A hero to me, for the longest time, is someone who did something epic. Something that changed the world, something that impacted our lives in a positive way. Never did I once stop to think about the smaller things that made someone a hero or the virtues that these heroes had in mind that mad them what they were, until I read Homer’s The Odyssey. I started to give more thought on how commitment, sacrifice and loyalty all came into play to make Odysseus the great leader that he was portrayed as, at the same time I questioned if these values, when placed in the “wrong hands” would make one into a bad and morally corrupt person.
Before reading The Odyssey, I had not given much thought to what I though it meant to be a hero. When I thought of
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That's a judgment from another side. But it doesn't destroy the heroism of what was done. Absolutely not.” That quote really struck me, because it forced me to think about value systems that made someone a hero. ON the 13th of November this year, members of ISIS, an Islamist militant group, made a series of attacks in Paris. These attacks resulted in about one hundred and thirty deaths, not including the lives of the perpetrators of the attacks. The people who decided to bomb Paris were doing so in the name of their god or at least their interpretation of their god. They sacrificed themselves for an idea, and even if we, in the Western world, feel like what they did was wrong and unjust, our opinions from the other side don’t destroy the heroism of what was done. In Liz Goodwin’s article, “The doomsday ideology of ISIS” she states “That fighters believe they are fulfilling a grand destiny helps explain why thousands of them have been willing to leave more comfortable lives in nations all around the world to join the dangerous and reviled group.” The people who perpetrated the attack in France have deep-rooted beliefs in their god, who will lead