I don't believe in it but I do it because it is part of my 'culture'.

 I don't believe in it but I do it because it is part of my 'culture'.

     When it comes to religion,for example,we no longer “really believe”today,we just follow (some) religious rituals and mores aspart of respect for the “lifestyle”of the community to which we be-long (non believing Jews obeying kosher rules “out of respect for tra-dition,”etc.).“I don’t really believe in it,it’s just part of my culture”e

ff sectively seems to be the predominant mode of the disavowed/displaced belief characteristic of our times.What is a cultural lifestyle,if not the fact that,although we don’t believe in Santa Claus,there i sa Christmas tree in every house,and even in public places,everyDecember? 

Perhaps,then,the “nonfundamentalist”notion of “cul-ture”as distinguished from “real”religion,art,and so on,

is

in its  very core the name for the field of disowned/impersonal beliefs—“culture”is the name for all those things we practice without reallybelieving in them,without “taking them seriously.”Is this not also why science is not part of this notion of culture—it is all too real?And is this also not why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as “bar-barians,”as anticultural,as a threat to culture—they dare to take their beliefs seriously?

Today,we ultimately perceive as a threat to culture those who live their culture immediately,those who lack a distance toward it.

Recall the outrage when,two years ago,the Taliban forces in Afghanistan destroyed the ancient Buddhist statues at Bamiyan:al-though none of us enlightened Westerners believe in the divinity of the Buddha,we were outraged because the Taliban Muslims did not show the appropriate respect for the “cultural heritage”of their own country and the entire world.Instead of believing through the other,like all people of culture,they really believed in their own religion,and thus had no great sensitivity toward the cultural value of the other