Is global warming man made Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Is global warming man made - Essay Example In short, nobody has any doubt about the fact that atmospheric temperature is showing abnormal increases in recent times. On the other hand, many people believe that global warming is a scam or manmade issue in order to exploit the sentiments of people for commercial purposes. â€Å"Global warming skeptics consider that the weather models used to establish global warming and to forecast its impacts are distorted†1. They are of the view that some scientists raise this issue in order to make money in the name of global warming researches. This paper critically analyses whether global warming is manmade or not. Prominent scientists, such as Frederick Seitz, Ph.D., Richard S. Lindzen, Ph.D., S. Fred Singer, Ph.D, Patrick J. Michaels, Ph.D. and Robert C. Balling, Jr., Ph. D.2 have expressed doubts over climate change and challenged the consensus of mainstream scientists3. Greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles and industrial units are often cited as the major reason for global w arming. According to scientific principles, gases in atmosphere should expand when they get heated and travel in the upward direction. If that is true, air pressure at earth’s surface should be dipped. However, such dip in atmospheric pressure near earth’s surface has been never observed. ... Also the warming can be due to the variation in cloud cover4. Lord Crimson (n. d) has quoted the opinions of 19,000 scientists in order to reject the idea of global warming. He has pointed out that these scientists are of the view that global warming is probably natural and not a crisis5. It should be noted that it is impossible for mankind to make any changes in in solar output or variations in cloud cover. Under these circumstances, the opinion of meteorologist John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel, is very much important. He said that â€Å"even if global warming is something to worry about, it's dangerous to look to government to fix the climate†6. Stephen Mulholland (2009) approached global warming issue from a different angle. In his opinion, â€Å"We have one of mankind's greatest scams: climate change and anthropogenic global warming (AGW), in which we're asked to expend trillions of dollars now so that events which may, or may not, take place when we've been d ead for centuries don't take place†7. In Dr. Sami Solanki’s (the director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany) opinion, â€Å"Sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures†8. In other words, we have to look upwards to identify the villain who causes global warming instead of looking around. Some scientists believe that the intensity of solar radiations increases and decreases periodically in every 1000 years of time period. In their opinion, sun is currently going through a period in which its radiations are intensified and there is nothing to worry about it since such increases in temperature may not go beyond certain

Views of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau Essay Example for Free

Views of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau Essay Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Racques Rosseau were philosophers who stated their belief of human nature and how we should govern mankind. Although Rousseau was born a different time than Hobbes and Locke, they all had a very strong influence on the way governments should function. They created a revolutionary idea of the state of nature, the way men were before a government came into play. Each philosopher developed guidelines and responsibilities that the government is obliged to. Although proposing different views and ideas, they all contributed significant ideas to society. Thomas Hobbes, Jock Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau all differed on their views of government. Thomas Hobbes described the state of nature for man is nasty, brutish and short. In order to escape this, people must give up freedom to receive peace and order by the protection of the government. Hobbes believed in an absolute monarchy. Order could only be established with a ruler holding absolute power. The state was there to prevent people from attacking and killing each other. His structure of a government was to prevent chaos and violence. Just like Hobbes, John Locke believed there was a need to establish order; however, he saw a different way to achieve this. He had a more optimistic perspective on human kind. People should give up some rights to attain protection, like Hobbes outlook of the social contract, but if the government does not fulfill its duty, the people must change it. Rebellion was only justified if the ruler lost the consent of his people. Hobbes believed that it was never justified. John Locke believed in any type of representative government such as a republic, constitutional monarchy or democracy. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had been considered by some the prophet of democracy. Rousseau believed in the General Will, the decision of the majority, because what is best for all is best for an individual. He said people enslaved in the law. All rights of people are given up to the General Will in order to be incorporated through the legislature. The state is there to enact the General Will. Society embarked on with the state of nature. The English Civil War was influential to Hobbes and Locke. It made Locke object violence. Hobbes believed that to put an end to the war, an absolute monarchy must be established. Rousseau was influenced by emotion and not reason. This was the origin of Romanticism. The three philosophers vision of the state of nature was contrasting in terms of things like property and freedom. Hobbes believed that man was essentially evil, bad and corrupt. His view of depravity of human nature was influenced by the English Revolution. He believed that humans would constantly fight if left alone, especially over property which was a limited source that was competed for. Thomas Hobbes essentially believed that humans were not good and order was established by depriving humans of their rights and freedom. According to Hobbes, state of nature was state of war. John Locke believed people were born with a blank slate or mind and their surroundings and environment made them good or evil. Like Rousseau, Locke believes that people are equal, not in ability but in rights. People are born entitled to natural rights, life liberty and property. He stated, Man is born free, and everywhere is in chains† was said by Rousseau. He also thought that men were born free and are good and that it is society that is corrupt. In order to accomplish this objective, society must eliminate all titles. His understanding was that the title of nobility should be abolished. Noble savage was a concept he admired very much. Humans are just like any other animal. These philosophers agreed that things must be sacrificed to advance society. Despite their differences, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau could all comply that Government should not be through the Church. This contradicted the concept of Divine Right, which is the belief that a monarch received their power only from God. To determine what society should be, a clean slate was needed which included freedom of religion. Thomas Hobbes believes that the state must be only one religion in order to be united. John Locke declares that the state should have religious toleration. Rousseau does not repudiate God but is disgusted with religion, especially Christianity. Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau all acknowledge that before men were to govern, we lived in a state of nature. They all constructed their own adaptation of what a government should be and how society should work. All of them recognize that the government should not be through the church and differ on human nature and the form of government. Their ideas were inspiring and spread to many places constructing new governments. Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau were revolutionary.

Race Issues in Social Work Practice

Race Issues in Social Work Practice White Social Workers pejorative assessment of black families and the reinforcement of racist stereotypes through their intervention are central to the social working, i.e. social control, of black families and form the major avenues through which they clientise black people. (Dominelli, 1988) Introduction While keeping the above statement in mind this paper will discuss how assessment can be effective in assessing need and managing risk for all users. It will do this by looking at how problems and conflicts are addressed and in what ways this might be effective for users of mental health services. Assessment Assessment is a process that all users have to undergo in order to determine what services they might be entitled to and how their needs might best be addressed. Social workers who specialise in the area of mental health are bound by the 1995 Act which defines their responsibilities to people with mental or physical disabilities. Disability is defined as a physical or mental impairment which has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities (Brayne and Martin, 1999:460). The Human Rights Act of 1998 is phrased in such a manner that local authorities now have a duty to act in ways that are conversant with the Act. Social workers help people with mental health difficulties to deal with the problems that they face. It is the social worker’s duty to help organise care and support for people with physical disabilities, with learning disabilities, and with mental health problems. This duty begins with an assessment of need for services, it is only once such an assessment has taken place that social workers and local authorities will be able to decide whether they can help with that need. In the 1980s the Tory Thatcher Government brought market policies into the health service that included what is known as ‘care in the community’ this meant that large numbers of psychiatric hospitals were closed. This resulted in those who were mentally impaired, along with a small number of psychotic patients being discharged into the community. They did not receive proper treatment and a number of incidents created public unrest. Thus, whenever a social worker makes an assessment for someone with mental health difficulties they have a duty to do so with the concept of also assessing any risk that they feel users might face or that they could pose to society. Under the 1990 NHS and Community Care Act (circular LAC (92) 12 any needs assessment that a social worker undertakes needs to take into account the following: The capacity/incapacity of the person being assessed Their preferences and aspirations Their living situation Any support they might have from relatives and friends Other sources of help With regard to people with mental health problems and with other disabilities, just because local authorities have a duty to find out about such people in their area and offer help, does not depend on a client’s request for services rather it requires the social worker to carry out an assessment of anyone in that group who might be eligible for services (Brayne and Martin, 1999). Once an assessment has been carried out and the client’s needs identified then social workers have a duty to help people with mental health problems obtain the benefits that they are entitled to. The social