Protestantism

» pink101 - Others Are Unafraid

In response to A Good Place To Start posted by paper_turtle:
.
Where do you see cultural influences enhancing or detracting from the overall quality of life in America?
.
Culture is influenced by nature first--the geography, the temperature, the natural environment, availability of fresh water, types of animals and agricultural aspects, Hunting, gathering, and fishing, everything imaginable. In another thread, Migisi mentions that primitive people were mystified by thunder and lightening. One of the major influences on culture is the impact of the unknown and the unknowable. What makes people sick and why do we die? What happens to the person after death?
.
When the ancients developed ideas about the sun and the stars and recognized that seasons were influenced or were covalent to the movement of the sun and that it was associated with the length of the days and nights, they were concerned that the sun might continue its trip away so the the days would be shorter and shorter until they might disappear all together. It's easy to see that they might have thought the sun had some persona--a god of types.
.
There is a concept that has been mentioned before in which the relationship between people and things causes them to experience associations that can be seen as spiritual. Two people have a close relationship. one dies; but, the other senses the departed's presence from time to time when they visit places and do things that remind them of the departed. Early on in culture, people are able to imagine that the dead person is somehow revisiting them. This raises the unknown and the unknowable and of an after life.
.
There are all sorts of things that go into the development of culture. Most of our ideas come to us from the deepest past. We have developed those ideas to be what they are today. Religion, itself, is one of the first inventions and comes to us out of the mysteries of life as it was known.
.
We still have those same unknowns. We still experience the spiritual when a loved one has departed. We walk into a room where we saw that person and sense their spirit. We go to their grave site and experience their presence again. And, we seek explanations to satisfy our curiosity.
.
This area is only one aspect of culture; but, it is an important one and it gives rise, among other things to religion as an institution of the culture--of society.
.
Some religious people would rather ridicule such a discussion or stay out of it altogether than they would think of it as a discovery. Others are unafraid.
.

-- posted by pink101