In other words…people don’t usually choose to die of infection or disease nor accept the death of a child in particular as being “God’s will.” What was Mather’s reasoning, that was initially rejected by his own peers, and that is now quite acceptable for most modern people today? Then discuss this change of norm over time by explaining if you felt empathetic toward Mather’s predicament AND empathy for the parents and doctors in the Larry May article on Christian Science followers? (EMPATHY is defined as understanding, not feeling sorry for someone but actually understanding how they feel.) In other words, your argument is about explaining the probable reasons for people shifting from the colonial Puritan world view (Illness is God’s will/punishment)to the more common one world wide today that accepts medicine and science on many levels and while still believing in an active god.

DO NOT go on a rant about what other people should or shouldn’t do according to you, instead look at the readings and understand another point of view. Can you empathize with Cotton Mather’s change of heart regarding new information or why his “friends” rejected him without respect for who he was in the community? How does it make sense, in the face of scientific proof, to reject anything Natives/Africans said based on their ethnicity and different religions? Do you understand that people read and understand the same religious texts in various ways even when they are of the same faith? (Think back to Manseau’s chapter 3 and the American dissenters whose religious conscience disagreed with the leaders of other dissenters on how they saw the world. Is there any evidence that “liked minded people” are actually of a single mind?)

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