worker also has a duty to ensure that the client is in accommodation that is suitable to their particular needs. The authority may need to provide extra support to enable a person to continue living in their own home or they may need to arrange a move to residential accommodation or long term hospital care. Thus working with this client group is a large and varied field and social workers ar e faced with a number of different duties in this respect. These duties and responsibilities are further defined under legislation and policy relating to the needs of people with mental and or physical disabilities. A social worker whose clients are in one of the aforementioned groups may find themselves visiting clients in a number of different settings. It may be the client’s home, hospital, residential accommodation, or sometimes at the social worker’s place of employment. Generally the social worker will act as part of a team dealing with a number of different cases and in each one will need to be aware of the general legislative framework as it applies to that particular client group. Social workers are required to write reports on every case that he/she is engaged with. This will then be seen by their supervisor and by the care management team. This helps in addressing client needs and determining a care package. It is also a way of determining whether the social worker has done their job in the best way possible i.e. a way that empowers the service user and gives them some say in the decision making process. This is especially relevant where mental health is concerned as the re has been some speculation as to whether social workers and other mental health professionals deal with service users in ways that are non-prejudicial. Some research tends to suggest that over the last fifteen years those who use mental health services have been treated in a prejudicial way. This is because (and Government debates are also at fault here) this group of users have tended to be defined in terms of the risk they constitute to themselves and the wider society. This is despite all the evidence supporting the view that those with mental health problems are not generally a risk to society. Langow and Lindow (2004) argue that such a concentration on risk means that an individual so defined runs the risk of having decisions concerning their lives taken out of their hands. This is certainly borne out by government policy proposals regarding people who are considered to be a risk to themselves or others. Langow and Lindow (ibid) maintain that this concentration on risk means that social workers and other mental health workers often find it hard to distinguish the reasons why someone may behave in an aggressive manner. Is it due to psychotic behaviour, or is it just that they feel disempowered or feel themselves as having been subject to racial abuse? The danger here is simply to err in favour of the psychosis rather than believing they have to take the risk that someone would not pose a threat to the rest of society. Service users are often not aware that they are being assessed in this way. The fact that staff might consider users to be a risk to others however, could have serious implications for that person’s future. Dilemmas and Conflicts It is not always easy working with people with mental health problems. A social worker may undertake an assessment and then find that the client does not want the help that is on offer. This really can be problematic as the legislation implies that local authorities must make an assessment of needs once mental health problems or disability have been identified. This further implies that they will produce a care package to address those needs. If a client refuses to allow a social worker entry then they are not able to do their job and undertake an assessment or provide services as required by the legal framework. If an assessment is made then the social worker has to try and identify areas where family and friends can help the person. When such arrangements break down and there are no alternatives in place then problems may arise. Thus a person who may previously have been assessed as being able to remain in their own home may later have a need for either supported living (particular ly in the case of people with mental health problems or learning disability) or for residential care. If a person is deemed unfit to live alone or is a problem to others then the social worker has a duty to call in the medical officer of health who then has to obtain an order from the magistrates court. Removal to residential accommodation then involves the social worker in another set of rules as to how the accommodation is financed. This is also pertinent to regular inspection of such accommodation and other welfare services that the client is entitled to. Clearly there are a growing number of legal and policy requirements that a social worker must adhere to when dealing with specific client groups. Mental health is an increasingly problematic area because new regulations are coming up all the time and the wording is not always clear or precise. This means that the social worker’s job can be a minefield as they try to adhere to the needs and wishes of the client and yet remain within the legislative framework. Factors that Promote and Limit Service User Involvement in Decision Making Current debates on the needs and rights of services users show that although there has been a move to ensure individual’s rights to equality of service, some service users still face discrimination. Under these circumstances it is vital that power imbalances between service users and professionals be acknowledged and the contributing factors addressed. Once they come to such an acknowledgement the parties can then work together to minimalise any factors that contribute to the marginalisation and exclusion of some service users (Carr, 2004). Some of these issues might include the fact that there is still a tendency for some professionals to ignore service users’ views or to at least misinterpret them. This means that instead of being enabled through greater user participation, service users may end up feeling further disempowered. Institutional barriers have to be overcome, and the continuing use of professional jargon can also serve to exclude service users from the dec ision making process. Carr (2004) found that service users often saw such gaps as a disempowering and exclusionary factor, but, once aware of this fact, most professionals were more than happy to try to modify their language in order to encourage greater service user participation. It is sometimes very difficult for people with mental health problems to communicate their needs in a way that is fully understood by the professionals trying to assess them. There is a need for different models and levels of participation depending on the service user’s circumstances. Some service users will be so empowered by participation that they will go on to be involved in how services are delivered, still others are not able to be truly involved at any recognisable level without the intervention of a third person. Thus advocacy is an important element of lower levels of service user participation. An advocate can help to empower people because service users will then have someone who is impartial, who can inform them as to what is available in terms of services and support and who will promote their best interests among other professionals and make sure that their wishes are made known. Carr (2004) notes that the service user movement has been instrumental in promoting the rights of people’s entitlement to as ordinary way of life as is possible. People with mental health problems may have multiple and complex needs, nevertheless under the 1998 Human Rights Act, they are entitled to be treated with dignity and local authorities have a duty to abide by the requirements of this Act (Moore, 2002). Conclusion Ethical and effective social work should involve a thorough assessment of the needs of users with mental health problems and a care package that takes their problems and wishes into account. This should be tailored to suit an individual’s needs and there should be room for changes and adjustments if the care package is not to become an imposition (Kerr et al, 2005). Where a person is not fully cognisant of what is happening then anti-oppressive practice should involve the use of an entirely independent advocate. Effective social work is client centred and this is achieved through the social worker’s own reflective practice. If criticisms and accusations of prejudicial attitudes are to be avoided then it might be argued that advocacy, coupled with reflexive and effective social work practice should bring an end to service user disempowerment and become one that assesses need and manages risk in a way that is beneficial for both users and professionals. Bibliography Brayne and Martin 6th ed. 1999 Law for Social Workers London, Blackstone Press Carr, S. 2004 Has Service User Participation Made a Difference to Social Care Services? London, SCIE Department of Health (2002b) Information Strategy for Older People (ISOP)  in England. London: Department of Health Dunning, A. 2005 Information, Advice and Advocacy for Older People York, Joseph Rowntree Foundation Langow and Lindow. 2004. â€Å"Mental health service users and their involvement in risk assessment and management† Findings, Joseph Rowntree Foundation Leason, K. 2005 â€Å"Fear and freedom† Community Care April 14th 2005 p. 32-34 Moore, S. 2002 3rd Edition Social Welfare Alive Cheltenham, Nelson Thornes Ruch, G. 2000 â€Å"Self and social work: Towards an integrated model of learning† Journal of Social Work Practice Volume 14, no. 2 November 1st 2000 Disability Discrimination Act 1995 http://www.drc-gb.org/thelaw/thedda.asp http://www.after16.org.uk/pages/law5.html

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis :: Biology Essays Research Papers

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Have you ever had an experience of morning paralysis where you see yourself lying down, and you think you're awake so you try to get up, but suddenly you realize that you can't move? I have, several times. They have been the most frustrating and scariest times of my life. As I try harder to move, concentrating all my energy into moving one arm, the deeper I seem to be sinking in this indescribable feeling of entrapment. I hear the people outside my room and try to get their attention by screaming. Instead, I hear a soft slurred sound coming from my throat. Then I start to panic. I can't breathe! My energy is depleted and my body is exhausted. Eventually, I start to relax. The first time this happened to me, a mosquito landed on my big toe while I was thinking of what to do. Without being consciously aware of it, I move my big toe. My body jerks and suddenly I can move! Thank God for the mosquito, otherwise I wouldn't have known that all I had to do was move my big toe towards me. Eve r since, whenever I would have another one of these experiences, I would relax and gently move my big toe towards me. If you've had one of these experiences, then you've probably had a glimpse of how it feels to have a fully developed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease, is a neurological disorder that involves the degeneration of motor neurons. A-myo-trophic is derived from the Greek language. A connotes something negative or none. Myo means it has something to do with the muscles. Trophic translates to "nourishment". (1) The term Lateral is attributed to the parts of the spinal cord that ALS usually affects. (2) The scarring that results from the degeneration of these neurons and nerves in the spinal cord is known as sclerosis. (2) In 1941, Lou Gehrig, a famous baseball player, died of ALS. His name has been associated with this progressive fatal neuromuscular disease ever since. (3) Another person whose name is associated with this disease is the French neurologist, Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot. He was the first to identify that motor neurons from the spinal cord are the main part of the nervous system affected by this disease, in 1869. For that, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is also known as maladie de Charcot.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

