Essay On Sinning For The Crucible

Sinning For The Right Reasons Everyday, good people do bad things because they think it is the right thing to do. Sometimes religion is the cause, other times it is secular pressures. What happens if these ‘bad things’ people are doing are only bad according to their religion? And what if these ‘bad things’ really are understandable and rational but because of your biased religious surroundings are they considered bad? Arthur Miller’s The Crucible illustrates this concept vividly using the 1982 Salem Witch Trials. During The Crucible, people are accused of an act they did not commit and have to go against their religion and sin or face being hanged which leads to mass hysteria and paranoia. Even though Reverend Hale sins according to the
He changes his entire view on life because of how insane the witch trials are. Being a Reverend, religion is quite important to Hale, and it is not easy to give up everything your life revolves around. No matter what the religiously right thing is, Hale does the morally right thing. Hale goes against everything the Puritan religion believed in because he saw that hanging innocent people was morally wrong. Miller writes an amazing foreword of Hale in the beginning of The Crucible, which gives an understanding to the concept of sinning for a greater good. “It is as impossible for most men to conceive of a morality without sin as of an earth without “sky.” The concept of unity, in which positive and negative are attributes of the same force, in which good and evil are relative, ever-changing, and always joined to the same phenomenon- such a concept is still reserved to the physical sciences and to the few who have grasped the history of the ideas” (Miller 33-34). Everyone sins, but not everyone sins for the right reason. Hale sins for the right reason. He could have saved lives and to him, that was less of a sin to God then giving your life away because of an accusation. Reverend Hale did the morally just thing and sinned for all the right