Culture (individual) = suite of behaviors and perceptions

Ha, if it were this way, what to make of individuals who would "crash" the culture box and thus be excluded from the domain? They would seek out a culture more agreeable to their talents & temperaments, which reverses the Culturalist's assignment of roles of function and argument.

cognitive scientists are spending a lot of time understsanding the universal basal aspects of religious belief, as opposed to the cross-cultural variation

Right, that would require talking about psychological group differences. Cognitive psychologists are fine w/ universals and individual differences, but not group differences. Psychometricians talk abt group differences, but usually restricted to IQ or Big Five personality traits.

My hunch is that you're right that group differences in religious beliefs are more a reflection of co-opting existing cognitive & personality biases, rather than the Baldwin Effect increasingly hard-wiring them in. The BE works best & fastest when the selection pressure is strong, like pathogens, and it's hard to imagine religious beliefs reflecting ambient pathogen load: e.g., you'd expect some kind of ritual purification based only on disgust mechanisms, regardless of whatever role religious thought had.

Now, group differences in mating psychology I'd ascribe by default to the BE mostly hard-wiring them in response to pathogens. So, where do the most peacock-ish males hail from? The least? How about the most vs the least sexually flirtatious females? Etc.

The BE works best & fastest when the selection pressure is strong

re: mating, well...what about if group conformity increases your fitness, and fitness is proportional to your comfort with the modal cognitive state. by this, imagine group A has a ritualized religious system, while group B has a more charismatic free form system. what if you comfort level, due to innnate personality biases, has a strong effect on mate choice?

i'm skeptical though because how persistent would such group dynamics be? history teaches that religious systems go through flux VERY quickly....

Despite the fact that religion may not in and of itself completely control human behavior, it would be absurd to say that religion has no role in human thinking and behavior. Yes, people from different cultural backgrounds may interpret a religion differently, but certainly their religion has some impact on their lives.

To use a mathematical analogy, religion is one of the many matrices through which our thoughts are shaped. Sure, a Chinese christian will be hugely different from a European christian, but a Chinese christian will still be different from, say, a Chinese buddhist.

I have read that Bengalis are blind to the whole concept of culture, and that even after many years of education they're still unable to understand basic cultural concepts.

One way this has been understood in history is something like the way geneticists talk about knockout genes. For example, in a few generations (3 or 4) American Puritanism evolved from an austere, fearful religion to a rather complacent, materialist one. People who look at Puritan doctrine closely can see that only a very few switches had to be flipped in order to make that happen: a reinterpretation of "election", the notion of the "visible signs of grace" (= wealth), etc. Very different results were achieved with relatively minimal change in the formal belief system.

In Spain when Franco's system was replaced you also had some enormous changes in behavior with regard to sex and marriage. In Spain intense eroticism had always been kept under minimal control by the power of the Church and close control of young women, but when the church lost its grip the eroticism remained.

The modernization of Japan after 1850 would be another case. The Japoanese are just as Japanese as ever, but much different.

I'm not an expert on any of these transitions, but an examination of dramatic historical changes can be a kind of laboratory of culture. (Anthropologists cheat by gravitating toward historically-static societies, and also by claiming that they are more static than they really are).

To use a mathematical analogy, religion is one of the many matrices through which our thoughts are shaped. Sure, a Chinese christian will be hugely different from a European christian, but a Chinese christian will still be different from, say, a Chinese buddhist.

that is qualitative wiggling. if your going to use a mathematical analogy you should venture some proportionality. so, questions

a) will the vector 'chinese christian' share a greater component with 'european christian' than with 'chinese buddhist'?

b) will a 'chinese christian' exhibit a component that alters its vector vis-a-vi a 'chinese buddhist' that is not shared with a european christian' because of sampling bias in conversion from the sample 'chinese buddhists'?

