A people is its social heritage – the learned patterns for thinking, feeling and acting that are transmitted from one generation to the next.  A people is its culture.  A society is a group of people who live within the same territory and share a culture.  Culture has to do with the customs of a people, and society with the people who are practicing these customs.  We talk about culture in terms of temporal epochs and about society in terms of developmental stages: stone age culture, technological society. Religious ideas are part of cultural inheritance, yet two peoples can share a culture yet practice different religions: e.g. both African traditionalists and African Muslim communities practice genital cutting. What are you going after in trying to make this distinction?  Is it important to separate religious ideas from other sorts of cultural practices?  

In order to buttress this explanation for the commonality of human choices as differing due to context in contrast to the explanation of cultural boundedness, consider how the context explanation better explains the conduct of a society that is widely but mistakenly held up as evidence that people can be limited by their culture – the Piraha (of Brazil).[1]  We can explain not only this society’s failure to count objects in the classic sense, to use pronouns, to tell creation myths and to write – but even its refusal to make changes.  Instead of hubristically explaining the Piraha's allegedly “anomalous” unwillingness to “progress” as due to cultural-boundedness (as claimed by anthropological imperialists), we can explain their behavior pragmatically:

a.       The reason that they refuse to learn to count in the classic sense (numbers) is because they would experience no benefit and only experience loss in learning to count.  First: they live in a tight-knit society of mutual barter and exchange of services (in lieu of trade), a society in which the pettiness of counting would interfere with their internal mutual support.[2]  Second: they face a lack of real bargaining power with European traders so that an attempt to count would lead to failed confrontation.

b.      Their refusal to learn to write maintains their interpersonal contact and also their dependence on each other; it maximizes the benefit that can be drawn from their highly interwoven communitarian society. In fact: if they were to lose that, they would not only lose the benefits of their society.  Rather, they would be more at prey to European traders.[3]

c.       The reason that they have no creation myths (and of course no history, which is not found in any foraging society[4]) is not because they are culturally limited.  Rather, they have no need for creation myths because they live in a resource-rich environment of consistent climate, with personal supportive human interaction.

In this book’s methodology, the Piraha failure to count objects in the classic sense, to use pronouns, to tell creation myths and to write are all behaviors with which each one of us can identify.  It is the behavior that most people would adopt if they found themselves living in a communitarian foraging society in which people all know each other by name, live in a consistent climate, and live with limited power against people with threatening interests.

[1] Contra Everett 2005, 621-634.

[2] Cf. Hamminga 2005, 86-87 on African culture.  Note: this is not to say that the Piraha do not notice significant differences in sums.  In line with all people (and with many animal species) the Piraha presumably perceptually subitize quantities of objects.  (For more on perceptual subitization, see Dehaene 1997, 66-72; et al.)

[3] Of course, there are also advantages to written communication.  Just as speech allowed hominids to maintain larger groups in which individuals spend more time away from each other on protein foraging than did cattarhini’s limited tactile and vocal social grooming (Aiello and Dunbar 1993, 185, 190-191) so does written communication extend that advantage.  However, under present conditions, the Piraha can find no resource/economic advantage in attempting to extend their reach over a larger area.

[4] This point is not made in any of the responses to Everett’s article printed in the same issue. 

[5] As Richard Rorty pointed out, some people are tone-deaf, some people are philosophy-deaf, and some people are religion-deaf (Rorty and Vattimo 2005, 39). [Similarly, just as “poetic thinking” is both varied within a culture and this range is similar cross-culturally (ibid), so is theistic feeling varied among individual personalities and is not merely a matter of cultural formation (contra Rorty 1989, 59-68).]

[6] Wittgenstein does point out correctly that when a person recognizes an object he does not see it interpretively, “as such”, but rather sees it the way it serves in the culture – as for example a fork, wrench or the letter x.  However, this is not due to society but rather experience.  After all, Wittgenstein also grants that one can see the same object in more than one way based on experience – so that I can look at a given object and see both a pipe wrench and a nutcracker (Wittgenstein 1980, 2 §515-517; Wittgenstein 1953, Ixi; Wittgenstein 1992, 44-46).  In fact experience is so critical according to Wittgenstein that it can lead to borrowing terms from an existent social language in order to create a private vocabulary (Murphey 1994, 195-197).

[7] For example, from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, humans and less developed organisms are hard-wired for both revenge and forgiveness.  However, the actual utilization of either option will depend upon the circumstances of the material and interactive world in which one lives (McCullough 2008, xvii, xviii, xix, 226).

