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Igel

(36,966 posts)
7. Not all Xians have the baggage of original sin.
Sun Mar 3, 2019, 01:19 PM
Mar 2019

However, pretty much every group has the idea of "here's the goal, and people miss it."

They also typically treat insiders differently from outsiders, but every sane group has a way of dealing with transgressors in some sort of hierarchical way. You kill, that's a bigger punishment than if you simply fail to do something that's largely ritualistic. But any culture that doesn't enforce norms so that they're internally simply stops being a culture, pretty much by definition. A culture is an internalized set of norms, with all the food and folkloric elements often just associated with the culture but tied to it indexically (like the word "no" is indexical for negative in English but "but" in Czech or possession in Japanese).


It's when you get to an insane group that every transgression seems to be the same, and there are no accepted ways to find forgiveness and absolution.

I will say, however, that I have met subgroups that had sharply divergent ideas of what was acceptable. In many cases, they were just waiting for the "injustice" of being arrested, but really didn't see anything wrong with what they were doing, however at odds it may be with social norms and conventions. Others are fairly passive, but still tend to think of smaller things as huge--sort of in the same way that in the Old Testament murder and sabbath breaking have the same punishment.

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