We're All F****d

Wars have been fought and blood has been spilled because of people's beliefs. Some people believe that God has ordered them to kill, others believe that He has ordered them to give up all of their belongings, others believe that the second coming of Jesus has already come (Vissarion), etc. The point is, throughout time people have had hundreds (if not thousands) of beliefs and the amusing thing is that they actually base their sometimes absurd beliefs on documented and biblical documents. Because of these beliefs things like the crusades, the holocaust, and the genocides in Darfur and Rwanda have been occurring. There has been intolerance and discrimination ever since the beginning of human civilization and we can clearly see examples of these innate and dark human tendencies in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.

In The Prologue to the Wife of Bath's Tale, there are two characters that personify this mortal inclination towards having nonsensical and absurd beliefs and actually back them up with historical and even biblical text. Alison is a lustful woman that has been married multiple times with many rich, old men for purely economic reasons and she tries to justify her actions by using what some might consider "logical" or "coherent" thinking. For example in this excerpt from lines 57-72, we can see how she uses biblical text to back up her sinful and shameful actions:

So what, then, if people say bad things about marrying more than once? Lamech, Abraham, and Jacob were all holy men, as far as I can tell, and they all had more than a couple wives, as have many others like them. Has God ever expressly forbidden marriage before? Huh? Or has he ever commanded people to remain virgins all their lives? I know as well as you that St. Paul only recommended women to maintain their viriginity—he never ordered it. Giving advice and making commands are two different things, and he left it up to us to decide how to live. Besides, if God preferred virgins, then He would pretty much be against marriage, now wouldn’t He? And if people weren’t having sex, well then how would we make more virgins? No, St. Paul would never order anything that God himself wouldn’t want. Anyway, whoever wants to aspire to maintaining their virginity can do so, but we’ll see who comes out on top in the end.

Another example is Jankin and how he personifies the typical misogynistic man that believes that all women are horrid creatures that do not deserve respect or liberties and has the audacity to back up his illogical beliefs by using the Bible and certain other ancient texts. We can see a perfect example of how he did this in lines 650-655, "And then Jankin would break out his Bible to find that proverb in the book of Ecclesiasticus in the apocrypha that tells men not to let their wives go out and about." Also, on lines 772-775 we read, " And then Jankin would break out his Bible to find that proverb in the book of Ecclesiasticus in the apocrypha that tells men not to let their wives go out and about."

People have the habit of adamantly believing whatever gives them the chance to justify what they actually want to do. What does this mean for us as a people? Do we have a moral compass? Or do we simply "bend the rules" in order to do whatever the f*** we actually want to do? We're doomed...