Religion Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 1

Religion - Essay Example These religions command people to show kindness to fellow human beings as well as to animals. MORALS, PERFECTION – The followers of the three East Asian religions, Confucianism, Taoism, and Shinto, concentrate mainly on being a perfect human being and upholding moral behavior. Each of these has a humanist philosophy. MONOTHEISM, BOOK – The common features of the religions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are that both believe in one God and both are religions of the book. The latter means that a book was sent to the people of all these religions through their prophets. Generally speaking, with time people are only becoming lesser and lesser interested in religion. The number of atheists is increasing. People are getting further from religion and there may be several reasons behind this phenomenon. Man is always attracted to shiny, happy and fun aspects of life. Many religions are not all about fun. They are about being kind to the fellow human beings, helping others eve n if you have to go out of your way, and being honest no matter what. Not everyone happily complies with these rules. For instance, many feel that they could be much more successful in life if they don’t follow the humanity rules; they don’t work honestly to earn; they cheat on their customers to see their personal profit; they indulge in illegal work such as smuggling and money laundering. The list is endless. But that is not to say, however, that good people are no longer there today. There still are several good people out there who prefer to be honest over being rich illegally. They treat others nicely and take care of the animals too. They have moral values which they hold on to and uphold. However, one important thing to consider is that we cannot really relate religion to being good or bad. Nowadays there is more to being spiritual than being religious. There are good Christians, Jews, Muslims, etc., and bad too. So we cannot really say that being religious mean s being good. A person may be ritualistically following a religion without really putting any meaning to it. He may have been brought up in such an environment while his perceptions might be different. There are good and bad atheists too around the world. Coming back to the original discussion, after a century religion would still be there but it would have few followers, and even less of the really true followers. Also, from research it has been concluded that the less religious countries are happier and also have lower crime rates. With the progress of science and technology the people have been more depending on it and leaving religion in the air. It is said that science has been debunking several religious claims. If this is how it goes on and if people consider science to be more reliable – what with all the logical and valid reasons laid down – it is inevitable that more and more people would look up to science and consider religion as unimportant. It is vital to note, however, that though science can take us till the moon, going to heaven is another thing all together, and only religion is what will get us there. Even in today’s world we see there are so many religious conflicts all over the world – some places more than the other, but they are there. People have become intolerant of each other; if someone’s views do not match theirs, they are wrong. This is the general perception. Of course, not everyone acts this way but those who do are enough to bring about violence and conflict as we have seen. We have heard about religious institutions being bombed and attacked and we have heard of people being persecuted because of their chosen religion. This is not limited to a single religion; conflicts exist in every religion. Churches as well as mosques are attacked;

Sliding Filament Theory Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Sliding Filament Theory - Essay Example Surrounding the whole muscle is a layer of connective tissue, epimysium that encloses the individual fascicules together. The individual muscle fibers are made up of filamentous bundles that run along the length of the fiber. Most of the interior of the fibre consists of the protein filaments which constitute the contractile apparatus, grouped together in bundles called myofibrils. Each myofibril consists of a repeating unit, known as a sarcomere. The alignment of the sarcomeres between adjacent muscle fibers is responsible for the characteristic striations in the striated skeletal muscle fibers. The sarcomere is the fundamental contractile unit of the skeletal muscles. When a muscle fiber is viewed by polarized light, the sarcomeres are seen as alternating dark and light zones. Some regions appear dark because they refract the polarized light. This property is called anisotropy, and the corresponding band is known as an A band. The light regions do not refract polarized light and ar e called isotropic and are denoted as I bands. Each I band is divided by a characteristic line known as a Z line, and the unit between successive Z lines is the sarcomere [1]. Under electron microscopic examination with high magnification, the A bands are seen to be composed of thick filaments arranged in a regular order. The I bands consist of thin filaments. When the muscle is in the resting state, that is, when there is no shortening of the fibers due to contraction, a pale area can be seen in the center of the A band. This is known as the H zone, and it corresponds to the region where the thick and thin filaments do not overlap, which otherwise is the case throughout the muscle fiber architecture. In the center of each H zone, there is a line called M line. It is in this line, links are formed between adjacent thick filaments. The principal protein of the A bands is myosin, while that of I bands is actin. The interaction between these proteins is fundamental to the contractile process in the skeletal muscle at the ultrastructural and molecular levels. There are two types of actin filaments. One is globular in shape, known as globular or G actin subuni ts, and the other is filamentous of F actin. The actin filaments of the I band are made by joining many G actin subunits together by polymerization to form F actin. The F actin, in turn, is stabilized by binding to the Z line. The thick filaments are made up of an assembly of myosin molecules together. Each myosin molecule consists of two heavy chains. Each of these heavy chains has two light chains associated with a head region that is globular. The junction between the head region and the long tail contains a hinge. This hinge allows the myosin to generate the force required for muscle contraction. The tail regions of the myosin molecules associate together to form the thick filaments. Each thick filament consists of several hundred myosin molecules [2]. The sliding filament theory explains muscle contraction, and the structure of skeletal muscle provides important clues to the mechanism of contraction. The width of the A bands or thick filament areas in striated muscle remains constant, regardless of the length of the entire muscle fiber, while the width of the I bands or the thin-filament areas varies