. However, a new form of religion known as capitalism religion has developed which is now the source of hope and fulfilment for people in the modern world. This exposition will look into a structuralist and interpretative position on the effect of the capitalism religion on society and how religion can be used to help people understand it as a false hope. The scholars that will be utilized are Karl Marx, Max Weber, and David Loy.
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David L. Smith states that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the story of slavery and freedom, death and rebirth (to escape from his father, Huck cleverly faked his own death) has not only specific, but also a symbolic meaning. This novel is not only about the legalized slavery of black Americans, but also about the lack of freedom of the white man, enslaved by social conventions and prejudices of the environment, not only about the "revival" of the hero after his supposed death, but also about the actual birth of his personality, which gained emotional breadth. Huck’s and ...

“Mulatto” is a play written by Langston Hughes in the thirties of the previous century. The play explores the issues of the race such as lynching and miscegenation as well as the tragedy of family relationships between father and son during a difficult and controversial period in the social relations in America. The author received the national reputation of a dramatist due to the performance of “Mulatto” in 1935 by Martin Jones on Broadway. The play appealed to the public of Broadway because it examined the theme of tragic mulatto that symbolized the failure of the myth of egalitarianism. ...

Since its 1947 decision in Everson v. Board of Education (with an opinion written by Justice Hugo Black), the Supreme Court has further considered and limited the active role that religion or religious institutions can play in the public sphere” that is, on government property. This paper presents an argument for the position that “faith groups and institutions should not be allowed to form political parties and they should not attempt to gain influence in the workings of government for their views and values by entering the realm of political discourse and attempting to elect their own politicians.”
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In the many developments that are taking place in the religious world, ecumenism is one of the most significant of them all. Church leaders are coming together with common goals that enable them to best serve and worship God, among other many activities. The main goal of contemporary ecumenism has been for all the Christians in the world to be brought together into unity amidst diverse and pluralistic expressions of the faith. This interdenominational union is rooted in the belief that all Christians are bound together by Christ and His existence should not be the cause of division and ...

Of all the varieties of conceptual models of the information society, for the purposes of this study, it is important to include at least two aspects: first, characterizing the functioning of culture at the named stage of social development and, secondly, a new type of relations in the system of "individual - society". The first of them is determined by the mosaic of culture, the increasing role of virtualization, media saturation, changing patterns of behavior, loss of a clear hierarchy of values that actually leads to the disappearance of the notion of norm. Second - characterizes crisis of paternalistic society, increase ...

And Chan-Wook Park

Given the increasing globalization of the film industry, Hollywood directors have begun to pull increasingly from international sources for their creative output. Looking into the small-but-potent international film markets, often directors from other countries are given the opportunity to cross-over into Hollywood. This is certainly the case with Asian cinema; many Asian film directors who have achieved success in Japan and Hong Kong have been given the chance to make films in America in order to provide a rapidly-consuming film market with the variety and quality it desires. In the 1980s and 1990s, two Asian directors in particular crossed over ...

Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca was more successful as a writer and traveler than he was as a conquisidator. He was an early explorer, exploring the New World hailing from Spain, as well as a protoanthropological author. He was born in Jerez de la Frontera, Cadiz in the year 1490 into a wealthy family. Orphaned at a very early age, Cabeza grew up under care of his maternal aunt. Pedro de Vera, his grandfather, had conquered the Canary Islands and would serve a large shadow in Cabeza de Vaca’s ambitions in ‘the new world’ America. His name cabeza means ‘head’ and de Vaca means ‘ ...

Settling a peaceful life in a tempestuous place is possible or not?

Settling a peaceful life in a tempestuous place is possible or not?
Inner realization and solace is a component aspired by every individual of present times. The very search is the objective of my present state in life. I searched books and scholarly reading of poetry and religious scripts. The vision of realization was obvious but the essence of sensation in person was distant away. The very thought when searched in readings illusify verified opinions. However, the approach to attain the state of solace and self realization in my opinion can be consolidated in the theory illustrated below;
Spiritual peace ...

