Myrtle Mendez LIB 200 Professor Cardaio October 16, 2020 Inherit the Wind: Drummond’s Humanist View Humanism is a belief system that prioritizes human needs and values over religious concepts. The main principles of humanism are rooted in the information that is obtained from scientific experimentation. This belief system is demonstrated throughout the play,Inherit the Windby Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. In this story, Bertram Cates, a high school teacher in a small, fictional, religious town in the Southern United States called Hillsboro, was arrested and tried for the crime of teaching his students the theory of evolution. In the town of Hillsboro, teaching scientific theory in schools was prohibited by law because it contradicted the fundamental religious beliefs of the townsfolk. Cates hired Henry Drummond, a well respected attorney from Chicago with humanistic beliefs, to defend him from prosecution from the deeply religious prosecutor, Matthew Harrison Brady. Throughout the play, Drummond constantly shows that he is more of a humanist than Brady by demonstrating through his actions that he does not put a belief in God ahead of scientific reasoning and free thought while Brady consistently shows that his belief in God overrules all scientific evidence. Humanists dismiss the idea of God and separate themselves from any religious ideologies. Throughout the play, Brady shows that he does not fit into this ideological classification. In fact, one could argue that Brady represents the antithesis of a humanist. Where a humanist would separate from God and only view science as the truth, Brady does the opposite. Brady is a powerful United States politician and lawyer with fundamentalist Christian beliefs. He
travels to Hillsboro to lead the prosecution in Cate’s trial with the intent to enforce the
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