Cultural ideas

[noons]

A while back, I made a post about historical myths, and another about what I called "irredeemable ignorance" - ideas which if held by someone, absolve everyone else of the need to listen to him or her speak about any subject whatsoever.

Now I want to start a thread on how certain ideas are perceived in different cultures. There are a great many ideas which are rejected by the relevant scientific or scholarly community, and subsequently dismissed in some cultures, but widely accepted in others. And vice versa, ideas accepted by the relevant experts, but rejected in some cultures while accepted in others. Case in point: evolution still has a hard time being accepted in America, while it is widely accepted in Europe. But then again, conspiracy theories about 9/11 and the moon landing are much more popular in Europe than in America. Thus leading one to the conclusion that Europeans trust the scientific community, but not the US government.

So if anyone has anything to say about ideas that are accepted in some cultures but rejected in others, and why that may be, this is the thread for it.

[jim_s]

I've noticed that Europeans tend to put much more stock in astrology than Americans. They print horoscopes in the papers in the States, but here I regularly meet people who take it very seriously, while I can't recall ever meeting anyone like that in America. This is all anecdotal though.

[ignorantianescia]

Actually, I have never come across anybody who told me they take astrology seriously, though your conclusion would not surprise me at all. There is quite a lot of unaffiliated spirituality (I don't mean beliefs without affiliation to a denomination, but the more "fuzzy" stuff) in Europe, whether explicit or implicit, and this seems quite prone to belief in phenomena like astrology.