http://eclipse-phase.wikispaces.com/Noctis-Qianjiao Start reading at "Cultural Forces and Clades" and "Authentics"

For Native Americans, you forget about collecting scalps, including of children.

Re-Laborat wrote:

Shall we make similarly outrageous embarrassing generalizations about Europeans based on German conduct of the 1940s? Let's not, hm?

Thank you for making my point.

Re-Laborat wrote:

Generally speaking, people adapt and romanticize the more positive aspects of cultures which they see as having insight into things their own culture does not satisfactorily fulfill.

Which are outrageous embarrassing generalizations, and provide a suitably sanitized half-truth, an "American fast food" version for consumption for those who complain about the same. "Half the Truth is often a great Lie." - Benjamin Franklin "That a lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies, That a lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright, But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight." - Tennyson

Re-Laborat wrote:

There is, of course, some reality to it, depending on the tribe or nation (some did, same didn't) and how much [i]the White Man[/i] was paying for scalps at that time.

How much [i]the White Man[/i] was paying for scalps wasn't always a factor. "Probably the most dramatic skeletal example of prehistoric violence in North America comes from the Crow Creek site in central South Dakota. Archaeological excavations revealed about 486 skeletons within a fortification ditch on the periphery of the habitation area. The site represents the Initial Coalescent period and dates to about 1325. P. Willey's analysis revealed that 90% of the individuals had cut marks characteristic of scalping." - Hall Steckel, Richard; R. Haines, Michael (2000). A population history of North America

You don't see the irony of riffing about how "it can be said Americans don't really have a culture" and then referring to some generic "Native American" concept which covers such a huge group of cultures (across two continents) to render statements like "Native ways" so vague as to be meaningless? You wrote "They in fact find themselves joining a very ancient clade that delivers the goods in terms of spiritual fulfillment, healthy living, connection to the Earth, and to other people. The same is achieved by people who seriously delve into old Celtic practices and others." The above may well be true in all parts except being "ancient" or "old". It's based on a modern myth invented by the likes of Henry Thoreau, the Theosophical Society, and the modern environmental movement. Statements like that show much of a ghost Celtic and Native American culture really is now. They've been turned into benign Tolkien elves that magically barely touched their environment, despite extensively using geography altering slash and burn agriculture. My point is Native Americans and Celts are just like everybody else. Rewriting history to turn them into magical elves is creepy. It's "benign" chauvinism that I find to be malignant because it's a lie, or worse, a half truth.

Every group of a certain size and a certain age is probably guilty of crimes against humanity of some kind. Religions, ethnic groups, large corporations...there's (sadly) nothing special about atrocities. I don't believe we should ignore those atrocities, but making false equivalencies between the commission of atrocities and a particular group that committed them is the express train to Othering and all the nasty left-over tribal instincts that go along with it. What we need is to recognize is that no group and no individual is incapable of committing heinous acts, then do everything we can prevent situations that make such things easier. On the flip side, if we're going to be forgiving of past cultures, why not this one? I don't think it's entirely true to say that America has no true culture. In fact quite the opposite. We've exported so much of our culture to the rest of the world that the core of American culture is practically invisible for its ubiquity. I don't lament this. In fact certain aspects of American culture (even ones I feel we could tone down) are desperately needed in other parts of the world, such as the distrust of authority (a vital part of science) and a sharp divide between national identity and the government (I'm looking at you, China). Even when congress has an approval rating approximately equal to your average pedophile and people let themselves get fooled into believing that the wrong choice for president will end the entire fucking world - we can still be proud to be Americans. And we should be. Yes we've entered a period where we're spiritually unfulfilled. Yes, we're seeking meaning all over the fucking everywhere. But we're still Americans. Our newfound obsession with paganism is just the shiny trinket of the week. Not that I have a problem with people finding meaning in whatever way they choose. Studying the positive and negative aspects of past cultures, taking the good and letting the bad be a warning is pretty much the American way. Like Shakespeare, we're pretty good and ripping shit off, passing it off as our own, and occasionally doing it better than it was done originally. We're cool like that. PS In the spirit of my post, I did my level best to swear as much as fucking possible ;-)

Erenthia wrote:

On the flip side, if we're going to be forgiving of past cultures, why not this one? I don't think it's entirely true to say that America has no true culture. In fact quite the opposite. We've exported so much of our culture to the rest of the world that the core of American culture is practically invisible for its ubiquity. I don't lament this. In fact certain aspects of American culture (even ones I feel we could tone down) are desperately needed in other parts of the world, such as the distrust of authority (a vital part of science) and a sharp divide between national identity and the government (I'm looking at you, China).