annie dillard Pilgrim at Tinker Creek for Richard It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out. —HERACLITUS Contents Epigraph 1 Heaven and Earth in Jest iii 3 2 Seeing 16 3 Winter 37 4 The Fixed 55 5 Untying the Knot 73 6 The Present 78 7 Spring 105 8 Intricacy 124 9 Flood 149 10 Fecundity 161 11 Stalking 184 12 Nightwatch 209 13 The Horns of the Altar 225 14 Northing 247 15 The Waters of Separation 265 Afterword 278 More Years Afterward 283 About Annie Dillard 285 About the Author Other Books By Annie Dillard Cover CopyrightAbout the Publisher Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 1 Heaven and Earth in Jest I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I’d half-awaken. He’d stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his b ack, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I’d wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I’d been painted with roses.It was hot, so hot the mirror felt warm. I washed before the mirror in a daze, my twisted summer sleep still hung about me like sea kelp. What blood was this, and what roses? It could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth. The sign on my body could have been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain. I never knew. I never 4 / Annie Dillard knew as I washed, and the blood streaked, faded, and finally disappeared, whether I’d purified myself or ruined the blood sign of the passover.We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence†¦. â€Å"Seem like we’re just set down here,† a woman said to me recently, à ¢â‚¬Å"and don’t nobody know why. † These are morning matters, pictures you dream as the final wave heaves you up on the sand to the bright light and drying air. You remember pressure, and a curved sleep you rested against, soft, like a scallop in its shell. But the air hardens your skin; you stand; you leave the lighted shore to explore some dim headland, and soon you’re lost in the leafy interior, intent, remembering nothing.I still think of that old tomcat, mornings, when I wake. Things are tamer now; I sleep with the window shut. The cat and our rites are gone and my life is changed, but the memory remains of something powerful playing over me. I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing. If I’m lucky I might be jogged awake by a strange bird call. I dress in a hurry, imagining the yard flapping with auks, or flamingos. This morning it was a wood duck, down at the creek. It flew away. I live by a creek, Tinker Creek, in a valley in Virginia’s Blu e Ridge.An anchorite’s hermitage is called an anchor-hold; some anchor-holds were simple sheds clamped to the side of a church like a barnacle to a rock. I think of this house clamped to the side of Tinker Creek as an anchor-hold. It holds me at anchor to the rock bottom of the creek itself and it keeps me steadied in the current, as a sea anchor does, facing the stream of light pouring down. It’s a good place to live; there’s a lot to think about. The creeks—Tinker and Carvin’s—are an active mystery, fresh every minute. Theirs is the mystery of the continuous creation and all Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 5 hat providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection. The mountains—Tinker and Brushy, McAfee’s Knob and Dead Man—are a passive mystery, the oldest of all. Theirs is the one simple mystery of creation from nothing, of matter itself, anything at all, the given. Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will.The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home. The wood duck flew away. I caught only a glimpse of something like a bright torpedo that blasted the leaves where it flew. Back at the house I ate a bowl of oatmeal; much later in the day came the long slant of light that means good walking. If the day is fine, any walk will do; it all looks good. Water in particular looks its best, reflecting blue sky in the flat, and chopping it into graveled shallows and white chute and foam in the riffles. On a dark day, or a hazy one, everything’s washed-out and lackluster but the water.It carries its own lights. I set out for the railroad tracks, for the hill the floc ks fly over, for the woods where the white mare lives. But I go to the water. Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then shadow sweeps it away. You know you’re alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet’s roundness arc between your feet. Kazantzakis says that when he was young he had a canary and a globe. When he freed the canary, it would perch on the globe and sing.All his life, wandering the earth, he felt as though he had a canary on top of his mind, singing. West of the house, Tinker Creek makes a sharp loop, so 6 / Annie Dillard that the creek is both in back of the house, south of me, and also on the other side of the road, north of me. I like to go north. There the afternoon sun hits the creek just right, deepening the reflected blue and lighting the sides of trees on the banks. Steers from the pasture across the creek come down to drink; I always f lush a rabbit or two there; I sit on a fallen trunk in the shade and watch the squirrels in the sun.There are two separated wooden fences suspended from cables that cross the creek just upstream from my tree-trunk bench. They keep the steers from escaping up or down the creek when they come to drink. Squirrels, the neighborhood children, and I use the downstream fence as a swaying bridge across the creek. But the steers are there today. I sit on the downed tree and watch the black steers slip on the creek bottom. They are all bred beef: beef heart, beef hide, beef hocks. They’re a human product like rayon. They’re like a field of shoes.They have cast-iron shanks and tongues like foam insoles. You can’t see through to their brains as you can with other animals; they have beef fat behind their eyes, beef stew. I cross the fence six feet above the water, walking my hands down the rusty cable and tightroping my feet along the narrow edge of the planks. When I hit th e other bank and terra firma, some steers are bunched in a knot between me and the barbedwire fence I want to cross. So I suddenly rush at them in an enthusiastic sprint, flailing my arms and hollering, â€Å"Lightning! Copperhead! Swedish meatballs! They flee, still in a knot, stumbling across the flat pasture. I stand with the wind on my face. When I slide under a barbed-wire fence, cross a field, and run over a sycamore trunk felled across the water, I’m on a little island shaped like a tear in the middle of Tinker Creek. On one side of the creek is a steep forested bank; the water is swift and deep on that side of the island. On the other side is the level field I walked Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 7 through next to the steers’ pasture; the water between the field and the island is shallow and sluggish.In summer’s low water, flags and bulrushes grow along a series of shallow pools cooled by the lazy current. Water striders patrol the surface film, crayfish hu mp along the silt bottom eating filth, frogs shout and glare, and shiners and small bream hide among roots from the sulky green heron’s eye. I come to this island every month of the year. I walk around it, stopping and staring, or I straddle the sycamore log over the creek, curling my legs out of the water in winter, trying to read. Today I sit on dry grass at the end of the island by the slower side of the creek. I’m drawn to this spot.I come to it as to an oracle; I return to it as a man years later will seek out the battlefield where he lost a leg or an arm. A couple of summers ago I was walking along the edge of the island to see what I could see in the water, and mainly to scare frogs. Frogs have an inelegant way of taking off from invisible positions on the bank just ahead of your feet, in dire panic, emitting a froggy â€Å"Yike! † and splashing into the water. Incredibly, this amused me, and, incredibly, it amuses me still. As I walked along the grassy e dge of the island, I got better and better at seeing frogs both in and out of the water.I learned to recognize, slowing down, the difference in texture of the light reflected from mud bank, water, grass, or frog. Frogs were flying all around me. At the end of the island I noticed a small green frog. He was exactly half in and half out of the water, looking like a schematic diagram of an amphibian, and he didn’t jump. He didn’t jump; I crept closer. At last I knelt on the island’s winter killed grass, lost, dumbstruck, staring at the frog in the creek just four feet away. He was a very small frog with wide, dull eyes. And just as I looked at him, he slowly crumpled and began to sag.The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed. His skin 8 / Annie Dillard emptied and drooped; his very skull seemed to collapse and settle like a kicked tent. He was shrinking before my eyes like a deflating football. I watched the taut, glistening skin on his shoulders ruck, and ru mple, and fall. Soon, part of his skin, formless as a pricked balloon, lay in floating folds like bright scum on top of the water: it was a monstrous and terrifying thing. I gaped bewildered, appalled. An oval shadow hung in the water behind the drained frog; then the shadow glided away. The frog skin bag started to sink.I had read about the giant water bug, but never seen one. â€Å"Giant water bug† is really the name of the creature, which is an enormous, heavy-bodied brown bug. It eats insects, tadpoles, fish, and frogs. Its grasping forelegs are mighty and hooked inward. It seizes a victim with these legs, hugs it tight, and paralyzes it with enzymes injected during a vicious bite. That one bite is the only bite it ever takes. Through the puncture shoot the poisons that dissolve the victim’s muscles and bones and organs—all but the skin—and through it the giant water bug sucks out the victim’s body, reduced to a juice.This event is quite common in warm fresh water. The frog I saw was being sucked by a giant water bug. I had been kneeling on the island grass; when the unrecognizable flap of frog skin settled on the creek bottom, swaying, I stood up and brushed the knees of my pants. I couldn’t catch my breath. Of course, many carnivorous animals devour their prey alive. The usual method seems to be to subdue the victim by downing or grasping it so it can’t flee, then eating it whole or in a series of bloody bites. Frogs eat everything whole, stuffing prey into their mouths with their thumbs.People have seen frogs with their wide jaws so full of live dragonflies they couldn’t close them. Ants don’t even have to catch their prey: in the spring they swarm over newly hatched, featherless birds in the nest and eat them tiny bite by bite. