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...o be a ritualistic cleansing of the village from its sins. The villager chosen at random in the drawing inherits from the community all of the evils of the past year, and then is stoned to death. Although to others this practice seems barbaric, to them it is a necessary practice which must be continued from year to year. What the villagers fail to recognize is that by seeming to wash away their sins by the stoning, they are in fact doing nothing but creating sins for themselves. IRONY ---- The villagers, however, are only afraid of the unknown; to thiem, evil is whatever would happen if the lottery was not successfully carried out. Year after year after year for as long as the villagers can remember, there has been an annual lottery, which comes from “One of the ancient practices that modern man deplores as inhumanely evil is the annual sacrifice of a scapegoat…for the benefit of the community (Friedman 63).” The “benefit” behind the lottery seems to...