Culture Defined By Paradigms, Religions, And Spirituality

(May 27, 2025, updated July 26, 2025) Runic texts cannot be accurately translated and understood without first understanding the culture behind them. Achieving this understanding was an iterative process involving repeated translations while slowing adding an ever greater number of texts to the starting sample. Eventually, consistent word definitions emerged allowing translations to proceed according to the strict scholar's standard (one English word or phrase for each Akkadian word). Contrast this to most ancient language translations outside of Latin which have many possible English words per ancient word. So if a sentence does not make sense just replace the word with other words until the translation conforms to some preconceived bias.

"Culture" is a layered cake of ideas having different levels of emotional stickiness. The most sticky are paradigms, often held subconsciously. Next are religions which define the rules of one's life path. Everyone has a religion even if those rules have not been formally stated. The loosest layer are traditions and spirituality. Traditions include the material culture of archaeology, technology, and the techniques of magic.

Together the define a person's identity. Along with greed and altruism, the psychology of identity is one of the big motivators of history.

(April 1, 2025) Facts must be organized so they can be found when needed. This requires a mental framework, that is, a paradigm for working with acquired facts. If new facts cannot be fitted into a person's existing paradigm they will be ignored. Those facts are just not seen. Paradigms should not be confused with social or cultural classification schemes (which they often are). They exist at a much deeper level.

(November 27, 2023, Updated April 1, 2025) Paradigms can be difficult to change because they are heavily influenced by humanity's psychology. Either the psychology of identity or the difficulty in unlearning something then relearning.  The first learning of something is always the easiest. This combination of change difficulty and identity psychology can make such people having such a "brain-washed" paradigm appear completely irrational to others.  Holding onto an identity paradigm will even make them willing to perform atrocities in defense of that paradigm. This was noticed by German Christian theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was jailed and eventually killed by the Nazis. He wrote this:

(May 27, 2025) This difficulty in changing paradigms leads to cultural evolution. Those tribes which happen to have paradigms better adapted to surviving in any particular environment will grow and prosper more than those tribes not so well adapted.

Cultural evolution is a faster from of adaptive change then biological evolution. Only in modern times with the rise of literacy and science has reasoning allowed for even faster social change. An existing culture always comes from some mix of earlier cultures or from mixing with neighboring cultures (analogous to biological mating).

For better or for worse, the defense of one's culture has been a major motivating force in history. A tribes prosperity depended on its culture yet innovation was also important as the tribe's environment changed. So successful human tribes developed a balance between cultural innovation and cultural dogmatism. This balance was achieved by each tribe having a continuum of different personality types. Their conservatives sought to preserve existing culture with a tendency to blame others for social problems. In contrast, their liberals sought innovation and tolerance with a tendency to blame themselves for social problems.

(April 1, 2025, updated June 5, 2025) History has 3 great paradigm shifts between 4 phases of history. The phases of history are shown below with their main religious groupings in parenthesis:

1. Druid Era - European literacy develops on Minoan Crete around 2000 BCE to support trade directed by centralized empires out of their palace-temple complexes.  A literate class of priests (male and female) appears for the first time. Formal religious/philosophical debates first appear (Phaistos Disk). 

2. Classical Era - Empires become common with the arrival of the Indo-European ruling class into literal southern Europe with the new empires changing culture towards the forced personification of deities. Because lords tended to be males this forced personification started to marginalize the divine feminine, once so prominant in Druidry. The first bardic tales also appear (Homer's works) involving personified deities. These bardic tales appear when the official Druid priesthood has been suppressed allowing the local native folk religion to emerge and the local spoken dialects (Greek in this case, a mix of Druid Akkadian and Indo-European) to be standardized in writing by the bards. As deities were personified in common culture forming classical mythology, the Druid tradition of philosophical debate continued among others forming the new derivative religions of Pythagoreanism, Stoicism, Platoism, and many other smaller "philosophies." Late during this stage, Stoicism started adopting dualism with Epicureanism being a reaction against that dualism.

3. Christian Era - Full dualism splits reality into good and evil halves at war with each other. Achieving peace and restoring a unified reality required an end-times apocalypse according to Persian Zoroastrian religion. Judaism started adopting this view (Pharisees) but Jesus using the "everyone is connected" idea from eastern Druid culture argued against this because this would introduce polluting hate into the eternal kingdom of God. Despite this, Paul (who never heard Jesus) turned Jesus into an apocalyptic figurehead by using the Hebrew scriptures as a community authority. This became the core idea of Christianity. Other Dualist religions having sacred scriptures along with personified deities are: Judaism and Islam. A dualist religion having sacred scriptures but without personified deities is Buddhism (the ever changing material world is imperfect and something humans need to escape) which became the official religion of the Indian Ashokan empire.

4. Nature Era - Observations of nature, rise of literacy, and the decentralization of power exposed the limits of the Bible as an all encompasing community knowlege source. Christianity split into smaller groups and new religions arose such as: Humanists, Materialists, New Agers, Witches, Modern Pagans. Christianity survived by selectively ignoring certain Biblical passages. Peace was acheived after various Protestant and Catholic religious wars by separating the natural material world from the spiritual/relgious world of consciousness. This era includes phases labeled as the Renaisance, Enlightenment, Romantic era, and Modern era.