Culture and religion. Are they really different?

[evangelicalhumanist]

Culture is important to us, of course. Even an uncultured boor such as I know that. But why?

Culture is a sort of security blanket. It gives comfort and meaning, helps us to make some sense out of what is a confused and impossibly complex range of sensory input. It helps us, you might say, to give some structure, some order and meaning, to a universe that in fact really doesn't have any!

But I think that cultures adapt religious thought (rather than religion subsuming cultures) because ultimately it is the culture, not the religion, which is important. And why should this be? Probably for the very simple reason that the great majority recognize that religion is merely a formalized mythology, trying to explain the culture in terms that everyone can understand.

[Baruch]

Good observation. Culture is a term of greater scope than religion, and I consider religion to always be cultural (and thus relative), and social in its institutional form. Religion is one general way of doing part of what we call culture. And there are cultures that are anti-religion ... but always for political reasons, because they are in fact anti-clerical, and are too totalitarian to allow any narratives different than the group-think of the State.

Shalom

[Kurt]

I like EH's thought of culture as a "security blanket". I think, though, that when a culture is too wrapped up in maintaining tradition or the status quo, it can also be a wet blanket.

Kurt

[evangelicalhumanist]

Good one, Kurt! But of course that's entirely consistent with reality, isn't it? While we're comfortable, we rarely reach for more. As I used to be fond of saying (in business, where I was a leader of necessary change), "the only people who really like change are wet babies."

But of course, that would over-simplify the point about culture providing meaning to a universe too complex to really make sense of. I truly think that is one of culture's most important purposes. And while it provides us with the comfort to be able to move in the face of sometimes intolerable ambiguity, if the culture contains within itself an element of curiosity, then all is well. And of course, since the world is not static, since evolution itself might be said to be a consequence of a an unstable nature, then curiosity should really be adaptive.

[Baruch]

Change is also Machiavellian ...

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

... and he was no bambino, capeche?

Shalom

[evangelicalhumanist]

Capisco!

That is, perhaps, why "change for change's sake" is generally seen in a negative light. There are, of course, cultures in which the notion of change itself is abhorrent. But once you adopt the notion of "progress," it becomes a necessary component, doesn't it?

And progress, asI read in "A Short History of Progress" by Ronald Wright, isn't always a necessarily good thing.

[Baruch]

Wright is more pessimistic than Diamond, but I think even Wright is too optimistic. A species expands until the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse balances out growth. And that is what happens to every species. Humans are simply more successful than lions, tigers and bears .... oh my! And we are more damaging to the ecology than those other predators, so our advent lessens the carrying capacity of the entire planet. As a student of the Anasazi experiment in civilization (see Diamond's book ... Collapse) ... I have read it takes a much longer time for the ecology to regenerate than people have time left. The Elite know all this, and intend to decide which one billion people will survive, and which five billion will be sacrificed. They are in charge of the Four Horsemen.

Shalom

[evangelicalhumanist]

You know, I read your post above and for the life of me I cannot understand you. Your world-view and your god-view really do, sometimes, seem absolutely irreconcilable! How can you help us to know you, Baruch?

[Baruch]

You can only understand anyone one post at a time. But only bother if you think it is worth your time. I am not deliberately trying to be obtuse. But since I think by association, any given word can send me off on a tangent. All of reality just is one Rorshach blot to me. But some prefer to deal with each drop of ink separately. At Hebrew class, since the economy is such an issue, I went off on a tangent giving the history of money.

Those whose epistemology is exclusively analytical ... break things up into little pieces (such as atoms). So they know more and more about less and less. Those whose epistemology is exclusively synthetical ... bring all the little pieces together into one big whole. So they know less and less about more and more. What I try to do is not be fundamentalist in my epistemology or my metaphysics. I use whatever tool seems to do the most good at the time, without prejudice.

I have an old bronze coin in front of me. It is a "heavy aes" of the time of the Third Punic War. Issued by Rome in Sicily. My ex-wife's ancestors may have owned it 2150 years ago. On one side it has the prow of a Roman warship, with the letters ROMA below. AMOR being ROMA's secret name. The other side has a two faced god, and old Latin god, Janus, the god of War/Peace. And the reason why two months ago it was January ... the month of Janus. I can analyze it to its very atoms, and I can consider it in context of its time and place. It would be too fundy of me to exclusively choose one over the other.

Shalom

[evangelicalhumanist]

I see. "Stream of consciousness" can be productive for oneself, but to try and participate in someone else's stream of consciousness is an often forlorn and frustrating task. Communication, to be really effective, requires some common and identifiable point of reference. I've no doubt that with patience I could work back and figure out what that common POR is, but in simply reading your posts, I'm often mystified. But then, that's the mystic in you, isn't it?