Doesn’t Utah watch the most porn, as an example, though? There’s something to be said about something being taboo also making it more appealing in certain contexts.
A Russian colleague of mine confirmed that their society has this conflicted attitude towards alcohol.
He explained it like this:
“Everybody drinks. You are expected to drink to be friendly- Celebration, friendship, sadness- these are all reasons to drink. But you are expected to act as if you are drinking water. Being a drinker is good, being a drunk is disgusting and shameful. If you are noticeably drunk in public, old ladies will spit at you in the street. It has been this way since before Soviet times, and I cannot explain why.”
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Am I wrong to have read that with a really bad Russian accent in my head?
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I don’t remember where I read this but… people don’t often bother to rail against non-occurring sins. If you find yourself in a place where preachers constantly urge against bestiality, this is not a nation of animal rights activists.[quote=“tachin1, post:23, topic:31985, full:true”]
Am I wrong to have read that with a really bad Russian accent in my head?
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I did too.
I wonder how often respondents dialed up the questions a little. Like, instead of ‘drinking alcohol’, they thought about it as ‘drinking heavily’ and so on.
I am also blown away by the results stating that 42% of Argentinian respondents claimed that consuming alcohol was morally wrong. This is a majority Catholic country, but even taking in the religious minorities most often associated with a prohibition against alcohol (Adventist, Muslim, LDS, other evangelical Judeo-Christian sects) you only come up to about 12% according the data on this Wikipedia page. So-crazy pants! I would guess sampling error, but I’m always up for believing that just under the surface, things are not what they seem . . . .
Well, I can’t speak for Argentina, but at lest in Mexico, where Catholicism is ingrained in the culture, and with a 41% unacceptable in alcohol.use it completely makes sense.
First, and something most catholic leaders would not readily admit, is that while most people will identify as catholic, they will probably not identify as devout catholics, this means they are at least baptized, This means they don’t go to church, they don’t observe more than the shared traditions that keep catholicism in the public conciousness. (Please note that I am talking about the idea of the catholic religion as a thing, I am not addressing at all the concept of god as it is not necesary to make my point)
You’ll get a nation of people who drink liberally, celebrate drinking in song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_muPL5w7bQ
and yet, have a shared understanding that, strictly speaking, its morally wrong to get effed up on booze. (Also, catholicism does not condemn drinking moderately)
I’ve always suspected that this type of religious doublethink was one of the things that led to the rise of the protestant churches who try (in thoery) to match up every aspect of ones life to religion with much more rigour.
I thought that was the point. Catholic Jesus taught us that without booze it’s not a party. Usually it’s the protestants who have a problem with that.
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The trouble with these sort of questions is they miss out on the nuance of a subject.
I don’t know. Personally I see the difference between something between morally acceptable and it not being a morall issue, and from the survey results it is obvious that people taking the survey did as well.
Quoted for truth.
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