Selfishness is a bad behavior because it is an action which focuses on someone’s interest without paying attention to others’ needs and interests. People
who are selfish do not care about the circumstances and feelings of others. Making a decision that might be burdens or harms others for personal gain is also selfishness.
4.2.2 Blasphemy
Blasphemy is the second bad behavior found in this novel. Based on Christian ethical ideal, blasphemy is bad because it is an act of insulting or showing contempt
or lack of reverence for God, to religious or holy persons or things, or toward something considered sacred or inviolable.
At first, the Stranger is a good man. He was a regular churchgoer. He feared God and respected His commandments. After his wife and daughter got killed by the
terrorist, he doubted God and the justice of God. He wodered why God let this thing happen to his family. At the end of that year, he traveled to the four corners of the
earth, asking himself how human beings can be capable of such evil. He lost the most precious thing a man can have, faith in his fellow man.
“God, I did not deseve what happened to me. If you did that to me, I can do the same to others. That is justice” Paulo Coelho:89
“the Devil was worried, but resolved to keep quiet—he could not show that he too was terrified. The man was blaspheming against
God and trying to justify his actions, but this was the first time in two years he had heard him adressing the heavens.” Paulo
Coelho:89
Blasphemy is heretical when the insult to God involves a declaration that is against faith, as in the assertion: God is cruel and unjust or The noblest work of
Universitas Sumatera Utara
man is God. The Stranger in the novel says the same thing about God, he says God is cruel because He let the thing happened in his life. As the quotation below
“…Since we can never see the enemy—because if we take this tale to its logical conclusion, our real enemy is God for putting us
through everything we’ve suffered—we vent our frustrations on everything around us. It’s a desire for vengeance that can never be
satisfied, because it’s directed against life itself” Paulo Coelho: 121
“Forgive God Said the Stranger. “Forgive an implacable God who is constantly creating and destroying” Paulo Coelho: 126
God is good. He will not try human above their ability. If because a bad thing happen to human life they did insult and blaming God for what
happend in their life, it is called blasphemy.
4.2.3 Greed
