New Reflections

While reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn two years ago, my curiosity was arroused as Huck struggles mentally to free his slave, Jim. Huck is a white boy brought up in the south where freeing slaves is strictly wrong. There is an inner battle within Huck because he feels the need to free Jim, but has been raised thinking this was wrong. He feels guilty because of his urges to free a black man. This book particularly striked my interest because it appears as though Mark Twain is conveying that there is a true right and wrong, although we may be raised to believe a certain way.

This question is significant to me personally because I believe that there is a true right and wrong. This belief is strongly rooted in my Christian faith. I personally believe that the Bible teaches what is right and wrong and that the Holy Spirit acts as a concious to reveal what is right and what is wrong. I know that in life there is not always an exclusively "right" or "wrong" decision and that not everything is moral. However, what I am trying to prove is that a moral code is not dependent on the person or their upbringing, but universal.

I have heard oppinions on this topic mulitiple times from classmates. Most believe that morality is very grey and difficult to decipher. They don't think that there's a solid "right" and "wrong," but that it depends on the person and their beliefs and circumstances. This I disagree with and hope to address in my essay.

In my western civilizations class last year we discussed this very question. Most people were saying that there is no moral code and that people can make up right and wrong for themselves. I argued this by relating it to drunk driving. I said that if someone doesn't think drunk driving is wrong and they go and kill someone driving, it doesn't make it okay. Just because they have their own set of right and wrong doesn't account for their actions. I'm sure that if you asked a drunk driver convicted of murder whether or not they feel guilty, they would probably say they were.

I realize this will be a very difficult question to follow. Maybe the point isn't provable. I may have to go more in the direction of proving that man actually does have a moral concience even though he has allowed society to pollute him, or that he does have a concience period. That may be easier to prove with the works I have read recently.

This question is also very personal for me because I have a very guilty concience whenever I do something unacceptable. Whether it's truly wrong or only wrong because my parents don't condone my actions, I feel exeedingly guilty when I disobey my parents or God.

The most rediculous event I can remember relating to this topic was a sleepover in seventh grade. I had all my friends over sleeping out on the trampoline on a warm summer night. We wanted to cause some sort of mischeif and resorted to toilet papering. Unfortunately as seventh graders we did not have access to cars and could not travel to TP our friends houses. We then decided that the only reasonable thing to do was toilet paper my own house! After, I felt guilty and went straight to my parent's room to tell them.