In today's society there are many things that we accept as the standard. These standards have formed over generations and are past from one to the next. They become part of our everyday lives; so common that we don't even think about them. However, my generation is becoming one that asks "why?" Why is it that we must conform to these societal traditions? The answer we receive from the elder generation is always "Because that's the way it has always been done." I say that is no excuse. The fact is that at some point in history someone made a change and it was accepted by enough people that it became the normal. This is particularly true in today's average Christian church. I would like to parallel the outdated tradition of the black box lottery in Shirley Jackson's The Lottery to what we know as today's Christian faith.
             In The Lottery we are presented with a tradition that the community has blindly followed it for so long that it has lost it meaning. No one in the town remembers how it started or why they still do it. This fact alone reminds me of how most denominations do not even know how they got their start or what differs them from other denominations. In short, the average Christian does not know what they believe, what the doctrine of their church states or why. For many believers, we show up every Sunday and some Wednesdays, sing a few songs, hear a sermon, sing another song or recite a prayer, and go home the same as when we entered. In The Lottery every year on June 27th at ten o'clock in the morning the community gathers to draw slips of paper out of an old black box, stone the unfortunate soul who received the slip with the black dot, clean up the mess and go home the same as when they gathered only one less in their ranks.
             It seems to me that this ignorant monotony is the reason that Christians are blindsided by temptation and lack the
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