Week 9: Post 1
Considering the social constructionist perspective I would say that we “build worlds” because we are given tools provided by our culture and we are given the freedom to create meanings from that. Because we “never experience the world directly” we process our culture and turn that culture into meanings that are significant to us. An idea that we have in our culture that is not present in most other cultures is the idea of complete freedom. In most other countries the government controls many aspects of their daily lives. We have the freedom to choose our religion and in some other cultures that would be absolutely unacceptable. I think we take this for granted too often. We have so many different religions that make up our country, too many to count. In many other cultures you are born into a religion and that is the religion you will belong to for the rest of your life. I think it is pretty obvious how this contributes to our happiness. Imagine this country with only one religion. After having the freedom to choose your religion it would be chaos to make everyone choose the same religion. I think it would be impossible; people would be so outraged I don’t even know what would happen.
posted by Eleanor Rigby @ 8:27 AM
3 Comments
3 Comments:
I appreciated how you said, "we are given tools provides by our culture and we are given the freedome to create meanings from that." To me, that is a very interesting yet beautiful way to look at it and I couldn't agree more. It would be very interesting to imagine this country with only one religion and at the same time, sort of scary. There would be much outrage and I know that it would cause more friction than there already is now in the world and I think we all know we don't need that.
I too liked how you said that we use tools given by our culture to communicate, but that we are given the freedom to create meaning from it. It certainly would be scary to see this country convert to a single religion. We enjoy freedom of speech and religion here, but this is not necessarily the case in other parts of the world. I come from a country where people are persecuted because of their religion. People need to consciously be aware of the consequences of allowing culture to influence their thoughts and how they communicate. What may be acceptable in one culture may not be the case in another.
BTW: I have enjoyed reading all of your thoughtful posts!!!
Freedom is a great example of a symbol our culture uses to define itself. In contrast to our culture, those who live in a culture that does not assign significance to freedom would be blind to the concept of freedom that we know. That is of course, if there is no exposure to outside cultures. In the cases where individuals are isolated within a culture that does not assign significance to freedom, I can imagine those within the culture would have no issue with only a single religion; ignorance is bliss after all. Their reality would be simply defined by their culture, and that reality would have only one religion.
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