Saturday, October 12, 2013

Are all cultures valid?

This week we spoke a bit about culture validity.According to Culture Relativism, yes. Cultural relativism is the view that all beliefs, customs, and ethics are relative to the individual within his own social context. In other words, “right” and “wrong” are culture-specific; what is considered moral in one society may be considered immoral in another, and, since no universal standard of morality exists, no one has the right to judge another society’s customs, right? Even if they believe in self-mutilation or eating cats or human sacrifice or other strange, or in our culture bad, things? 
 They are allowed to do those things because of their culture and we don't believe in interfering or stopping someone from practicing what they believe. While we cannot and should not tell other people how to live, we can share with them what we believe.  When it comes to culture we tend to see things only our way and vice versa.  While we may think that what the other is doing is crazy and makes no sense.. they may see the way we do things to be even crazier. I don't believe that there is a temporal way to answer this question, spiritually though we know differently. We will all be held to the same standard in the last days. 

1 comment:

  1. Hey its Emily your TA again, good post! It is often so difficult to remain unbiased when discussing other cultures, we often have ethnocentric thoughts which can lead to potential difficulties. What are some of these potential issues? What are some ways that you can encourage kindness and tolerance when those around you are undermining cultures that differ from their own? I appreciated the thought you expressed that we will all be judged according to the same standard. Yet through perfect mercy all will feel complete justice.

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