"Cuz the perfect world begins and ends with," sings the theme song singer, "Me" (Emperor’s New Groove)! answers Emperor Kuzko as he points to his face with both index fingers. In The Emperor’s New Groove, Kuzko’s view of the meaning of the universe is apparent in the movie’s first lines. The universe revolves around whoever sits on the emperor's chair. As the story unfolds, an entire worldview is explored. The Emperor’s New Groove displays an unbiblical worldview of moral truths and classic myths.
The opening song of The Emperor’s New Groove displays the main character’s personality and nature. Emperor Kuzko is an arrogant, egocentric man. At the closing of the song, the Incan Emperor summons Pacha, the burly headman of a nearby village on the outskirts of town. Nonchalantly, he announces the he is demolishing Pacha's house for the construction of his summer home Kuzkotopia. Enraged, Pacha protests and is dismissed. Moments later, Kuzko catches his longtime advisor, the ancient, power-hungry Ezma, sitting on his throne. He callously fires her for attempting to run the kingdom. Livid, Ezma takes her naive right-hand man Kronk to her secret lair where she begins plotting the Emperor’s death to take full control of the kingdom. The wrong poison is served to Kuzko and his body transforms into a llama instead of instantly dying. Ezma commands Kronk to dispose of Kuzko. When Kronk is about to kill Kuzko, his mythical shoulder angels intervene. Accidentally, Kronk drops Kuzko onto Pacha's cart and he ends up at the top of Pacha's middle-of-nowhere village. Stranded in the jungle, his only chance to reclaim his throne rests in the hands of good-hearted Pacha. The journey back to the village with trials and tribulation change Kuzko forever...
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...around a finite man offers no meaning for history. Without absolutes, the shoulder angels set individual standards for people. This results in unpunished murderers and conflict with no law to regulate it. Sin causes suffering; but if man was born without a sinful nature, then there should be no sin. Ultimately, the only source that sufficiently answers the questions encompassing life is the book provided by the One who gives life.
Works Cited
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English Standard Version. May 16, 2014. Web. .
The Emperor's New Groove. Dir. Steven Weber. Walt Disney Home Entertainment , 2000. VHS.
"The History of Angels." Top Documentary Films RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 May 2014. .
The four fundamental claims of the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Human beings exist in a relation to a triune God, God’s presence in the world is mediated through nature and reality, faith and reason are compatible, the dignity of the human being is inviolable and therefore the commitment to justice for the common good is necessary. However, the great books in the Catholic Intellectual tradition show that they represent these fundamental claims in a broad distinctive way. This essay will show that these readings better represent one of the fundamental claims, human beings exist in a relation with a triune God, from the view point of three great books from the bible, Genesis, Exodus and the Gospel of Matthew. The Bible clearly supports the
On July 8th 1741, Jonathan Edwards preached the sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in Enfield, Connecticut. Edwards states to his listeners that God does not lack in power, and that people have yet not fallen to destruction because his mercy. God is so forgiving that he gives his people an opportunity to repent and change their ways before it was too late. Edwards urges that the possibility of damnation is immanent. Also that it urgently requires the considerations of the sinner before time runs out. He does not only preach about the ways that make God so omnipotent, but the ways that he is more superior to us. In his sermon, Edwards uses strong, powerful, and influential words to clearly point out his message that we must amend our ways or else destruction invincible. Edwards appeals to the spectators though the various usages of rhetorical devices. This includes diction, imagery, language/tone and syntax. Through the use of these rhetoric devices, Edwards‘s purpose is to remind the speculators that life is given by God and so they must live according to him. This include...
...o die, everything is growing farther and farther apart toward a state of decay; and as it goes, so goes hope, so goes man’s faith in what he can see, think, and reason. This is the hard reality that becomes apparent; if ethical action is limited to man’s thought about morals and principles that are, according to man, “absolute”, then man may be the most arrogant and ignorant of God’s creation.
A foundational belief in Christianity is the idea that God is perfectly good. God is unable to do anything evil and all his actions are motives are completely pure. This principle, however, leads to many questions concerning the apparent suffering and wrong-doing that is prevalent in the world that this perfect being created. Where did evil come from? Also, how can evil exist when the only eternal entity is the perfect, sinless, ultimately good God? This question with the principle of God's sovereignty leads to even more difficult problems, including human responsibility and free will. These problems are not limited to our setting, as church fathers and Christian philosophers are the ones who proposed some of the solutions people believe today. As Christianity begins to spread and establish itself across Europe in the centuries after Jesus' resurrection, Augustine and Boethius provide answers, although wordy and complex, to this problem of evil and exactly how humans are responsible in the midst of God's sovereignty and Providence.
In order to explain man’s path from the one to the other, he sets up a system of dichotomies that originate from Adam’s fall and are hinged upon the role of the will in earthly life. At the top, God is the source of the “supreme good,” and evil is its opposite (XII, 3). Up to this point, he is in agreement with the ancients, but he diverges again when he equates the good with nature, and evil with a defect of nature—an absence of the good (XII, 3). In this we have the first division of what “supremely is” between nature and vice, with nature arising ...
Michael Sandel is a distinguished political philosopher and a professor at Harvard University. Sandel is best known for his best known for his critique of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice. While he is an acclaimed professor if government, he has also delved deeply into the ethics of biotechnology. At Harvard, Sandel has taught a course called "Ethics, Biotechnology, and the Future of Human Nature" and from 2002 to 2005 he served on the President’s Council on Bioethics (Harvard University Department of Government, 2013). In 2007, Sandel published his book, The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering, in which he explains unethical implications biotechnology has and may have in the near future regarding genetic engineering.
