Quotes About Culture

Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I'll show you a hypocrite ... If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there - the reason you don't plummet into a ploughed field - is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sum right.

the Genesis story is just one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants.

none of us will have forgotten that lesson. What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them: education in the true sense, very different from today's assessment-mad exam culture.

The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal—God is the Omnipotent Father—hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. —GORE VIDAL

Perhaps, then, the words male and female have no general meaning.

There was something built into the human brain by natural selection which was once useful, and which now manifests itself as religion.

The American comedian Cathy Ladman observes that 'All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays.

We can give up belief in God while not losing touch with a treasured heritage.

Perhaps Islam is analogous to a carnivorous gene complex, Buddhism to a herbivorous one.

The computers in which memes live are human brains.

Our genes may instruct us to be selfish, but we are not necessarily compelled to obey them all our lives. It may just be more difficult to learn altruism than it would be if we were genetically programmed to be altruistic. Among animals, man is uniquely dominated by culture, by influences learned and handed down.

If I'd been born in ancient Greece, I'd worship Zeus and Aphrodite

If you were born in Arkansas and you think Christianity is true and Islam false, knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in Afghanistan, you are the victim of childhood indoctrination.

People growing up in different countries copy their parents and believe in the god or gods of their own country. These beliefs contradict each other, so they can't all be right.

Something has shifted in the intervening decades. It has shifted in all of us, and the shift has no connection with religion. If anything, it happens in spite of religion, not because of it.

I am, indeed, quite sympathetic towards the idea that human culture provides a new milieu in which an entirely different kind of replicator selection can go on.

What is remarkable is the polar opposition between the religiosity of the American public at large and the atheism of the intellectual elite.54

The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next. RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Isaac Watts's hymn is reminiscent of three daily prayers that male Orthodox and Conservative (but not Reform) Jews are taught to recite: shall in a 'Blessed are You for not making me a Gentile. Blessed are You for not making me a woman. Blessed are You for not making me a slave.' Religion

The paradox has often been noted that the United States, founded in secularism, is now the most religiose country in Christendom, while England, with an established church headed by its constitutional monarch, is among the least.

The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.

Religion, is a mistake of geography. If you where born in America you are Christan, if you where born in the middle east you are Muslim, China Buddha, and before that Zeus, Thor, and people believed that the earth was flat and the sun went around the earth, though they where wrong & not only that but all of these things have no evidence.

I have previously supported the case for a completely non-genetic kind of replicator, which flourishes only in the environment provided by complex, communicating brains. I called it the 'meme' (Dawkins 1976a).

They are the outward and visible (audible, etc.) manifestations of the memes within the brain.