Thesis

Government and religion a menace according to Thoreau

Introduction

Henry David Thoreau was born July 12, 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau was a student at Harvard University and over there he studied Greek, math, philosophy, and history and Latin composition. Thoreau was a very well influenced by Ralph Waldo and later on he became a very good friend of Ralph, and Ralph even after friendship acted as a mentor for Thoreau. Thoreau was a good writer, and he has written many books, essays, articles, poetry and journals. Walden and civil defense which is known to be a very famous book was written by Thoreau. It was the belief of Thoreau that if the government did not govern at all, it would be at its best form. All of his books have some element of government, culture and society.

Main body

Transcendentalism started of in the mid of 19th century was a movement that brought in new ideas for literature, religion and culture. In this movement it was believed that the people by using their intuition can reach the stage of spirituality and they needed no teachings of religion and learned doctrines. It was Thoreau, who had a firm belied on this theory and worked very hard to help people understand this level of thought; he spread the message through his writing. He also believed that if a person lives a simple life, which means a person has to be decent not materialistic; he can live the life more peacefully than he would with all the luxuries. Thoreau was very much influenced by Emerson, and this is what led him to be the early adopters and influencers of transcendentalist movement. Quote by Thoreau “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer”. This quote gives us a very clear idea about how liberal Thoreau was, he had absolutely no believed on the government and the religion. He believed that it was the religion and the politics that had destroyed the true peace of the world, and the people needed to move away from both the aspects so that peace could be brought in the world and prosperity and success could be achieved. Thoreau believed that the man had to live co-coordinating with the nature, and nature according to him was a reason for the existence of human beings. He wrote quite a few books on helping people adapt to the reality of nature and telling them the importance of nature. Many of his books were more of essays sort of books and this made it very easy for the people to read it. The reason why Thoreau got to bring so many close to him , and how he got to influence so many people is that he was against the government, which means that he was against all those false commitments that the government used to commit. He was a man of his words and never spoke about anything he didn't practice him self, ...