The moral dilemma's presented in The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible are predicaments distinctly connected to early American society. The Puritan church, America's first community forum and system of social organization, provided a strict rule of individual lifestyle that encompassed daily work, holy ritual, and interpersonal etiquette. These guidelines of doctrine and deed created societies that were non-violently homogeneous, utopias of voluntary submission and hard-worked routine. While the social contract created by the church-dictated standards of morality in patriarchal Puritan societies depicted by Hawthorne and Miller in The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible provided a sense of order and assigned purpose to the collective, it ultimately worked to the detriment of the individual's spirit, happiness and consequent success.
             The Puritan church, like similar religious systems of diverse backgrounds that are commonly based upon defined deities, has writings and lessons that in the name of an absolute ruler, dictate, without space for subjective interpretation, which actions are good and which are evil. Therefore, universal truths apply to all individuals, despite the varying characters of these persons; and acts of evil are predetermined as evil. Religion therefore, provides a completely objective definition of morality, unwavering and finite. Morality, however, can also be interpreted as completely subjective, usually based on standards provided by cultural background and historically-instilled ethics. For example, in some parts of India, cows are considered holy. They are not eaten, and are protected by their owners. In America, cows have no religious value, and are treated poorly for business advantage and dietary pleasure. Can one belief refute the other? Although both practices are backed by objective standards of morality that cannot be disproven, both are objectively believed to be correct. Because there is ...