The main character Odysseus in Homer’s work of art, entitled, “The Odyssey” is all about facing trials and tribulations. It is about the journey to achieve peace in one’s heart – a story of acceptance of the unfortunate events that happen in our lives and moving forward with a better understanding of life and the true source of happiness.
Trials and tribulations are inevitable in our lives. This is one of the many messages of The Odyssey. These trials and tribulations are the doors towards enlightenment. They are the reasons why we yearn for relief – why we yearn for ...

Introduction

Mental illness is classified as a medical condition whereby an individual’s feelings, thinking, moods, daily functioning and ability to interact with others are disrupted. The larger society classifies such patients as crazy since they seem to be detached from others. Like any other disease, mental illness is a medical condition whereby one cannot cope with the ordinary demands of life (Thompson, 11). The concept mental illness entails brain disorders like dementia and schizophrenia, personality disorders and other disorders like anxiety and depression to mention a few. It affects people across socio-economic, religious or educational backgrounds. For many decades, mental illness has ...

Yoga is a system based on Hindu philosophy that was developed in ancient India. While the spiritual background in which it was created defined it as a method for attaining a peace of mind and union with the divine, yoga also incorporates several physical and mental practices that are associated with improved physical health and emotional well-being. A posture in yoga is called an asana while a breathing exercise is referred to as pranayama. Both types of practices have been introduced to the Western civilization and popularized during the late 20th century. Since then, yoga has been adopted as a lifestyle by several groups. ...

Wars around the world can be traced back to a form of religion or religious expressions of difference. As the evolution of mankind has progressed, so too have the unique interpretations of religious elements that each population carries into the world. This study will produce evidence that supports the argument that each military engagement across the face of international civilization has been at the core, a result of religious ideals and the manner in which these philosophical differences are expressed.
Wilson (16) argues that the human race needs a means to explain and control the unexpected, which in turn creates religion. ...

I intend to discuss the nature of self and the conflicting theories of the French philosopher Rene Descartes and the English philosopher Derek Parfit. Firstly I will be briefly outlining Descartes theory of self and then I will be discussing Parfit’s theory and highlighting areas in which it has similarities and where it contrasts to establish whether or not the two philosophers have a shared idea of the self.
The French philosopher Descartes looked for the nature of man in the existence of god. What he asks in a nutshell is; ‘Is what I believe a product of god or ...

Death often comes after advanced age or serious illness. End of life is defined as ‘the time period during which the healthcare providers would not be surprised if death occurred within about 6 months (APA, 1). Most deaths are of the older age group (above 65 years) or those who are terminally ill (APA, 1). End of life care issues can be simple or complex and may range from legal, ethical, psychosocial, practical, spiritual, and medical aspects and even personal issues of the dying person (APA, 2). In literature, broadly discussed are the ethical and legal issues. In this ...

Abstract

People often turn to God or religion when they face facts or situations that cannot be explained. Although humans are more interested in material things, rather than in spirituality, idolizing money instead of purifying their souls, they still turn to God and religion when facing problems, asking for favors from the unseen being that they worship in times of trouble.
In the land of the man, God meets science and they become two factors that influence people’s minds and their existence. Religion is an alternative for science or vice – versa or are people living in a material world, ...

On the fifth of July 1996 the first cloned sheep was born, they called her ‘Dolly’ and she sparked off one of the hottest debates of the twentieth century, the debate over the nature of and consequences of cloning a human being, thus starting the idea of bio-ethics.
Science furthering the lifespan of the human race has been at the core of scientific research since the dawn of time, organ donor-ship, organ transplants, advances in medical technology, like in vitro fertilisation, what seemed like science fiction to people of the past are now commonplace, everyday affair for those living ...