On the contrary, I would say that we have a fairly rich culture in the United States. A multitude of faiths that have spawned here, a plethora of musical genres, as well as numerous lingos and accents that dot our social landscape. To say that America has no culture is inaccurate; it would be more apt to say that the U.S. has a multitude of cultures, many of which are admixtures of other cultures, both without and within.

Erenthia wrote:

Even when congress has an approval rating approximately equal to your average pedophile and people let themselves get fooled into believing that the wrong choice for president will end the entire fucking world - we can still be proud to be Americans. And we should be. Yes we've entered a period where we're spiritually unfulfilled. Yes, we're seeking meaning all over the fucking everywhere. But we're still Americans. Our newfound obsession with paganism is just the shiny trinket of the week. Not that I have a problem with people finding meaning in whatever way they choose. Studying the positive and negative aspects of past cultures, taking the good and letting the bad be a warning is pretty much the American way. Like Shakespeare, we're pretty good and ripping shit off, passing it off as our own, and occasionally doing it better than it was done originally. We're cool like that. PS In the spirit of my post, I did my level best to swear as much as fucking possible ;-)

I disagree with the sentiment that we are a "spiritually unfulfilled" people. It makes spirituality sound like something that people always want, like food. I, and many like me, have no need for "spiritual fulfillment", and can do fine with a cultural fulfillment and social fulfillment that is very similar. And it does make sense with the United States' history; we were one of the bastions of Enlightenment Deism, and are one of the biggest homes for secular society in the world. Besides, religions and faiths have come and gone throughout our 236-year chronicle. It's not a surprise to me [i]at all[/i] that this continues into this day. How is a bunch of people in the modern day creating a neo-pagan faith any different from Joseph Smith hybridizing pop-culture Egyptology with Evangelical Christianity to create the Church of Latter-day Saints some 183 years ago?

NewtonPulsifer wrote:

This is an apt comparison. Neither the Mormon religion nor neo-paganism have much support in the archaeological record. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeology_and_the_Book_of_Mormon http://www.aeonmagazine.com/nature-and-cosmos/hugh-thomson-britain-fores... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_use_of_fire http://news.discovery.com/animals/mammoth-mastodon-extinction-climate.html

My point was that it doesn't matter whether they have evidence. They are faiths. If faiths were based on evidence, they'd be sciences. Or something; they'd definitely not be faiths.

I'd like to voice my objection to the notion, implied in comments above, that there is any equivalence between; Spirituality, Faith, and Religious Dogma. One may lead to the next in the specific order of; Spirituality -> Faith -> Dogma, but each is further than the next from the "spiritual fulfillment" questioned in the earlier posts.

Quote:

I strongly suspect that aside from the strong North European influence on Titan, the American trend of the Jovians and so on, that we should be assuming that 'white' is definitely not in the majority here.

Culture /= race. The name of the author of a goodly part of the Titan chapter, a graduate of school in Oslo and veteran of the first NAC settlement is Marcus [i]Ming[/i]. Going back to the question of ethnicity in Eclipse Phase, different settlements and even entire worlds have their own cultural inheritances--Venus is heavily influenced by the European Union's style of government, at least, Titan is likewise shaped by the Nordic Europeans and Canadians who collaborated in their world's settlement, this settlement is an enclave of Chinese Taoists while that settlement is Russian Orthodox and this habitat on a spur of Locus is populated by neo-corvids, et cetera. Ethnicity is a real thing in Eclipse Phase.