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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Grainne who wrote (98808)	3/20/2005 2:27:23 AM
From: Augustus Gloop	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

<<But I think that breaking the lifestyle rules of your religion is quite different from not living in any way in the basic spirit of your religion. And that is what I think a lot of Christians in America are doing. Invoking the name of Jesus and living in an uncharitable, materially oriented, intolerant way is more what I was talking about in that post.>> Again....I think that has to do with the fact that you live here. Here's my view - a lot of people have a tendency to view Americans as not very international. They don't view us as well traveled and cultured and some of that is true. When you live in a country as large as the US its pretty much a basic cultural and geographical department store because you can have almost anything and stay in the country. In Europe things are a little tighter because basic cultures can change in a geographical area the size of what we call a state. Thats the same in many parts of the world. So the point that Americans may not be the most well traveled global citizens is true but we enjoy a pretty advanced society in terms of infrastructure. But with that generalization comes other generalizations that don't totally have merit. Europeans, Asians and people from all sorts of different countries and religious groups have the same downfall in character. Thats not being an American - thats being human. What I find ironic is that we tend to generalize our culture in such a way thats slightly demeaning and based on a few weeks in one country or another tend to generalize a foreign culture that we have spent 2 weeks with in such a way that they have all the solutions. In the final analysis I don't think either is an educated view. Generalizations may have some basis in fact but they don't tell the entire story or they would start with the root word - general. Humans in every country, culture and religion are faced with corruption and character flaws. I don't think for a minute that the ills in the US or Christianity are any worse than those in any other country or religion. They may be different but if you or I had to live in Saudi Arabia or any other country/culture for 20 years my bet is we'd both come home and say they have their problems in the same way we do. I think it's great to question if we could be going in a better direction with our culture but until we have a global beacon of perfection I think we'd better stop short of saying we have problems and other countries and religions don't - that just isn't the case.