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 9 That it’s rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But a t the same time we are also created. In the Koran, Allah asks, â€Å"The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest? † It’s a good question.What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness, those sickening reaches of time in either direction? If the giant water bug was not made in jest, was it then made in earnest? Pascal uses a nice term to describe the notion of the creator’s, once having called forth the universe, turning his back to it: Deus Absconditus. Is this what we think happened? Was the sense of it there, and God absconded with it, ate it, like a wolf who disappears round the edge of the house with the Thanksgiving turkey? God is subtle,† Einstein said, â€Å"but not malicious. † Again, Einstein said that â€Å"nature conceals her mystery by means of her essential grandeur, not by her cunning. † It could be that God has not absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem. In making the thick darkness a swaddling band for the sea, God â€Å"set bars and doors† and said, â€Å"Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further. † But have we come even that far?Have we rowed out to the thick darkness, or are we all playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat? Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light, the canary that sings on the skull. Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who? ), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous. About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a 10 / Annie Dillard traight vertical de scent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star. The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass.I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there. Another time I saw another wonder: sharks off the At lantic coast of Florida. There is a way a wave rises above the ocean horizon, a triangular wedge against the sky. If you stand where the ocean breaks on a shallow beach, you see the raised water in a wave is translucent, shot with lights.One late afternoon at low tide a hundred big sharks passed the beach near the mouth of a tidal river in a feeding frenzy. As each green wave rose from the churning water, it illuminated within itself the six-or eight-footlong bodies of twisting sharks. The sharks disappeared as each wave rolled toward me; then a new wave would swell above the horizon, containing in it, like scorpions in amber, sharks that roiled and heaved. The sight held awesome wonders: power and beauty, grace tangled in a rapture with violence. We don’t know what’s going on here. If these tremendous vents are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 11 millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammer ed out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We don’t know. Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.At the time of Lewis and Clark, setting the prairies on fire was a well-known signal that meant, â€Å"Come down to the water. † It was an extravagant gesture, but we can’t do less. If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has een on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames. I have come to the grassy island late in the day. The creek is up; icy water sweeps under the sycamore log bridge. The frog skin, of course, is utterly gone. I have stared at that one spot on the creek bottom for so long, focusing past the rush of water, that when I stand, the opposite bank seems to stretch before my eyes and flow grassily upstream.When the bank settles down I cross the sycamore log and enter again the big plowed field next to the steers’ pasture. The wind is terrific out of the west; the sun comes and goes. I can see the shadow on the field before me deepen uniformly and spread like a plague. Everything seems so dull I am 12 / Annie Dillard amazed I can even distinguish objects. And suddenly the light runs across the land like a comber, and up the trees, a nd goes again in a wink: I think I’ve gone blind or died. When it comes again, the light, you hold your breath, and if it stays you forget about it until it goes again.It’s the most beautiful day of the year. At four o’clock the eastern sky is a dead stratus black flecked with low white clouds. The sun in the west illuminates the ground, the mountains, and especially the bare branches of trees, so that everywhere silver trees cut into the black sky like a photographer’s negative of a landscape. The air and the ground are dry; the mountains are going on and off like neon signs. Clouds slide east as if pulled from the horizon, like a tablecloth whipped off a table. The hemlocks by the barbed-wire fence are flinging themselves east as though their backs would break.Purple shadows are racing east; the wind makes me face east, and again I feel the dizzying, drawn sensation I felt when the creek bank reeled. At four-thirty the sky in the east is clear; how coul d that big blackness be blown? Fifteen minutes later another darkness is coming overhead from the northwest; and it’s here. Everything is drained of its light as if sucked. Only at the horizon do inky black mountains give way to distant, lighted mountains—lighted not by direct illumination but rather paled by glowing sheets of mist hung before them. Now the blackness is in the east; verything is half in shadow, half in sun, every clod, tree, mountain, and hedge. I can’t see Tinker Mountain through the line of hemlock, till it comes on like a streetlight, ping, ex nihilo. Its sandstone cliffs pink and swell. Suddenly the light goes; the cliffs recede as if pushed. The sun hits a clump of sycamores between me and the mountains; the sycamore arms light up, and I can’t see the cliffs. They’re gone. The pale network of sycamore arms, which a second ago was transparent as a screen, is suddenly Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 13 opaque, glowing with light.Now t he sycamore arms snuff out, the mountains come on, and there are the cliffs again. I walk home. By five-thirty the show has pulled out. Nothing is left but an unreal blue and a few banked clouds low in the north. Some sort of carnival magician has been here, some fasttalking worker of wonders who has the act backwards. â€Å"Something in this hand,† he says, â€Å"something in this hand, something up my sleeve, something behind my back†¦Ã¢â‚¬  and abracadabra, he snaps his fingers, and it’s all gone. Only the bland, blank-faced magician remains, in his unruffled coat, bare handed, acknowledging a smattering of baffled applause.When you look again the whole show has pulled up stakes and moved on down the road. It never stops. New shows roll in from over the mountains and the magician reappears unannounced from a fold in the curtain you never dreamed was an opening. Scarves of clouds, rabbits in plain view, disappear into the black hat forever. Presto chango. The audience, if there is an audience at all, is dizzy from head-turning, dazed. Like the bear who went over the mountain, I went out to see what I could see. And, I might as well warn you, like the bear, all that I could see was the other side of the mountain: more of same.On a good day I might catch a glimpse of another wooded ridge rolling under the sun like water, another bivouac. I propose to keep here what Thoreau called â€Å"a meteorological journal of the mind,† telling some tales and describing some of the sights of this rather tamed valley, and exploring, in fear and trembling, some of the unmapped dim reaches and unholy fastnesses to which those tales and sights so dizzyingly lead. I am no scientist. I explore the neighborhood. An infant who has just learned to hold his head up has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment.He hasn’t the 14 / Annie Dillard faintest clue where he is, and he aims to learn. In a couple of years, what he will ha ve learned instead is how to fake it: he’ll have the cocksure air of a squatter who has come to feel he owns the place. Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our original intent, which is to explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why. So I think about the valley. It is my leisure as well as my work, a game.It is a fierce game I have joined because it is being played anyway, a game of both skill and chance, played against an unseen adversary—the conditions of time—in which the payoffs, which may suddenly arrive in a blast of light at any moment, might as well come to me as anyone else. I stake the time I’m grateful to have, the energies I’m glad to direct. I risk getting stuck on the board, so to speak, unable to move in any direction, which happens enough, God knows; and I risk the searing, exhausting nightmares that plunder rest and fo rce me face down all night long in some muddy ditch seething with hatching insects and crustaceans.But if I can bear the nights, the days are a pleasure. I walk out; I see something, some event that would otherwise have been utterly missed and lost; or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell. I am an explorer, then, and I am also a stalker, or the instrument of the hunt itself. Certain Indians used to carve long grooves along the wooden shafts of their arrows. They called the grooves â€Å"lightning marks,† because they resembled the curved fissure lightning slices down the trunks of trees.The function of lightning marks is this: if the arrow fails to kill the game, blood from a deep wound will channel along the lightning mark, streak down the arrow shaft, and spatter to the ground, laying a trail Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 15 dripped on broad-leaves, on stones, that the barefoot and trembling archer can follow in to whatever deep or rare wilderness it leads. I am the arrow shaft, carved along my length by unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky, and this book is the straying trail of blood. Something pummels us, something barely sheathed. Power broods and lights.We’re played on like a pipe; our breath is not our own. James Houston describes two young Eskimo girls sitting cross-legged on the ground, mouth on mouth, blowing by turns each other’s throat cords, making a low, unearthly music. When I cross again the bridge that is really the steers’ fence, the wind has thinned to the delicate air of twilight; it crumples the water’s skin. I watch the running sheets of light raised on the creek’s surface. The sight has the appeal of the purely passive, like the racing of light under clouds on a field, the beautiful dream at the moment of being dreamed.The breeze is the merest puff, but you yourself sail headlong and breathless under the gale force of the sp irit. 2 Seeing When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find. It was a curious compulsion; sadly, I’ve never been seized by it since. For some reason I always â€Å"hid† the penny along the same stretch of sidewalk up the street. I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off piece of sidewalk.Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block, draw huge arrows leading up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write I labeled the arrows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all this arrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe. But I never lurked about. I would go straight home and not give the matter another thought, until, some months later, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 17 I wou ld be gripped again by the impulse to hide another penny.It is still the first week in January, and I’ve got great plans. I’ve been thinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But—and this is the point—who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat kit paddling from its den, will you count that sight of a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way?It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get. I used to be able to see flying insects in the air. I’d look ahead and see, not the row of hemlocks across the road, but the air in front of it. My eyes would focus along that column of air, picking out flying insects.But I lost interest, I guess, for I dropped the habit. Now I can see birds. Probably some people can look at the grass at their feet and discover all the crawling creatures. I would like to know grasses and sedges—and care. Then my least journey into the world would be a field trip, a series of happy recognitions. Thoreau, in an expansive mood, exulted, â€Å"What a rich book might be made about buds, including, perhaps, sprouts! † It would be nice to think so. I cherish mental images I have of three perfectly happy people. One collects stones.Another—an Englishman, say—watches clouds. The third lives on a coast and collects drops of seawater which 18 / Annie Dillard he examines microscopically an d mounts. But I don’t see what the specialist sees, and so I cut myself off, not only from the total picture, but from the various forms of happiness. Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-youdon’t affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves.These disappearances stun me into stillness and concentration; they say of nature that it conceals with a grand nonchalance, and they say of vision that it is a deliberate gift, the revelation of a dancer who for my eyes only flings away her seven veils. For nature does reveal as well as conceal: now-you-don’t-see-it, now-you-do. For a week last September migrating red-winged blackbirds were feeding heavily down by the creek at the back of the house. One day I went out to investigate the racket; I walked up to a tree, an Osage orange, and a hundred birds flew away.They simply material ized out of the tree. I saw a tree, then a whisk of color, then a tree again. I walked closer and another hundred blackbirds took flight. Not a branch, not a twig budged: the birds were apparently weightless as well as invisible. Or, it was as if the leaves of the Osage orange had been freed from a spell in the form of red-winged blackbirds; they flew from the tree, caught my eye in the sky, and vanished. When I looked again at the tree the leaves had reassembled as if nothing had happened.Finally I walked directly to the trunk of the tree and a final hundred, the real diehards, appeared, spread, and vanished. How could so many hide in the tree without my seeing them? The Osage orange, unruffled, looked just as it had looked from the house, when three hundred red-winged blackbirds cried from its crown. I looked downstream where they flew, and they were gone. Searching, I couldn’t spot one. I wandered downstream to force them to play their hand, but they’d crossed the c reek and scattered. One show to a Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 19 customer.These appearances catch at my throat; they are the free gifts, the bright coppers at the roots of trees. It’s all a matter of keeping my eyes open. Nature is like one of those line drawings of a tree that are puzzles for children: Can you find hidden in the leaves a duck, a house, a boy, a bucket, a zebra, and a boot? Specialists can find the most incredibly wellhidden things. A book I read when I was young recommended an easy way to find caterpillars to rear: you simply find some fresh caterpillar droppings, look up, and there’s your caterpillar.More recently an author advised me to set my mind at ease about those piles of cut stems on the ground in grassy fields. Field mice make them; they cut the grass down by degrees to reach the seeds at the head. It seems that when the grass is tightly packed, as in a field of ripe grain, the blade won’t topple at a single cut through the stem; instead , the cut stem simply drops vertically, held in the crush of grain. The mouse severs the bottom again and again, the stem keeps dropping an inch at a time, and finally the head is low enough for the mouse to reach the seeds.Meanwhile, the mouse is positively littering the field with its little piles of cut stems into which, presumably, the author of the book is constantly stumbling. If I can’t see these minutiae, I still try to keep my eyes open. I’m always on the lookout for antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. These things are utterly common, and I’ve not seen one. I bang on hollow trees near water, but so far no flying squirrels have appeared. In flat country I watch every sunset in hopes of seeing the green ray.The green ray is a seldom-seen streak of light that rises from the sun like a spurting fountain at the moment of sunset; it throbs into the sky for two seconds and disappears. One more reason to ke ep my eyes open. A photography professor at the University of Florida just happened to 20 / Annie Dillard see a bird die in midflight; it jerked, died, dropped, and smashed on the ground. I squint at the wind because I read Stewart Edward White: â€Å"I have always maintained that if you looked closely enough you could see the wind—the dim, hardly-made-out, fine debris fleeing high in the air. White was an excellent observer, and devoted an entire chapter of The Mountains to the subject of seeing deer: â€Å"As soon as you can forget the naturally obvious and construct an artificial obvious, then you too will see deer. † But the artificial obvious is hard to see. My eyes account for less than one percent of the weight of my head; I’m bony and dense; I see what I expect. I once spent a full three minutes looking at a bullfrog that was so unexpectedly large I couldn’t see it even though a dozen enthusiastic campers were shouting directions.Finally I asked, â€Å"What color am I looking for? † and a fellow said, â€Å"Green. † When at last I picked out the frog, I saw what painters are up against: the thing wasn’t green at all, but the color of wet hickory bark. The lover can see, and the knowledgeable. I visited an aunt and uncle at a quarter-horse ranch in Cody, Wyoming. I couldn’t do much of anything useful, but I could, I thought, draw. So, as we all sat around the kitchen table after supper, I produced a sheet of paper and drew a horse. â€Å"That’s one lame horse,† my aunt volunteered.The rest of the family joined in: â€Å"Only place to saddle that one is his neck†; â€Å"Looks like we better shoot the poor thing, on account of those terrible growths. † Meekly, I slid the pencil and paper down the table. Everyone in that family, including my three young cousins, could draw a horse. Beautifully. When the paper came back it looked as though five shining, real quarter horses had been corralled by mistake with a papier-mache moose; the real horses seemed to gaze at the monster with a steady, puzzled air. I stay away from horses now, but I can do a Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 21 creditable goldfish.The point is that I just don’t know what the lover knows; I just can’t see the artificial obvious that those in the know construct. The herpetologist asks the native, â€Å"Are there snakes in that ravine? † â€Å"Nosir. † And the herpetologist comes home with, yessir, three bags full. Are there butterflies on that mountain? Are the bluets in bloom, are there arrowheads here, or fossil shells in the shale? Peeping through my keyhole I see within the range of only about thirty percent of the light that comes from the sun; the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many animals, but invisible to me.A nightmare network of ganglia, charged and firing without my knowledge, cuts and splices what I do see, editing it for my brain. Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: â€Å"This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is. † A fog that won’t burn away drifts and flows across my field of vision. When you see fog move against a backdrop of deep pines, you don’t see the fog itself, but streaks of clearness floating across the air in dark shreds.So I see only tatters of clearness through a pervading obscurity. I can’t distinguish the fog from the overcast sky; I can’t be sure if the light is direct or reflected. Everywhere darkness and the presence of the unseen appalls. We estimate now that only one atom dances alone in every cubic meter of intergalactic space. I blink and squint. What planet or power yanks Halley’s Comet out of orbit? We haven’t seen that force yet; it’s a question of distance, density, and the pallor of reflected light. We rock, cradled in the swaddling band of darkness.Even the simple darkness of night whispers suggestions to the mind. Last summer, in August, I stayed at the creek too late. 22 / Annie Dillard Where Tinker Creek flows under the sycamore log bridge to the tear-shaped island, it is slow and shallow, fringed thinly in cattail marsh. At this spot an astonishing bloom of life supports vast breeding populations of insects, fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals. On windless summer evenings I stalk along the creek bank or straddle the sycamore log in absolute stillness, watching for muskrats.The night I stayed too late I was hunched on the log staring spellbound at spreading, reflected stains of lilac on the water. A cloud in the sky suddenly lighted as if turned on by a switch; its reflection just as suddenly materialized on the water upstream, flat and floating, so that I couldn’t see the creek bottom, or life in the water under the cloud. Downstream, away from the cloud on the water, water turtles smooth as beans were gliding down with the current in a series of easy, weightless push-offs, as men bound on the moon.I didn’t know whether to trace the progress of one turtle I was sure of, risking sticking my face in one of the bridge’s spiderwebs made invisible by the gathering dark, or take a chance on seeing the carp, or scan the mud bank in hope of seeing a muskrat, or follow the last of the swallows who caught at my heart and trailed it after them like streamers as they appeared from directly below, under the log, flying upstream with their tails forked, so fast. But shadows spread, and deepened, and stayed. After thousands of years we’re still strangers to darkness, fearful aliens in an enemy camp with our arms crossed over our chests.I stirred. A land turtle on the bank, startled, hissed the air from its lungs and withdrew into its shell. An uneasy pink here, an unfathomable blue th ere, gave great suggestion of lurking beings. Things were going on. I couldn’t see whether that sere rustle I heard was a distant rattlesnake, slit-eyed, or a nearby sparrow kicking in the dry flood debris slung at the foot of a willow. Tremendous action Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 23 roiled the water everywhere I looked, big action, inexplicable. A tremor welled up beside a gaping muskrat burrow in the bank and I caught my breath, but no muskrat appeared.The ripples continued to fan upstream with a steady, powerful thrust. Night was knitting over my face an eyeless mask, and I still sat transfixed. A distant airplane, a delta wing out of nightmare, made a gliding shadow on the creek’s bottom that looked like a stingray cruising upstream. At once a black fin slit the pink cloud on the water, shearing it in two. The two halves