The Morality of Esther

This is a paper I wrote for my historical literature class... not my best work, but not terrible. The prompt was "Write a paper discussing the moral character of Esther." Enjoy.

Introduction

The book of Esther, one of the two eponymously feminine books of the bible, details the story of a young woman who’s moral character is tested by being made queen and then forced to make a choice either personal harm for her own nations sake or personal safety at the cost of her nation. Her story will be summarized more fully later in this paper. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate her moral character in making this decision. The cultural, historical, and personal levels of her situation will be most principally evaluated in an attempt to determine Esther’s moral character. Of course, moral character is such a loose term that it will also be more accurately defined later in this paper. Overall, this paper will attempt to paint a picture of Esther in a culturally and historically accurate context and determine whether or not she displayed good biblical moral character or bad biblical moral character. It will then attempt to isolate which traits of Esther can and should be emulated and which traits should be disregarded.

Halloween Hate

A recent incident occurred on Halloween. A woman dressed up in a tasteless Halloween costume depicting a bloodied Boston Marathon runner. 

This is a link to the article reviewing the incident, which I have seen posted all over facebook. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/03/boston-marathon-victim-costume_n_4208720.html

I had someone ask me my thoughts on this incident, so I'll share. 3 main points come to mind.

(1) First of all, obviously it was incredibly stupid for her to do this. That is pretty much universally agreed upon. She even admits that. It was disgusting, and insensitive and downright cruel to the people who suffered... BUT...

(2) Did she have a right to do this? Yes. In America we have the right to make whatever statements we want, in as poor of taste as we want, without legal action being taken as long as that expression does not violate some other law (such as public nudity, murder, rape, etc…). To my mind this right was best solidified in the Supreme Court case Texas v. Johnson when the right to burn American flags as an expression of free speech was upheld. It's appalling, and disgusting, and in incredibly poor taste to do so, but it is a right that we have as Americans.