Tolstoy's War and Peace evokes powerful contemplation about the meaning of life, of the nature of the human soul, and of the nature of suffering. In these excerpts alone readers can understand what Tolstoy was trying to convey through his characters' experiences. Both passages address the motif of h...

Abortion is by far the most extreme, permanent, and devastatingly violent solution for an unborn child. The right to life is the most basic and most important right we have. To deprive someone, an unborn child for that matter, from that right is immoral and inhumane. This is an issue concerning ...

Coming Back: The Science of Reincarnation A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada Coming from a Western background, all the logistics of reincarnation were unclear to me. Does the human soul only reincarnate into other humans or does it spread into animals as well? Where did the soul originally ...

ABORTION Abortion is an issue that evokes, on all sides, very strong feelings and judgments and very heated debates. Most opposition against abortion is that the fetus is a living being from the point of conception. This brings up the premise that the fetus is a human being, are a person....

The Unrequired Throughout history there have been many different types and forms of religions. Religious based civilizations have risen and fallen, orders have formed and disbanded, and gods have been created and forgotten. There have been no records within the switch over periods of massive amo...

Like many people today, Plato held the belief that the human being was both dualistic in nature, namely comprising of two separate entities; body and soul, and possessing a soul that would survive its embodied state. Plato saw the soul as immortal through being cyclical in nature and having this cy...

Euthanasia Imagine a woman who is ninety-five years old. She can't walk, she can't see, and she can barely breathe let alone speak. Her life was well lived those past ninety-five years. This woman is in such unbearable pain that she can't even cry. Her arthritis is taking over her...

Almost everyone dreams of living forever. It seems so appealing to be able to live life for a very long time, happily and healthily, and going out and enjoying everything that life has to offer once or twice. A lot of people think that it's a gift from God to live a long time. But what happens ...

"The Death of the Moth," written by Virginia Woolf, explains the brief life of a moth corresponding with the true nature of life and death. In this essay, Woolf puts the moth in a role that represents life. Woolf makes comparisons of the life outside to the life of the moth. The theme i...

The four great revolutions in thought and religion that occurred in the first millennium BCE shaped the subsequent history of the world as the cultural descendents of India, China, the Middle East, and Greece attempted to define the meaning of life and understand humankind's relationship with ...

Frankenstein Frankenstein is a story about a doctor that tried to give life to a combined died body. Dr. Frankenstein and his servant collected a number of body pieces. Such as: head, hands, legs, body, etc. Dr. Frankenstein made the monster, and kept him in the dungeon. They were treating the...

Professors lecture facts, while teachers help students learn lifelong lessons. Morrie Schwartz was both. His once "sparkling blue-green eyes, thinning silver hair that spills onto his forehead, big ears, an triangular nose, and tufts of graying eyebrows" became teary eyes, cluttered whi...

The concept of justice has been the subject of many philosophical inquiries. The question of why and how justice is to be attained in the life of an individual and in the management of society has yielded many answers. Plato's "Republic" and "St. Augustine's City of God" are two related views ...

Throughout the years, many unknown questions have been answered through the use of science. The atomic bomb, which ended World War II, was explored through physics, and other discoveries such as the atom, DNA, and photosynthesis have facilitated technological advancements for society. While all typ...

The Svetesvatara Upinashad in Hinduism states, "The quality of the soul determines its future body: earthly or airy, heavy or light. Its thoughts and its actions can lead it to freedom, or lead it to bondage" (Novak 19). The Hindu religion heavily believes in reincarnation, and the fact...

In the novel Resident Evil: The Umbrella Conspiracy, it makes you think about life, people, and human events, and what could happen if people decided to do something unnatural and go against God's word and make something that was never meant to be happen. This novel illustrates such a thing ab...

In general, living organic beings will always have a material dependence. Human beings may have a dominant form, but because they are "higher" in the scale of things, there is an even greater dependence upon a "material element". Take money for example. What other creature roams...

We are living human beings, one species out of a million others that exist simultaneously on this planet. Life is something that has been a mystery to us higher beings since the beginning of our existence. Are we merely living beings, or do we have an afterlife existence? The precision of the bio...

"Bring out yer dead!" cried the cartmaster, ringing a bell as he walked through the streets. "Here's one," said a man, who walked up to the cart, carrying what appeared to be a dead body. "Nine pence," demanded the cartmaster. "I'm not dead," spoke the body. "What?" inquired the cartmaster. "No...

Grendel follows the philosophical evolution, from solipsism to nihilism, of a socially isolated creature, a monster. It is an examination of human supernatural curiosity and its many dangers, specifically the tendency toward blind cynicism. Grendel is a censure of the rapid growth of this cynicism i...

Song of Myself As suggested in the title, Song of Myself is indeed concerned with the poet's experience. Yet it also is concerned with much more the human condition, nature, and the universe and it is presented through the lens of the poet's unique vision. Whitman's personality is powerful in t...

The right to die When someone is impossible to recover or get better, should doctors help to end their lives? It's the subject that people have strong feeling about. Many people have argued for or against it. Nevertheless, mercy killing is still illegal in most of area today. I strongly obj...

Miracle The Afterlife is an area of human consciousness we all enter upon leaving the physical world at physical death. Throughout history we've questioned if there is a life after death. Along the way, our religions and various philosophers offered beliefs and opinions to answer this commonl...

There is a new hope for the world and it comes in the form of embryotic stem cells. These tiny little miracles are the hope for the future. Scientists say they expect that someday many incurable diseases will be cured by stem cells. These wonder cells will end the suffering of millions. One day i...

The phrase or notion of "mono no aware" is derived from the Japanese word aware that in Heian Japan meant "sensitivity" or "sadness," to all things pertaining to human existence. (Hooker, 1996) This helps a reader understand why, despite the fact that the hero Genji behaves with frequent ...