^ Incidentally, quite a few people throughout history have claimed to be this guy called Maitreya, the one predicted by Siddartha Gautama (founder of Buddhism) to come here and enlighten us all over again/perpetuate Buddhist memes for centuries to come. He’ll be the next Buddha, essentially; having been prepared for this task over many lifetimes. Siddartha might’ve been right about a lot of things, but I won’t take the rest of what he said on faith (assuming he said it).

Great entry. I agree with virtually all of what you’ve written, and I can relate to some of it first-hand (being an eccentric myself). But is our culture truly crazy? The mistrust of nonconformity and the fear of abnormality acts as a stabilizing influence, from a sociological perspective. Tradition, norms, the status quo and ritual serve much the same function. All four promote some degree of psychosocial harmony, partly by creating an ‘in’ group with a shared sense of identity and values. Everyone knows their place. Cultural stagnation isn’t good, but I’m not sure if a society with extreme fluidity and openness to the unusual would hold itself together enough to function optimally. Some people appear to need this whole tradition, inviolable norms and mistrust of new ideas thing more than others (in fact most people need it more than I do), and I don’t know how a culture open to “strange” (from their perspective) new ideas would roll with them. Too broad a range of values and ideas not being passively discouraged might lead to the deterioration of “social capital” – as discouragement of the new decreases and more is allowed into a cultural framework, people might lose some of the commonalities they have with their community, which might lead to the deterioration of social networks. This would bring about a sense of isolation and disconnectedness, which would in turn lead to increased crime rates and drug abuse, etc. which leads to poverty, unemployment and child abuse in a couple of generations… at which point everything goes to hell. Gosh, I’m beginning to sound like a social conservative myself. But how well would an open culture like that function, overall? I can’t say, there are too many variables to take into account. An analogy could be made between culture and a house. If you leave the door of a house wide open, you will freeze in the winter and overheat in the summer because everything gets in. If you always have the door shut, the air in the room will start to get stale and hard to breathe, which isn’t very good either. Somewhere in-between is ideal for health and wellbeing of the house’s occupants, but the ideal is debatable. One member of the household might want more fresh air, while another might think it’s too cold to leave the door so open.

There’s always been a tug-of-war between the new and the old. Then the new becomes the old, and it settles in. The theory of evolution, for example, is approaching that settling-in point. Feminists and supporters of black rights have fought hard before their ideas began to permeate the cultural mainstream. I guess I am, errr… driving cultural evolution myself, in a small way. Bit by bit, I open people to new ideas that might initially be percieved as strange because they don’t fit in with common notions, and so they come up against that mental barrier of, “The Way Things Are” until further explanation is given. A new conceptual framework isn’t built in a day.

Jews, speaking in general here, have always been a bit legalistic… sigh. It’s even part of the Rabbi stereotype. Summum’s aphorisms are interesting; their religion/philosophy appears to have been derived from the Theosophical movement, and their name has a distinctly ancient touch to it – Sumerians, Semiramis, etc. I approach everything with a skeptical attitude, so maybe I’ll accept it when I see some empirical evidence — ’cause like, how the fuck do these people know what happened on Mt. Sinai? Having faith in another’s revelatory experiences is, in this circumstance, a bit silly. I don’t like the in-group esoteric religious speak/capitalizations they’ve got going on, either – however, I guess I support the development of a monument if enough of the locals do. I’ve been thinking about Hammurabi’s Code lately, ever since you mentioned the Chaldeans.

I like Summum’s Principle of Correspondence the most, but I suspect it’ll be misapplied. Not so partial to the Principle of Opposition (dualism, basically; I prefer nondualistic religions). The Principle of Gender.. i lol’d at that one. Got a bit carried away with the length of my comment here… oh well!

@SuSu - Probably, since Moses was supposed to have smashed the original commandments. Doesn’t change my point. For instance, how do the Summum know what the original commandments Moses recieved were? Someone’s revelation and not empirical evidence, probably.

I agree with you when you say that mental illness is the norm, and our own culture is kinda messed up; “violent and abusive” as you call it. What I thought you were also saying is that a culture which “mistrusts nonconformity and fears abnormality” is crazy, and that’s what I was addressing. So I thought I might throw in another perspective (and it’s not necessarily my own, do keep that in mind! Being something of a liberal, I am actually inclined to your POV more than anything).

A culture with some resistance to the unusual protects itself from the deletirious consequences of diversity mentioned earlier. It creates psychosocial harmony for the people within each in-group – and some of those in-groups can be pretty large. Western culture could be regarded as a kind of massive in-group with a shared political and religious tradition, with similar-ish values, dress sense, identity, and outlook on life. This allows its constituents (the people) to work together with more cohesion, mutual understanding, and with greater efficiency – it’s easier to communicate when everyone speaks the same language, for example. Similarity promotes bonding. The ancestors of black people in the US have been assimilated into Western culture, even added to it. Commonalities foster an increase in social capital, which has all kinds of beneficial effects. They give direction and identity to the next generation. A culture where everyone has a lot of common ground, and similar set of values and ideas which don’t deviate too far from the norm, might see an increase in that social capital. Now we don’t want to go so far as to create a bunch of patriotic drones like Stalin attempted, but an extremely open and diverse one might not function optimally. The “Other” needn’t be ignored or completely tolerated/accepted; it can be assimilated, integrated or absorbed until everyone’s in the giant melting pot of similarity – then bit by bit, there occurs a big increase in social capital which brings a lot of other benefits with it. Conquering and “civilizing” much of the world to a similar standard worked for the Romans – they built roads, aquaducts etc. and amalgamated their culture with the rest of Europe’s. Rome’s unifying power throughout the ancient world did great things, as did Alexander the Great’s in his melding of Greco-Oriental culture. I guess it comes down to the question, “What works better in general, cultural pluralism in peaceful co-operation with each other where differences are encouraged and supported, or a large group of people united by a common cultural framework where extreme deviations are either passively discouraged by society or assimilated (often both in time)?”. We’re already beginning to acquire a shared culture with this whole globalization thing. The Japanese wear suits and ties; western clothes. They eat McDonalds etc. Samurai and Buddhism have found their way into ours through cartoons, the Dalai Lama and such. We have Japanese-inspired dishes. Japanese-style art was popular in France, back in Van Gogh’s day.

We live in interesting times, alright. Chinese and their curses… or was it gypsies?

Are you familiar with the biblical story about the tower of Babel? Everyone spoke the same language and presumably shared the same culture, and they were able to function cohesively enough to build a big city and a giant tower that reached to heaven. God didn’t like it, so he decided to scatter them and give them all different languages – with the purpose of weakening them, essentially.

“If everyone had the gumption to be himself” –ooh! Since you don’t have a cock, a beard and a deep voice (as far as I know), did you have anyone in mind while you were typing that? Or does it have roots in the way humanity is often referred to in the masculine form eg. my church’s motto, “God will have all men to be saved”.

@SuSu - i agree with you, those are all valid ways of understanding.

my criticism was directed at having faith in someone else’s personal revelation – a risky business when it comes to religion.