merged together and seemed to dissolve before my eyes. Darkness pooled in the cleft of the creek and rose, as water collects in a well. Untamed, dr eaming lights flickered over the sky. I saw hints of hulking underwater shadows, two pale splashes out of the water, and ound ripples rolling close together from a blackened center. At last I stared upstream where only the deepest violet remained of the cloud, a cloud so high its underbelly still glowed feeble color reflected from a hidden sky lighted in turn by a sun halfway to China. And out of that violet, a sudden enormous black body arced over the water. I saw only a cylindrical sleekness. Head and tail, if there was a head and tail, were both submerged in cloud. I saw only one ebony fling, a headlong dive to darkness; then the waters closed, and the lights went out. I walked home in a shivering daze, up hill and down.Later I lay open-mouthed in bed, my arms flung wide at my sides to steady the whirling darkness. At this latitude I’m spinning 836 miles an hour round the earth’s axis; I often fancy I feel my sweeping fall as a breakneck arc like the dive of dolphin s, and the hollow rushing of wind raises hair on my neck and the side of my face. In orbit around the sun I’m moving 64,800 miles an hour. The solar system as a whole, like a merry-go-round unhinged, spins, bobs, and blinks at the speed of 43,200 miles an hour along a course set east of Hercules. Someone has 24 / Annie Dillard iped, and we are dancing a tarantella until the sweat pours. I open my eyes and I see dark, muscled forms curl out of water, with flapping gills and flattened eyes. I close my eyes and I see stars, deep stars giving way to deeper stars, deeper stars bowing to deepest stars at the crown of an infinite cone. â€Å"Still,† wrote van Gogh in a letter, â€Å"a great deal of light falls on everything. † If we are blinded by darkness, we are also blinded by light. When too much light falls on everything, a special terror results. Peter Freuchen describes the notorious kayak sickness to which Greenland Eskimos are prone. The Greenland fjords are p eculiar for the spells of completely quiet weather, when there is not enough wind to blow out a match and the water is like a sheet of glass. The kayak hunter must sit in his boat without stirring a finger so as not to scare the shy seals away†¦. The sun, low in the sky, sends a glare into his eyes, and the landscape around moves into the realm of the unreal. The reflex from the mirrorlike water hypnotizes him, he seems to be unable to move, and all of a sudden it is as if he were floating in a bottomless void, sinking, sinking, and sinking†¦.Horror-stricken, he tries to stir, to cry out, but he cannot, he is completely paralyzed, he just falls and falls. † Some hunters are especially cursed with this panic, and bring ruin and sometimes starvation to their families. Sometimes here in Virginia at sunset low clouds on the southern or northern horizon are completely invisible in the lighted sky. I only know one is there because I can see its reflection in still water. T he first time I discovered this mystery I looked from cloud to no-cloud in bewilderment, checking my bearings over and over, thinking maybe the ark of the covenant was just passing by south of Dead Man Mountain.Only much later did I read the explanation: polarized light from the sky is very much weakened by reflection, but the light Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 25 in clouds isn’t polarized. So invisible clouds pass among visible clouds, till all slide over the mountains; so a greater light extinguishes a lesser as though it didn’t exist. In the great meteor shower of August, the Perseid, I wail all day for the shooting stars I miss. They’re out there showering down, committing hara-kiri in a flame of fatal attraction, and hissing perhaps at last into the ocean.But at dawn what looks like a blue dome clamps down over me like a lid on a pot. The stars and planets could smash and I’d never know. Only a piece of ashen moon occasionally climbs up or down the insi de of the dome, and our local star without surcease explodes on our heads. We have really only that one light, one source for all power, and yet we must turn away from it by universal decree. Nobody here on the planet seems aware of this strange, powerful taboo, that we all walk about carefully averting our faces, this way and that, lest our eyes be blasted forever.Darkness appalls and light dazzles; the scrap of visible light that doesn’t hurt my eyes hurts my brain. What I see sets me swaying. Size and distance and the sudden swelling of meanings confuse me, bowl me over. I straddle the sycamore log bridge over Tinker Creek in the summer. I look at the lighted creek bottom: snail tracks tunnel the mud in quavering curves. A crayfish jerks, but by the time I absorb what has happened, he’s gone in a billowing smokescreen of silt. I look at the water: minnows and shiners. If I’m thinking minnows, a carp will fill my brain till I scream.I look at the water’ s surface: skaters, bubbles, and leaves sliding down. Suddenly, my own face, reflected, startles me witless. Those snails have been tracking my face! Finally, with a shuddering wrench of the will, I see clouds, cirrus clouds. I’m dizzy, I fall in. This looking business is risky. Once I stood on a humped rock on nearby Purgatory Mountain, watching through binoculars the great autumn 26 / Annie Dillard hawk migration below, until I discovered that I was in danger of joining the hawks on a vertical migration of my own.I was used to binoculars, but not, apparently, to balancing on humped rocks while looking through them. I staggered. Everything advanced and receded by turns; the world was full of unexplained foreshortenings and depths. A distant huge tan object, a hawk the size of an elephant, turned out to be the browned bough of a nearby loblolly pine. I followed a sharp-shinned hawk against a featureless sky, rotating my head unawares as it flew, and when I lowered the glass a glimpse of my own looming shoulder sent me staggering. What prevents the men on Palomar from falling, voiceless and blinded, from their tiny, vaulted chairs?I reel in confusion; I don’t understand what I see. With the naked eye I can see two million light-years to the Andromeda galaxy. Often I slop some creek water in a jar and when I get home I dump it in a white china bowl. After the silt settles I return and see tracings of minute snails on the bottom, a planarian or two winding round the rim of water, roundworms shimmying frantically, and finally, when my eyes have adjusted to these dimensions, amoebae. At first the amoebae look like muscae volitantes, those curled moving spots you seem to see in your eyes when you stare at a distant wall.Then I see the amoebae as drops of water congealed, bluish, translucent, like chips of sky in the bowl. At length I choose one individual and give myself over to its idea of an evening. I see it dribble a grainy foot before it on its we t, unfathomable way. Do its unedited sense impressions include the fierce focus of my eyes? Shall I take it outside and show it Andromeda, and blow its little endoplasm? I stir the water with a finger, in case it’s running out of oxygen. Maybe I should get a tropical aquarium with motorized bubblers and lights, and keep this one for aPilgrim at Tinker Creek / 27 pet. Yes, it would tell its fissioned descendants, the universe is two feet by five, and if you listen closely you can hear the buzzing music of the spheres. Oh, it’s mysterious lamplit evenings, here in the galaxy, one after the other. It’s one of those nights when I wander from window to window, looking for a sign. But I can’t see. Terror and a beauty insoluble are a ribband of blue woven into the fringes of garments of things both great and small. No culture explains, no bivouac offers real haven or rest. But it could be that we are not seeing something.Galileo thought comets were an optical il lusion. This is fertile ground: since we are certain that they’re not, we can look at what our scientists have been saying with fresh hope. What if there are really gleaming, castellated cities hung upsidedown over the desert sand? What limpid lakes and cool date palms have our caravans always passed untried? Until, one by one, by the blindest of leaps, we light on the road to these places, we must stumble in darkness and hunger. I turn from the window. I’m blind as a bat, sensing only from every direction the echo of my own thin cries.I chanced on a wonderful book by Marius von Senden, called Space and Sight. When Western surgeons discovered how to perform safe cataract operations, they ranged across Europe and America operating on dozens of men and women of all ages who had been blinded by cataracts since birth. Von Senden collected accounts of such cases; the histories are fascinating. Many doctors had tested their patients’ sense perceptions and ideas of spa ce both before and after the operations. The vast majority of patients, of both sexes and all ages, had, in von Senden’s opinion, no idea of space whatsoever.Form, distance, and size were so many meaningless syllables. A patient â€Å"had no idea of depth, confusing it with roundness. † Before 28 / Annie Dillard the operation a doctor would give a blind patient a cube and a sphere; the patient would tongue it or feel it with his hands, and name it correctly. After the operation the doctor would show the same objects to the patient without letting him touch them; now he had no clue whatsoever what he was seeing. One patient called lemonade â€Å"square† because it pricked on his tongue as a square shape pricked on the touch of his hands.Of another postoperative patient, the doctor writes, â€Å"I have found in her no notion of size, for example, not even within the narrow limits which she might have encompassed with the aid of touch. Thus when I asked her to sho w me how big her mother was, she did not stretch out her hands, but set her two index-fingers a few inches apart. † Other doctors reported their patients' own statements to similar effect. â€Å"The room he was in†¦he knew to be but part of the house, yet he could not conceive that the whole house could look bigger† â€Å"Those who are blind from birth†¦have no real conception of height or distance.A house that is a mile away is thought of as nearby, but requiring the taking of a lot of steps†¦. The elevator that whizzes him up and down gives no more sense of vertical distance than does the train of horizontal. † For the newly sighted, vision is pure sensation unencumbered by meaning: â€Å"The girl went through the experience that we all go through and forget, the moment we are born. She saw, but it did not mean anything but a lot of different kinds of brightness. † Again, â€Å"I asked the patient what he could see; he answered that he sa w an extensive field of light, in which everything appeared dull, confused, and in motion.He could not distinguish objects. † Another patient saw â€Å"nothing but a confusion of forms and colors. † When a newly sighted girl saw photographs and paintings, she asked, â€Å"‘Why do they put those dark marks all over them? ’ ‘Those aren’t dark marks,’ her mother explained, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 29 ‘those are shadows. That is one of the ways the eye knows that things have shape. If it were not for shadows many things would look flat. ’ ‘Well, that’s how things do look,’ Joan answered. ‘Everything looks flat with dark patches. ’† But it is the patients’ concepts of space that are most revealing.One