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Judeo-Christian Ethics Essay

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Due to the heavy Judeo-Christian influences in our culture, concepts like religion and its associated ideas such as cosmology and ethics are seen as universal. Divinity is usually interpreted as either omnipresent or far-beyond-this-world. Ethics are seen as unanimously appropriate, though they are fashioned from the relationship between the divine and his/her individual worshippers. However, many of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors did not see the world or the nature of the divine in this way, as their concepts of religion, culture, and politics were directly related to their familiar surroundings – the mountains, fields, and rivers that shaped and created their everyday life (Bauschatz 130). To put it bluntly, the pagan Anglo-Saxons recognized that …show more content…

Instead, they largely focused on the geards that enclosed, cultivated, and supported their community, and separated it from the world beyond. In Iceland, this differentiation between the community and the outside world was referred to using the terms ‘innangardh’ and ‘utangardh’ , and it can be generally assumed that the Anglo-Saxons probably had similar terms, but they have not been pasted down to us. Therefore, I will make a loose attempt to reconstruct the terms the Anglo-Saxons might have used, and will be using ‘innangeard’ and ‘utgeard’. The innangeard is understood to be the civilized space of close-knit social relationships, while the utgeard is everything outside of it. At times, the specific identification of the boundaries that separated these two geards might have been physical – a particularly mountain, a river, or even an actual wall. However, they were by no means geographically fixed. If your community grew or your farm expanded, then naturally so would your innangeard. Therefore, both the innangeard and utgeard were primarily conceptual, though they might occasionally be directly translated into real world …show more content…

It is far more than a matter of one who relies on, and who one might consider an outsider; the Innangeard is a matter of community – the laws, traditions, and customs of your kin - and is not merely reliant on a particular person’s opinion. It is definitely not an excuse to exclude another person based on a difference in opinion, especially if said person is inherently a member of your community. On top of that, the moral and ethical requirements shift between the geards – while it would not be okay to steal or harm someone from your community, the same could not be said in regards to outsiders. These two concepts and the division between them are integrally complex, especially with their fluid nature. However, they were inherent to how our Anglo-Saxon ancestors saw and interacted with the world, and as we try to recreate their ancient practices into our modern world, it is necessary that we seek to understand and use

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