i would say that the shared component in a) is minimal, and smaller in magnitude than b). to give you a specific example, a disproportionate number of the "christians" who participated in the taiping rebellion were marginalized hakkas. they were surely different in many ways from the run-of-the-mill chinese peasant, but, if you study the theology promoted by the rebels you will see that they deviated sharply from christianity very quickly, and it could be argued that their religious ideology was only superficially christian. someone with a shallow knowledge of the topic could be liable to say, "oh yes, monotheistic fanaticism warped their mentality, and now they are behaving like intolerant monotheists now that they have read the evil book of the monotheists." this would be a nice little abduction, but a more parsimonious one might be that the taiping rebels were following a long chinese tradition of local rebellions rooted in religious going back to the yellow turbans. and their differences from the typical chinese peasant in south-central china might be chalked up to the fact that they were disproportionately hakkas with no prospects (the leader failed his civil service examinations many times).

One way this has been understood in history is something like the way geneticists talk about knockout genes.

interesting analogy. one thing that i think is important to keep in mind is that humans

a) have strong group conformist tendencies

b) tend to have bad memories about their past motivations and beliefs

a specific example is segregationism in the south. as i noted before studies by cognitive psychologists show that many white southerners changed their opinions re: race between 1970 and 1983, but dont' remembering changing their opinions. the cultural zeitgeist "changed state," something many people have observed and commented on, but you would be hard-pressed to find people who acknowledge the process by which this happened. politicians to some extent are exceptions because they were in the public eye and can't deny their past views...but even hear i tend to find that southern white politicos offer very truncated narratives. one might assume they are being evasive, but after reading some cog. psych. of memory i am wondering if perhaps this is just normal, they really don't remember how they got from a -> z, and their main problem is they can't just fabulize and pretend like a -> z never happened because they are on the record about their segregationism in the past (for example, i recall strom thurmond confronted about this topic by MTV vjay bill bellamy about this pro-segregationist campaign circa 1948. at the time i assumed that thurmond's rather skeletal response was evasion or senility, but now i'm not so sure)

"To be specific and frank, the savagery of Islam today is a function of the savagery of the cultures that espouse Islam, not the religion itself (and there was a time when Islam was an exemplar of civilized cosmopolitanism)."

I've heard stuff about how Christianity emphasizes compassion and forgiveness more than Islam, but I don't they stopped burning heretics at the stake in Spain and Portugal until that late 1800's.

but I don't they stopped burning heretics at the stake in Spain and Portugal until that late 1800's.

i doubt that. there weren't any heretics to burn :) also, the body count for roman catholicism in the iberian peninsula is a little lower than you might think, in part because of the factor i allude to above. unlike many other regions of europe large religious minorities did not exist (at least after the expulsion of unconverted crypto-muslims after 1600). the last execution for heresy in the british isles was around 1700, in scotland (the heresy was atheism, which the individual recanted before his beheading).

So you argue christianity on the basis of science? That's intelligent...Satan created science, therefore any information you get from science is biased.

Many Chinese sects adopted Jesus and some Bible texts and legends (along with Mohammed, Buddha, and others) into their pantheon without abandoning all of their other beliefs and without conforming to any European form of Christianity.

Much of popular Chinese religion isn't derived from Taoism, Confucianism, or Buddhism, but isn't independent of them either. It's highly eclectic with a lot of substrate.

"i doubt that. there weren't any heretics to burn"

This page mentions a Jew being killed in 1826:

http:// www.jewishvirtuallibrary....odtimeline.html

Who knows how accurate that is. I remember reading something about a school master being hung around the year 1900 for some offense at his school - saying the wrong thing or something. Neverthless, it does seem that Spain was very hardline in its Catholicism for longer than other Catholic countries and what changed the thinking may have been secular developments and their influence on Catholic doctrine - things like religious freedom, and primacy of conscience - the sorts of doctrine that appear to have their origins in secular moral and legal thought and that were perhaps necessary to make the Catholic Church more compatible with the modern world.