patient, according to his doctor, â€Å"practiced his vision in a strange fashion; thus he takes off one of his boots, throws it some way off in front of him, and then attempts to gau ge the distance at which it lies; he takes a few steps towards the boot and tries to grasp it; on failing to reach it, he moves on a step or two and gropes for the boot until he finally gets hold of it. † â€Å"But even at this stage, after three weeks’ experience of seeing,† von Senden goes on, â€Å"‘space,’ as he conceives it, ends with visual space, i. e. with color-patches that happen to bound his view.He does not yet have the notion that a larger object (a chair) can mask a smaller one (a dog), or that the latter can still be present even though it is not directly seen. † In general the newly sighted see the world as a dazzle of colorpatches. They are pleased by the sensation of color, and learn quickly to name the colors, but the rest of seeing is tormentingly difficult. Soon after his operation a patient â€Å"generally bumps into one of these color-patches and observes them to be substantial, since they resist him as tactual objects do.In walking about it also strikes him—or can if he pays attention—that he is continually passing in between the colors he sees, that he can go past a visual object, that a part of it then steadily disappears from view; and that in spite of this, however he twists and turns—whether entering the room from the door, for example, or returning back to it—he always has a visual space in front of him. Thus he gradually comes to realize that there is also a space behind him, which he does not see. † The mental effort involved in these reasonings proves over- 0 / Annie Dillard whelming for many patients. It oppresses them to realize, if they ever do at all, the tremendous size of the world, which they had previously conceived of as something touchingly manageable. It oppresses them to realize that they have been visible to people all along, perhaps unattractively so, without their knowledge or consent. A disheartening number of them refuse to use their new vision, continuing to go over objects with their tongues, and lapsing into apathy and despair. â€Å"The child can see, but will not make use of his sight.Only when pressed can he with difficulty be brought to look at objects in his neighborhood; but more than a foot away it is impossible to bestir him to the necessary effort. † Of a twenty-one-year-old girl, the doctor relates, â€Å"Her unfortunate father, who had hoped for so much from this operation, wrote that his daughter carefully shuts her eyes whenever she wishes to go about the house, especially when she comes to a staircase, and that she is never happier or more at ease than when, by closing her eyelids, she relapses into her former state of total blindness. A fifteen-year-old boy, who was also in love with a girl at the asylum for the blind, finally blurted out, â€Å"No, really, I can’t stand it anymore; I want to be sent back to the asylum again. If things aren’t altered, I’ll tear my eye s out. † Some do learn to see, especially the young ones. But it changes their lives. One doctor comments on â€Å"the rapid and complete loss of that striking and wonderful serenity which is characteristic only of those who have never yet seen. † A blind man who learns to see is ashamed of his old habits. He dresses up, grooms himself, and tries to make a good impression.While he was blind he was indifferent to objects unless they were edible; now, â€Å"a sifting of values sets in†¦his thoughts and wishes are mightily stirred and some few of the patients are thereby led into dissimulation, envy, theft and fraud. † On the other hand, many newly sighted people speak well of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 31 the world, and teach us how dull is our own vision. To one patient, a human hand, unrecognized, is â€Å"something bright and then holes. † Shown a bunch of grapes, a boy calls out, â€Å"It is dark, blue and shiny†¦. It isn’t smooth, it ha s bumps and hollows. A little girl visits a garden. â€Å"She is greatly astonished, and can scarcely be persuaded to answer, stands speechless in front of the tree, which she only names on taking hold of it, and then as ‘the tree with the lights in it. ’† Some delight in their sight and give themselves over to the visual world. Of a patient just after her bandages were removed, her doctor writes, â€Å"The first things to attract her attention were her own hands; she looked at them very closely, moved them repeatedly to and fro, bent and stretched the fingers, and seemed greatly astonished at the sight. One girl was eager to tell her blind friend that â€Å"men do not really look like trees at all,† and astounded to discover that her every visitor had an utterly different face. Finally, a twenty-two-old girl was dazzled by the world’s brightness and kept her eyes shut for two weeks. When at the end of that time she opened her eyes again, she did n ot recognize any objects, but, â€Å"the more she now directed her gaze upon everything about her, the more it could be seen how an expression of gratification and astonishment overspread her features; she repeatedly exclaimed: ‘Oh God!How beautiful! ’† I saw color-patches for weeks after I read this wonderful book. It was summer; the peaches were ripe in the valley orchards. When I woke in the morning, color-patches wrapped round my eyes, intricately, leaving not one unfilled spot. All day long I walked among shifting color-patches that parted before me like the Red Sea and closed again in silence, transfigured, wherever I looked back. Some patches swelled and loomed, while others vanished utterly, and dark marks flitted at random 32 / Annie Dillard over the whole dazzling sweep.But I couldn’t sustain the illusion of flatness. I’ve been around for too long. Form is condemned to an eternal danse macabre with meaning: I couldn’t unpeach the pe aches. Nor can I remember ever having seen without understanding; the color-patches of infancy are lost. My brain then must have been smooth as any balloon. I’m told I reached for the moon; many babies do. But the color-patches of infancy swelled as meaning filled them; they arrayed themselves in solemn ranks down distance which unrolled and stretched before me like a plain. The moon rocketed away.I live now in a world of shadows that shape and distance color, a world where space makes a kind of terrible sense. What gnosticism is this, and what physics? The fluttering patch I saw in my nursery window—silver and green and shape-shifting blue—is gone; a row of Lombardy poplars takes its place, mute, across the distant lawn. That humming oblong creature pale as light that stole along the walls of my room at night, stretching exhilaratingly around the corners, is gone, too, gone the night I ate of the bittersweet fruit, put two and two together and puckered forever my brain.Martin Buber tells this tale: â€Å"Rabbi Mendel once boasted to his teacher Rabbi Elimelekh that evenings he saw the angel who rolls away the light before the darkness, and mornings the angel who rolls away the darkness before the light. ‘Yes,’ said Rabbi Elimelekh, ‘in my youth I saw that too. Later on you don’t see these things anymore. †Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ Why didn’t someone hand those newly sighted people paints and brushes from the start, when they still didn’t know what anything was? Then maybe we all could see color-patches too, the world unraveled from reason, Eden before Adam gave names.The scales would drop from my eyes; I’d see trees like men walking; I’d run down the road against all orders, hallooing and leaping. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 33 Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it. It is, as Ruskin says, â₠¬Å"not merely unnoticed, but in the full, clear sense of the word, unseen. † My eyes alone can’t solve analogy tests using figures, the ones which show, with increasing elaborations, a big square, then a small square in a big square, then a big triangle, and expect me to find a small triangle in a big triangle.I have to say the words, describe what I’m seeing. If Tinker Mountain erupted, I’d be likely to notice. But if I want to notice the lesser cataclysms of valley life, I have to maintain in my head a running description of the present. It’s not that I’m observant; it’s just that I talk too much. Otherwise, especially in a strange place, I’ll never know what’s happening. Like a blind man at the ball game, I need a radio. When I see this way I analyze and pry. I hurl over logs and roll away stones; I study the bank a square foot at a time, probing and tilting my head. Some ays when a mist covers the mountains, when the muskrats won’t show and the microscope’s mirror shatters, I want to climb up the blank blue dome as a man would storm the inside of a circus tent, wildly, dangling, and with a steel knife claw a rent in the top, peep, and, if I must, fall. But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter.When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment’s light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer. 34 / Annie Dillard It was sunny one evening last summer at Tinker Creek; the sun was low in the sky, upstream. I was sitting on the sycamore log bridge with the sunset at my back, watching the shiners the size of minnows who were feeding over the mud dy sand in skittery schools. Again and again, one fish, then another, turned for a split second across the current and flash! the sun shot out from its silver side. I couldn’t watch for it.It was always just happening somewhere else, and it drew my vision just as it disappeared: flash, like a sudden dazzle of the thinnest blade, a sparking over a dun and olive ground at chance intervals from every direction. Then I noticed white specks, some sort of pale petals, small, floating from under my feet on the creek’s surface, very slow and steady. So I blurred my eyes and gazed towards the brim of my hat and saw a new world. I saw the pale white circles roll up, roll up, like the world’s turning, mute and perfect, and I saw the linear flashes, gleaming silver, like stars being born at random down a rolling scroll of time.Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw a light like water. I was the lip of a fou ntain the creek filled forever; I was ether, the leaf in the zephyr; I was flesh-flake, feather, bone. When I see this way I see truly. As Thoreau says, I return to my senses. I am the man who watches the baseball game in silence in an empty stadium. I see the game purely; I’m abstracted and dazed. When it’s all over and the white-suited players lope off the green field to their shadowed dugouts, I leap to my feet; I cheer and cheer. But I can’t go out and try to see this way.I’ll fail, I’ll go mad. All I can do is try to gag the commentator, to hush the noise of useless interior babble that keeps me from seeing just as surely as a newspaper dangled before my eyes. The effort is really a Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 35 discipline requiring a lifetime of dedicated struggle; it marks the literature of saints and monks of every order East and West, under every rule and no rule, discalced and shod. The world’s spiritual geniuses seem to discover un iversally that the mind’s muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness.Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance. â€Å"Launch into the deep,† says Jacques Ellul, â€Å"and you shall see. † The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all.