It is true that sex differences are fixed in brain structure differences due to sex chromosomes (Witelson and Kigar 1992, 326-340; McCormik and Witelson 1994, 525-531; Witelson, Glezer, and Kigar 1995, 3418-3428; and Witelson, Kigar, and Harvey 1999, 2149-2153).  Nonetheless; in spite of evolutionary pressures that led to significant size differences between different structures of the standard male and female brain (Lindenfors, Nunn, and Barton 2007, 20; Dunbar 2007, 21), all healthy humans men and women share all the same brain structures and tend to be able to understand each other when they try to do so (at least, for the most part).

[8] Bereiter and Engelmann 1966, 55-56.

[9] Cf. Escandell-Vidal 1996, 634.

[10] This is not to deny that some people prefer to hold on to their old ways, especially when their previous identity included more significant or rewarding roles (for example, see Remenick and Shakhar 2003, 87-108).

[11] Raz 1999, 133.

[12] Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock 1991, 115.

The meaning of the term "culture" has been highly contested, especially within anthropology (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952; Baldwin et al. 2006). The first highly influential definition came from Edward Tylor (1871, 1), who opens his seminal anthropology text with the stipulation that culture is, "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." Subsequent authors have worried that Tylor's definition packs in too much, lumping together psychological items (e.g., belief) with external items (e.g., art). From a philosophical perspective, this would be especially problematic for those who hope that culture could be characterized as a natural kind, and thus as a proper subject for scientific inquiry. Other definitions often try to choose between the external and internal options in Tylor's definition.

On the external side, anthropologists have focused on both artifacts and behaviors. Herskovits (1948, 17) tells us that, "Culture is the man-made part of the environment," and Meade (1953, 22) says culture "is the total shared, learned behavior of a society or a subgroup." These dimensions are combined in Malinowski's (1931, 623) formulation: "Culture is a well organized unity divided into two fundamental aspects--a body of artifacts and a system of customs."

More recently, externally focused definitions of culture have taken a semiotic turn. According to Geertz (1973, 89), culture is "an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols." Culture, on such a view, is like a text--something that needs to be interpreted through the investigation of symbols.....

An even more radical break from psychology can be found in an approach called "cultural materialism" (Harris 2001). Cultural materialists believe that thick description thwarts explanation, because the factors that determine social practices are largely unknown to practitioners. For Harris, these factors principally involve material variables, such as the ecological conditions in which a group lives and the technologies available to it. Cultural variation and change can be best explained by these factors without describing richly elaborated practices, narratives, or psychological states. Harris calls the materialistic approach "etic" and contrasts it with the "emic" approaches, which try to capture a culture from within. This differs from Tylor's external/internal distinction because even external cultural items, such as artworks, may be part of emic analyses on Harris's model, since they belong to the symbolic environment of culture rather than, say, the ecological or technological environments--variables that can be repeated across cultural contexts. 

But psychological approaches to culture are also prevalent, and they have gained popularity as cognitive science has taken a cultural turn. D'Andrade (1995, 143) tells us that, since the 1950s, "Culture is often said to consist in rules… These rules are said to be implicit because ordinary people can't tell you what they are" (D'Andrade himself favors a more encompassing, processual definition, which includes both external items and the cognitive processes that interact with them). Richerson and Boyd (1995, 5) define culture as "information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation, and other forms of social transmission." Sperber (1996, 33) describes culture in terms of "widely distributed, lasting mental and public representations inhabiting a given social group."

In summary, most definitions characterize culture as something that is widely shared by members of a social group and shared in virtue of belonging to that group. As stated, this formulation is too general to be sufficient (a widespread influenza outbreak would qualify as cultural). Thus, this formulation must be refined by offering a specific account of what kind of shared items qualify as cultural, and what kind of transmission qualifies as social. The definitions reviewed here illustrate that such refinements are matters of controversy.

It is because conscience is directly related to a moral value system of some kind; religion cannot be disconnected from the human condition like one would disconnect a trailer from a towing vehicle. The innermost part of humanity can be directly affected by a religion and its belief systems. Thus our decision making process is solely based on our reasoning and conscience attributes and those attributes are directly connected to the spiritual side of our humanity. In the end, they are inter-related and work together to develop the whole person. These concepts can best be understood by reading my book. Made in the Image of God: Understanding the Nature of God and Mankind in a Changing World.

Religion is a two way relationship between an individual and society, and also from a society towards the individual. The society influence is not arguable and the dissent is not always tolerated. The culture is mainly a influence from a society towards the individual, and it is does not always include religion. Please note many Asian societies with the corresponding cultures; they are not tied to religion, any religion. Perhaps one can say that culture incorporates religion, when it is present. However, religion is not necessarily a component of culture. My 2 cents,...