Quote from: quinone on August 15, 2012, 02:26 am"You do not belong here unless you respect the traditions of the West"There is an EASTERN CULTURE too.I'm happy for you that you have a robust vocabulary, but using it to behave in a different manner makes you pretentious.The phrase "the West" does not refer to a geographical region even if historically the origin of the concept comes from from a small area of the Mediterranean.See the wiki:Quotehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_worldAlthough the term originally had a literal geographic meaning, contrasting Europe with the linked cultures of civilizations of the Near East (Muslim world), South Asia and remote Far East (Sinosphere)[citation needed], today it has little geographic relevance. Nations generally accepted to be part of the Western world occupy both hemispheres created by the arbitrary division of the earth at Greenwich or strongly related to Europe.The concept of the Western part of the earth has its roots in Greco-Roman civilization in Europe, with the advent of Christianity. In the modern era, Western culture has been heavily influenced by the traditions of Renaissance, Protestant Reformation, Age of Enlightenment, and shaped by the expansive colonialism of the 16th-20th centuries. Its political usage was temporarily informed by a mutual antagonism with the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War in the mid-to-late 20th Century (19451991).In the contemporary cultural meaning, the Western world includes many countries of Europe as well as many countries of European colonial origin in the Americas and Oceania, such as the United States of America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, etc.In addition, a country like Japan is part of the West. It has a relatively democratic process & free markets. Those, among others, are the ideals of the West.Similarly, China is becoming more Western due to its acceptance of markets, and eventually it will reach a point where it can be definitively said to be part of the West. It is almost there economically for example. Again, "the West" is an idea, not a place.In any case I would never argue that geographically Eastern philosophers are generally inferior to geographical Western ones. Some are strong and some are weak. For example, I have little time for Confucianism but have a good deal of respect for Taoist and Shinto thought.