Nick Elnasser 10/13/16

The class is now able to use and apply a historical lens to writing to evaluate the writer's thoughts based on the time they wrote it. For example, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" was written in 1741 which is right before the Great Awakening. Sinners uses pathos to strike fear and guilt into the audience rather than use logos to explain why the author is saying what he is. In "Common Sense" by Thomas Paine which is written in 1776, after the Great Awakening and during the American Revolution. Paine uses logos much more than Sinners did to explain the reasoning behind what he is saying. He started Common Sense out by saying, "In the following pages I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense." Paine was actually using his brain to figure things out instead of scaring people into doing things with emotion. After we were done discussing Sinners and Common Sense we went into advantages and dangers of rationalism.  Some of the advantages of rationalism are that now there was an objective and scientific view of the universe, logic and reason would help establish infrastructure, numbers and statistics justify decision making meaning there was a singular best choice backed by numbers, and the idea that education is important. However, there is a few dangers of rationalism such as there being no room for religion and during the time period slavery was justified based on previous numbers and statistics. This led us to the end of class.