Sunday, August 17, 2014

Found Essay #2

Here is another freshman year essay I found on one of my floppies.  A warning:  this one's really terrible.  I don't ever recall being in favor of banning books for any reason, and yet that's more or less what I argue for in this essay on Slaughterhouse Five.  I wonder if I took this position simply to write what I thought would be an interesting (or more likely A-worthy) paper.  Maybe that's it.  But if I did indeed believe that "sacrilegious ideas [should] remain out of reach to vulnerable young minds," then, wow, have I done a 180.  Just to reiterate my WARNING TO STUDENTS INTENDING TO PLAGIARIZE THIS PAPER:  do so at your own risk.  I'm sure there are much better Slaughterhouse Five papers out there, although if you're out there plagiarizing in the first place, you're too lazy and unscrupulous to care (and I hope you get caught).  Anyway, here's the paper:



What is the purpose of censorship?  It should not be to prevent access to a work simply because of personal dislike or disagreement.  Many people may think a particular work should be censored because they find the ideas or messages personally offensive.  They have no true practical reasons for not wanting other people to read the work.  And then on the other hand, there are those who want a work censored because they firmly believe that the ideas expressed in the work may cause a significant impact on the audience.  This is the true purpose of censorship:  to protect society from what the censor believes are harmful ideas.  Kurt Vonnegut’s famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five has been censored for a variety of reasons, some of which I agree with, and most of which I disagree with.  One issue presented in the novel which I firmly believe has grounds for censorship is religion.  There are certain passages in the novel that convey ideas that could be received as anti-Christian, causing readers, particularly young ones, to question Christianity and reconsider their faith, a consequence which is indeed negative.
Several passages in the novel portray Jesus Christ, the central figure of Christianity, in a completely irreverent and demeaning fashion, a fashion that could prove damaging to the faith of a young, vulnerable Christian reader.  Here is one passage that is particularly demeaning:
The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new gospel.  In it, Jesus really was
a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had...
And then, just before the nobody died, the...voice of God came crashing done.  He told
the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and            privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity.  God said
this: From this moment on, he will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who
has no connections!  (109-110)


Not only is Jesus referred to as a “nobody” and a “bum”, but the whole idea that Jesus died on the cross to save the world is ignored.  The last sentence of the passage implies the exact opposite: because of His suffering on the cross, Jesus is going to seek revenge instead of granting forgiveness.  Moreover, up to this point in the novel there has been a generally negative attitude toward all humans and their fallacies.  By this point, the reader may have already developed the same sentiments towards the human race as the narrator and is beginning to see Earth from a different perspective, a perspective making these anti-Christian ideas seem tempting or interesting to a young reader, especially one who is frustrated with trying to understand exactly what the bible is saying.  In addition to the irreverent portrayal of Jesus Christ, there is also further irreverent portrayal of His death; the potential effects of this portrayal are not unlike those mentioned previously.  In a short passage early in the novel, the narrator is describing Billy’s crucifix: “Billy’s Christ died horribly.  He was pitiful.  So it goes” (38).  I believe (as I’m sure many other Christians do) that Christ’s death should not be pitied.  It should be appreciated humbly and graciously.  Furthermore, the ending phrase “So it goes” sort of brushed His death aside, as if to say “Oh well” or “That’s life”.  All together, these three small sentences take the holiness out of Christ’s death, which again is unacceptably irreverent and harmful to young Christian readers.


Aside from conveying anti-Christian messages, this novel also conveys atheistic messages by implying that heaven does not exist; such messages are intolerable from a Christian point of view, since the Christianity is, of course, based on God.  Billy Pilgrim, the main character in the novel, spends eternity traveling through time to different parts of his life.  Never does he go to heaven or hell, and nor will he ever, according to the narrator.  When Billy dies, “it is simply a violet light and a hum.  There isn’t anybody else there.  Not even Billy Pilgrim is there” (143).  This implies that a heaven with God does not exist, which is an anti-Christian concept.  Young readers of the novel could think that the idea of time-traveling for eternity is plausible, and therefore think that the idea of no heaven is plausible, too.  And if a person decides not to believe in heaven, they may very well decide that there is no God either.


The passages I have mentioned thus far are passages that could be damaging to the faith of young Christian readers.  I think a distinction should be made between these passages and other passages with religious content that I personally dislike, yet would not use as grounds for censorship of Slaughterhouse-Five.  For example, during a war scene, the narrator describes a gun shot as sounding “like the opening of the zipper on the fly of God Almighty”  (34), an analogy that implies not only that God is a person, but also that he wears pants.  Another passage that I dislike is “The Earthlings had had a bad week on the market before that.  They had lost a small fortune in olive oil futures.  So they gave praying a whirl.  It worked.  Olive oil went up” (202).  This illustrates prayer merely as a device to get what you want.  Near the end of the novel, the phrase “The Son of God was as dead as a doornail” (203) is used, a phrase that is simply disrespectful, since we usually associates lowly things such as squashed bugs as being “dead as a doornail”.  Although I frown upon these passages because the first and third ones disrespect the Lord and the second one suggests misuse of prayer, I do not think they would have a significant negative impact on society.  I doubt that a reader would reconsider his or her respect for God simply because of reading these relatively trivial passages.  The passages criticized previously differ because they carry  much stronger anti-Christian themes than these less extreme passages do.  Saying that Christ is a nobody who really doesn’t love us is much more severe than implying that God is a person or saying that when Christ died, he was “dead as a doornail”.  I make this comparison to show that I am arguing in favor of censoring the novel not simply because of my personal tastes, but because of the larger impact the novel will have on the reader.
Remembering the purpose of censorship, I do not make petty claims, such as insisting that the short excerpts recently mentioned are valid reasons for censorship, or the fact that the Lord’s name is taken in vain twenty-three times in the novel is a valid reason.  These are not acceptable reasons, because the short excerpts alone do not have the potential to be significantly harmful, and because we often hear the Lord’s name misused in everyday life.  But passages containing new, different, yet not totally unbelievable anti-Christian ideas could indeed have a negative impact on society.  It is important that such sacrilegious ideas remain out of reach to vulnerable young minds.

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