Functionalism, Conflict, Interactionism and Religion Essay

Religion is the worship of and the belief in a God or gods. Every individual in life is often entitled to a religion as part of the culture. Devotional and performance of specific rituals characterize religion among the people. Religion possesses moral codes that regulate the affairs of man in the society. The paper seeks to determine how the sociological theories impact religion of an individual (Lizardo, 2009). Functionalism is a sociological theory that was purposely established to try and explain social institutions and more so religion in this case, as a collective way to end individualism in the society, with focus on the conduct in which social institutions impede social needs. Functionalism is instituted in a way to create an understanding on how social institutions work. Religion for instance has got many roles that it plays in the society. It is the basis for the belief in a god in every society (Lizardo, 2009). Functionalism as a theory applies to the sociological institution of religion in a number of ways. Religion has been disintegrated to spirituality and then to Christianity. According to the believers of functionalist theory such as Emile Durkheim, Talcott Parsons and Robert Merton there are many functions or rather roles that religion plays in the society. Staying holy is part of Christianity and thus religion. It is believed that holiness protects people from the dangers of the world. Religious people often try to lead a religious life, something that those who don’t have a religiously governed life, don’t really admire. Religion thus is seen to change the life and even culture of people, not only because of their own sake, but also for the sake of others. Religion offers solace to the believers and helps them overcome the challenges of life. Religion thus is instituted in the theory of functionalism to be of benefit to the society. Sometimes it is believed that religion offers basic need to the believers. This comes up due to the fact that since religion has been translated to groups of beliefs such as Christianity, individuals believe in God according to the teachings. As they believe in God, God grants them the desires of their heart (Lizardo, 2009). On the other hand, conflict theory applies in the sociological institution of religion in that; the theory suggests that the organization of religion was formed purposely to fulfill the basic human needs. This implies that all the needs of man could be granted with a belief in a god, who when praying to, grants the individual his or her needs. Basic needs can be food, shelter, clothing, and all those other things that man needs to lead a life that is not extreme poverty. However, religion has been destroyed in its organization and it has been left with one purpose, to safeguard the center of power. From the functionalism theory, religion does not, in its existence, fulfill the basic needs of an individual, but wholly in a different manner. Religion contributes to the equilibrium of the society through the provision of a structure within which the society functions in peace (Lizardo, 2009). Finally, the theory of interactionism applies to the sociological institution by viewing religion just like the functionalist theory of Durkheim. The two theories, functionalism and interactionism view religion as functional element that man applies to survive. This implies that in interactionism, the role of religion to the society and to an individual where he lives is regarded as of most importance. However, the interactionism theory has no clear definition or understanding on religion. Nevertheless, there have been several perspectives of the theory of interactionism in which many have been approved while others still remain with controversies. The main idea here is that interactionism theory is that it in a way supports the functionalism theory that regards religion as an important element that has roles to play in the society (Lizardo, 2009). In all the three theories, there are similarities and differences on their applications to the sociological institution of religion. It is evident that in all the three theories, their view point of religion is that of meaningful. This implies that they tend to view religion as something of importance in the society and to the people involved in it in general. Precisely, the theory of functionalism and that of interactionism give religion a functional role in the society. They bring out religion as something of importance to the society (Lizardo, 2009) The difference in these theories is that in the conflict theory, there are conditions that are attached to the role of religion. For instance, one has to pray to God so as to receive the need that he or she is really lacking. This is so unlike in the other two theories as they presume that religion is a functional institution and it should provide all the basic needs to man with or without asking. The conflict theory further draws lines of difference in that it deploys the concept of power. This is an implication that, there are some people in the society who are more powerful than others. It outlines concepts that religion brings about equilibrium by providing a structure whereby the society functions peacefully (Livesey, n. d). Each theory is seen to affect the views of every individual in the society. From the theory of functionalism, one can draw a conclusion that religion is not all about building temples and keeping shrines, but real religion is all about healing broken hearts and uniting people to God. Every Christian believes in a God, and every one prays to that God when in need and the needs are always granted. Staying close to God spiritually makes one have peace and lead a harmonious life. That is a belief that religious people have and they exploit the fact. It is crystal clear that believers lead holy lives, distant from evils of every kind. Therefore, the functionalism theory affects how every individual views religion by the emphasis that it is a functional concept. The conflict theory on the other hand, affects the views of individuals, as far as the sociological institution of religion is concerned. The conflict theory affects the view point of an individual in that; it makes a person think of religion to be functioning in a way to safeguard the powerful and the rich in their positions. This implies that, even if someone in a powerful position commits a crime, with religion it will be taken just as an accusation. Therefore it is possible to conclude that religion protects and preserves those who are powerful to remain in their positions and help them remain there. This has led to creation of conflicts in the society as criminals are being let to go free, something that the functionalism theory does not recommend and advise (Livesey, n. ). The interactionism theory affects the views of an individual in that it makes them belief that through religion, they are able to understand things in a better way. This is not approved, but it is a theory. Most interactionists have often argued that religion is a belief system that helps individuals to understand well all the things they come across with in their daily lives. This is achieved through making sense out of those things. People who are religious experience many things in their daily lives, some makes sense to them while others do not make sense. To those who are not religious, they may never have the capacity to understand anything that happens in nature. Some of these experiences include the mental and physical maps individuals make in their minds as they focus the life they have in the social and natural cycle. The three theories are also known to affect the approach to the social changes, which take place in religion, in a number of ways. For instance, in the functionalism theory, the social changes in religion as a sociological institution include the changes in the society that are religious. This includes religious marriages, offering of sacrifices to God, transformations from paganism to spirituality and many other changes. The theory of functionalism is known to affect the approach to these social changes. To be precise, religion is believed to transform life and this implies life transformation from bad to good. In every society there is existence of evil. People committing these evils do also exist. There are those bad characters in the society that no one admires, for instance people who rob others of their wealth, murderers, rapists, and many others are so much hated by the community. This is because they bring harm to the society and no benefit at all. Religion is believed to have the capacity to transform the life of an individual from this devastating state to something that people can admire. This can only be achieved if the victim believes in God and prays to Him. It is the only way to get transformation (Livesey, n. d). The conflict theory affects the approaches to social changes in the religion of individuals in a presumption that religion tends to be more lenient to its believers. The religions do this by supporting some institutions in the society for instance monogamy, family and marriage. Religion further encourages procreation and banning contraception religion in some cases as this can effectively bring new members that are born into the ideal world that one must produce and keep on the practice of producing as generations pass. Religion does this simply to have more members in their respective religions and keep teaching the new members the rules of the institution and the practices, for instance, children pass through rituals like baptism and confirmations. Religion further ensures that the new members Sunday school masses, Sabbath schools at the temple and festival gatherings (MacDonald, 2009). Interactionism theory affects the approach to the religious social changes in a similar manner as the functionalism and conflict theories. However, it tends to focus the traditional periods and tries to compare the sociological changes to the present times. Societies in the traditional times had a religious system that was very brief or rather very small. This was due to the fact that the traditional societies involved themselves to one universe of meaning simply because they were systems that were closed. This implies the fact that in those societies in which one religion is constantly highlighted and made sociable to persons, keeping out of all other religions. It is in these societies that the behavior code is written by the powerful actors in the society, simply because they possess positions in the society (Blumer, 1969). Each theory affects the views of the society. It is crystal clear that the society views religion in different ways. These sociological theories have been known to affect these views of the society in one way or another. The society for instance views religion as something sacred, that it should be respected simply because it is associated with a supreme being. But in functionalism theory, religion is believed to be the only way through which individuals can come up with an identity as far as the society in concerned. An individual’s faith can be measured through the way his or her religion is tied to the person’s heritage, family and culture. Religion of an individual gives individuals the capacity to endure all difficulties in life and all the individual tragedies that every one goes through in life. What remains a fact is that not everyone has faith in his or her religion. And this is as a result of the way functionalism theory affects the views of the society about religion (Blumer, 1969). The conflict theory also affects the way people view religion in the society. Religion is believed to give provisions of both power and ability to control people and also to give support in all means possible to those people. Religion achieves this through its forms and with all its mechanisms of authority and cohesion, comfort and confrontation. Most people in the society have put their trust and confidence on the religion that exists in their culture as it is evident that they have the will to do all that religion requires them to do for they believe it is something right that even their gods will be pleased to see it done. Clearly, this is as a result of the way the conflict theory affects the way individuals or rather the society’s view of religion (MacDonald, 2009). On the other hand, interactionism theory affects the views of the society from the concepts of relations amongst the people in the society. Every society is build up of relationships. Everyone is at least having a relationship with someone else, for instance relationships maybe fatherhood, brotherhood, sisterhood and many others. For all the studies that have been done, it is evident that religion makes people confident of their current locality. Individuals believe that religion offers optimum security and further still, religion brings a sense of certainty in the uncertain world. Most religious people believe that in this world you can never know what to expect in the near future, everything seems so uncertain. But with the belief in one person, having total faith in a God who exists, everything seems practical, real and true. In all cultures, there in a trend that is common of taking religion as the only true thing. This has been the result of the psychological, anthropological and sociological researches that have been made. From tradition, many people have believed in religion and it is evident that till now, people still regards religion as something that is real and that it gives people protection in all they do (McClelland, 2009) In conclusion, social institutions exist in almost all societies. There are the sociological theories that tend to make people in a society understand the sociological institutions. Every theory applies to each sociological institution, for instance the functionalism, conflict and interactionism theory affect religion as a sociological institution. The three theories affect the institution in different ways but at some point there is similarity on how they affect the sociological institution. The theories also affect religion in different ways and individuals view it in different ways too. Further still, all these sociological theories affect the views of the society in various ways.