The Importance Of Cultural Beliefs

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What do you believe in? A certain god? The rights of others? The traditions, both new and old, passed family to family, generation to generation? Where do these beliefs, be they religious, cultural, or social, come from? At some point in life people begin to question their beliefs (or lack thereof), search for the origins of and the reasoning behind these beliefs, and ask the same question: Why? The answer is both simple and complicated. What an individual, including this author, believes or disbelieves is shaped by cultural beliefs, learned beliefs, and the psychological need for beliefs. Cultural plays a large part in the development of a person. Religion, language, and socialization is all impacted by one’s culture. These beliefs can be both positive or negative. For example, the cultural beliefs in the Unites States have negatively impacted classes of people such as African Americans, members of the LGTBQ community, and women since the establishment of the country and continue today. These beliefs, similarly to learned beliefs, are passed between families and generations, prevailing through time, even if the majority of people do not agree with them. The oppression of women in the Unites States is an example of a …show more content…

Religion, he says, was devised as a means of compensation for this feeling. Man, unable to master nature and limited in his capacity for adaptation (57), feels insignificant and uncertain; god(s) ease this anxiety (35). He also claims infantile helplessness plays a part in the oceanic feeling (35). Freud explains this notion in depth at the end of his first chapter as follows: “The derivation of religious needs from the infant’s helplessness and the longing for the father aroused by it seem to me incontrovertible, especially since the feeling is not simply prolonged from childhood days, but it permanently sustained by fear of the superior powers of Fate

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