BINGO.
Saw this firsthand living in India. Their cultural morality is stupefying to a Westerner. I mean, when you watch an old woman beaten to near death by her own sons because she is a widow and her shadow touched them - and this was said to be a good and righteous thing to do ... it blows the mind. Same with how they treat the Dalits and Adhi Andrha - starving humans begging in the streets while exceedingly fat cows and water buffalo adorned with flowers and ornaments are revered and walk the streets.
And then there is their sense of 'justice', which is totally based on caste. Being ripped off by a shopkeeper or a bank - as a Christian or a Dalit - you will go to jail after a beating for complaining about it, because a lower caste may not dispute someone who is from a higher caste. Then there's the child brides and dowry still practiced there. Where 8 year olds are married to forty-somethings. All of that considered a moral, and righteous ethic - because the bible had no presence or influence in their pagan society whatsoever and their society is structured upon a morality system we int he West would see as evil.
That is utterly beyond my ken... There are vestiges of such a thing on the Rez... Some bits and pieces that evade the generally Christian tenor of the people there...
I see these sorts of things in antithesis - using racism as an example, more than caste...
Where I am it is virtually northern white European tribes... Mainly Norwegian, with some Irish and Scots-Irish, Swedes, and a smattering of everybody else... And the Native Americans... There may be some racism toward Native Americans, Blackfeet in particular... But by and large, we stand without the racism that, I can now see, plagued my youth growing up in Chicago.
My uncles, good Christian men, all, are possessed by a virulent hatred of others... Primarily Blacks, but not limited thereto. It has lessened in them, in their elder years, and somewhat due to my BIL, who is black as the ace of spades, but being Costa Rican, entirely without the norms of inner-city American blacks... He is well loved in my greater family,
despite the color of his skin, and in my immediate family,
regardless of it... Which, as it turns out, is the remarkable distinction.
Growing up as I have, largely right here, in the Northern Rockies, I see the morals of my youth in antithesis - Having been exposed early on, the cultural change moving here caused me to question the verity of that portion of my early youth, which, those not removed therefrom, might not have the ability to ponder, for a plethora of reasons, some of which are very valid. But the western sense of judging the individual merit of the man was what very quickly found acceptance within me.
All that to say, those that remain in the crucible, and also find that disparity of conscience, those are the ones that are the truly remarkable case - And those, following an inerrant path toward the dictates of good conscience are closer, I would think, to what YHWH would have written upon the heart.
