Religion And Religion In Shirley Jackson's The Lottery

"The Lottery and Religion

Organized religion and traditions have been a common idea throughout every civilization since the beginning of thought. All of these religions have had some sort of doctrine of faith or standardized set of codes and practices that have been passed down through the ages. In Shirley
Jackson's "The Lottery," The author presents the idea that without questioning the practices of our rituals, we lose the meaning of why they were conceived in the first place. The first clue that religion and doctrine may be the main subject of the moral of the story
Is the use of the last name of Delacroix. The literal translation is French for "of the cross" but the townspeople mispronounce it frequently which signifies that
The unquestioning obedience by the ranks of officers and troops had blinded them into doing terrible things because someone who seemed to know what he was talking about had told them to do so. The Nazis can be seen as a religious group to the members that had subscribed to the dictator's ideals and the Third Reich actually had practiced initiation rituals and ceremonies when having meetings and conducting business. Many did this for the same reason the townspeople do not question the whole reason for the lottery. The elder members of their society had insisted on keeping the lottery because they thought that they would degenerate into heathens. The irony here is that stoning a person to death just because they were unlucky enough to pick the wrong slip of paper or was born with the wrong color of skin or practices a different religion than the ones throwing the stones, is not a trait of a society that is considered advanced. "The Lottery" is a distorted mirror for many societies that restrict free thought and encourage dogma and tradition to the point that everyone is mentally