The Examined Life, The Genealogy of Morals, and Meditations on First Philosophy were written by three philosophers of very different times, Cornel West, Friedrich Nietzsche, and René Descartes respectively. The intricate language, once deciphered, holds great meaning. The three texts are quite different from one another, but if one were to look closely and decipher the odd combination of complex wording, one would find that each of the texts has one major similarity. Each text looks at a flaw of humanity. The first text, The Examined Life, views the limitations of man and man’s inability to grasp the truth as the blemish of man. Nietzsche describes what he views as man’s flaw in the following sentence: “Man harbors too much horror; the earth has been a lunatic asylum for too long.” The fault of man as described in the final text, Meditations on First Philosophy, is that the will of man far exceeds the understanding of man. Outside of this similarity in seeking out man’s flaws, there are many differences.
Boethius places an increased emphasis on God’s eternal goodness to prove He can neither causes nor condone wickedness, intending to provide comfort for the virtuous affected by injustice. Boethius’s belief concerning the interaction of evil and justice in the Consolation of Philosophy intends to comfort the virtuous from the seemingly wicked world. Lady Philosophy, representing reason, soothes Boethius’s initial concerns by explaining how evil, the absence of good, can never defeat justice, and that the wicked will receive their punishment when Providence sees fit. Boethius also places an increased emphasis on God’s eternal goodness to clarify the role of Providence in the natural plan of the world. Boethius advises the reader that true happiness can only be found in the stability of the self and a virtuous lifestyle.
In closing of this chapter it is worthy to note that it is clear from the beginning that God existed before creation. Thirty four times the word God is paired with an action verb, clearly this chapter is about who God is and less stress is placed on the “how” of creation.
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” is a frightening and entertaining short story about the severe consequences that result from persistent mockery and an unforgiving heart. Poe’s excellent use of Gothicism within the story sets the perfect tone for a dark and sinister plot of murder to unfold. “The Cask of Amontillado” simply overflows with various themes and other literary elements that result from Poe’s Gothic style of writing. Of these various themes, one that tends to dominant the story as a whole is the theme of revenge, which Poe supports with his sophisticated use of direct and indirect factors, irony, and symbolism.
“I have a point to argue, which is that mankind’s quest for the good has been a struggle between humanism, on the one hand, and religious conceptions of the world, on the other hand. The latter have proved resistant in the face of efforts by the former to free not just the imagination but the very life of man from the authority of religious world views, whether in the classical epoch, the Renaissance, or the eighteenth century and since. The durability of religious views might be variously explained, but one main historical reason is that most people are naturally superstitious
He argues that God will no longer favor immoral people, and force them to suffer punishment for their immoral actions during the afterlife. Although he does leave this argument eventually, it has much weight persuasively in today’s culture. Almost every modern religion places some sort of importance upon acting with morals. Most of the time, it is ordered and specified what is wrong and what is right by that religion’s God(s). This thought that God gives laws to obey is called the Divine Command Theory, and is the leading argument for why to act with morals. However, this argument, too, has several problems with its final assertion. The main issue is that in order for this argument to carry any weight whatsoever, both the giver and the receiver of the argument must have the correct type of religious belief that goes along with the argument. Since the existence of God and the possibility of afterlife are currently an ongoing debate, a nonreligious individual will not be led to agree with those arguments, nor will a religious person who does not agree with the argument’s different
Some of them have not hesitated to ascribe to man, in such a state, the idea of just and unjust, without troubling themselves to show that he must be possessed of such an idea, or that it could be of any use to him. Others have spoken of the natural right of every man to keep what belongs to him, without explaining what they meant by belongs. Others again, beginning by giving the strong authority over the weak, proceeded directly to the birth of government, without regard to the time that must have elapsed before the meaning of the words authority and government could have existed among men. Every one of them, in short, constantly dwelling on wants, avidity, oppression, desires and pride, has transferred to the state of nature ideas which were acquired in society; so that, in speaking of the savage, they described the social man. It has not even entered into the heads of most of our writers to doubt whether the state of nature ever existed; but it is clear from the Holy Scriptures that the first man, having received his understanding and commandments immediately from God, was not himself in such a state; and that, if we give such credit to the writings of Moses as every Christian philosopher ought to give, we must deny that, even before the deluge, men were ever in the pure state of nature; unless, indeed,
The study of ethics, traditionally, consists of two parts, one concerned with moral rules, the other with what is good on its own account. Rules of conduct, many of which have a ritual origin, play a great part in the lives of savages and primitive peoples. It is forbidden to eat out of the chief's dish, or to seethe the kid in its mother's milk; it is commanded to offer sacrifices to the gods, which, at a certain stage of development, are thought most acceptable if they are human beings. Other moral rules, such as the prohibition of murder and theft, have a more obvious social utility, and survive the decay of the primitive theological systems with which they were originally associated. But as men grow more reflective there is a tendency to lay less stress on rules and more on states of mind. This comes from two sources - philosophy and mystical religion. We are all familiar with passages in the prophets and the gospels, in which purity of heart is set above meticulous observance of the Law; and St. Paul's famous praise of charity, or love, teaches the same principle. The same thing will be found in all great mystics, Christian and non-Christian: what they values is a state of mind, out of which, as they hold, right conduct must ensue; rules seem to them external, and insufficiently adaptable to circumstances.
All humans yearn for some sort of perfection; whether it be the “perfect” job or the “perfect” family, the idea that something is perfect only if there is nothing more to be added and nothing more to be taken away has always been sought after by society. People are constantly pushed to believe by society that those who are famous, have the most money and live the most lavish lives are the people who have a perfect life; completely disregarding their state of happiness. Many are blinded by this unrealistic and invariably unattainable standard and fail to realize the bigger picture, that perfection is the state of being content with oneself and/or their surroundings.