re: #295 Aceofwhat?

You’ve created this odd notion that there is some binary natural selection at work that has led to a rigid condition where one’s religion and culture are not interchangeable. If there’s anything that our country has shown over the past 230+ years, it’s that personal faiths of all sorts can flourish in our culture.

Let me be more precise. How much honor-shame considerations affect one’s behavior is a variable. Arab society is fairly well permeated with bit from bottom to top. From the family to the heads of state. One can not survive in such a society without an acute respect - internalized, not cognitively deployed - for how your behavior toward others in various situations should be governed. In the West we also observe honor-shame considerations but have generally placed those into beneficial contexts. For example, we generally think it honorable to admit a mistake if you made it (honesty) and we think it is shameful to abuse the weak. In Arab society the opposite is more often the case.

But like most measurements of human nature these are always found on a continuum that varies in significant and measurable ways both within and across cultures. And within any culture the individual variation can swamp any cultural trends.