Introduction

Evidence of aliens having an influence on earth is evident in the writings, artifacts, and paintings and cave drawings.
Body
- First contact with Aliens in 1941.
- Cases of individuals who came into contact with the aliens. Cases highlighted help to provide evidence of aliens and human contact
- Instances of how aliens have contributed to human civilization
- The ancient cave paintings are one of the major inventions believed to be from aliens
- Angel Hair associated with aliens used in the contemporary world to design aircrafts.
- The ancient ...

Question 1

The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, in many of his works, tends to celebrate the idealized relationship between man and nature. He feels that nature is absolutely beautiful and powerful, and is connected to man through the divine spirit of God. In "Mont Blanc," he refers to God when talking about the titular mountain and the Arve River, and in "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" he cites a "spirit of beauty" as something that us the source of all truth and joy (766). "Ode to the West Wind" utilizes a terza rima format for its five cantos of text - here, it ...

Exchange among Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, and Mary Wollstonecraft

GE: The role of the writer in our time is much different than it will be in the future, I think. As the wheels of industry churn faster and faster, they will produce more and more distractions from the realities of society, and those in power will keep the public from noticing the stratagems that they use to hold onto that power, because of the sheer number of distractions available.
EB: Don’t you think that what we put together has a spiritual component to it? After all, while writing does allow the expression of the noble and the ...

Essay 1: Compare And Contrast How You, Lao Tzu and Homer Would Respond To The Old Testament

Lao Tzu is the spiritual leader behind the philosophy of Taoism. He is best known for his writings which currently form the foundations of Taoism. Taoism basically seeks to help people achieve harmony and peace with nature through distancing themselves from the world. It encourages people to avoid issues happening around the world as the only way in which they will attain inner peace with themselves. Homer was also a philosopher and one of the first influential writers in Greek. He was known for his many poems which were used as a standard to evaluate ones level of education in ancient ...

Fundamental Principles of Ethics

Principle of Toleration-This principle involves enduring a plethora of moral values, beliefs, and freedom of expression. For this reason, respect and accommodation should be accorded to divergent beliefs and opinions irrespective of their source. This principle is important in encouraging intellect, philosophy, and religious principles among other values that support liberty and human rights(Paul, 2006). According to great philosophers such as JS Mill and John Locke, the principle of tolerance presupposes individual freedom and autonomy thereby leading to the development of an innovative and creative society(Paul, 2006).
Principle of Stewardship-As human beings, we ought to take care ...

People from all cultures and all faiths advocate for forgiveness. However, there’s the question of how much one should forgive. If an offense is so grievous or repeatedly committed then it can make one question if continuing to forgive won’t cause further harm towards oneself. It’s true that nobody’s perfect and that even the people we love and who love us do things that hurt us, whether intentionally or unintentionally. However, although I believe that we should always find it in our hearts to forgive, I believe that we shouldn’t bestow the same level ...

Oedipus Rex is one of the great masterpieces by the great dramatist Sophocles. Oedipus the King is a trilogy out of which Oedipus Rex is the first part. The fast pace of this play and the horrible fate of the mighty king grips the reader from the very first word of the play.

After reading the play, some might argue that everything happened because it was supposed to happen i.e. because of the predestination. Furthermore, it is believed that Oedipus’s character had nothing to do with whatever happened with him and he was just a puppet in the fate’s ...

26th April 2011

Introduction

Siddhartha is a novel written by Hermann Hesse. It deals with Siddhartha’s (a boy) journey in search of knowledge. The word Siddhartha is a combination of two Sanskrit words: Siddha (“achieved”) and artha (“meaning or wealth’). Siddhartha in whole means “the one who has found meaning/wealth…”
Siddartha sets out, with his friend Govinda, to search for knowledge. He leaves asceticism and goes to a down-to-earth life and back to asceticism again in his effort to attain enlightenment and experience.
Hermann uses experience here to refer to the sum of the conscious happenings/events as experienced by a person in ...