Quote from traderNik:
You'd be wrong. This is an assertion or an opinion. Of course we can look at another culture and evaluate it psychologically and morally. Why do you say that we can't?
Genitally mutilating young girls is immoral.
Murdering young women who have premarital sex or an extramarital affair is immoral.
Burning alive young women who are found to have had an abortion is immoral.
Telling a young man that if he straps a bunch of explosives to his body and then detonates them in a public place and kills a bunch of women and kids and tourists, he will go to heaven and be serviced by virgins, is immoral.
Sending hundreds of thousands of people to Siberian camps because they wanted the right to determine their own form of government or to write about their feelings regarding government policy is immoral.
How about the culture of Nazism? Not too tough to evaluate that culture, is it? Murder all Jews. That's not really too tough to 'evaluate'. There is no 'value' in that, is there?
Within the cultures from which these various examples are drawn, there are large numbers of people who consider the behavior in question barbaric. They agree with us - these are immoral acts. The fact is, the power structure in these societies is often primitive, and that power is wielded through quasi-religious institutions by powermongers who rule a populace for whom ostracization is equivalent to death.
Few would disagree that the acts you describe are barbaric and immoral.
However without being guilty of what I loathe, cultural relativism, Judge not lest you be judged.
How would some societies view a culture that:
Women routinely elect to kill their fetuses for economic reasons or worst yet to peruse a freer less encumbered lifestyle.
A culture that promotes/lionizes violence and sex on the publics airwaves.
A culture of men who spend untold hours on the internet either gambling or whacking off to pornography.
A culture so consumed by thirst for alcohol and drugs that thousands are murdered in pursuit of these substances and tens of thousands killed or maimed on highways by those wasted on mind altering chemicals.
In a vacuum, if that's ALL I knew about Western culture I'd say at face value that we're quite primitive and barbaric in our own right.
So, yea this is a
cultural war. It has nothing to do with Israel. Certainly the Islamic bombings in Bombay, London, Bali and Lisbon were for reasons far beyond the plight of Palestine.
While I vehemently believe that the goal of fundamentalist Islam is global domination and the danger as such is profound, I'm also hesitant to state ipso-facto that Western culture is "morally" superior. We should just admit that we have are own axe to grind and not be so smug about it.
