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The following article about beliefs is just an expression of my thoughts. It is certainly not definitive.

In my opinion, we live our life on the basis of beliefs. We, literally live in a huge belief system. So seamlessly integrated (into our world) are some beliefs that most people assume that they are natural and accepted them without questioning.

The very act of reading this article is belief-based, because the very construct that is formed in your head now is conceptual & of the thinking mind. Perhaps, what really is does not just exist as concepts, but also exists in the NOW as experience. Although one is able to describe or conceptualize a truth, the conceptualization is itself a thought.

Beliefs can be very powerful, especially when the majority of the population buys into it. Sometime a certain belief when set in motion, causes catalytic reactions, triggering the formation of yet other beliefs. Gradually, layers upon layers of beliefs mire directness and truth. So thickly laden with beliefs and far removed from the original spontaneity that life becomes unnecessarily complex and ritualized.
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The father in the Roman family (paterfamilias) exercised absolute and lifelong power over all other family members (patria potestas): his wife, children, and slaves. If the father’s father was alive – then he was the supreme authority in the household. Fathers were even allowed to execute their grown sons for serious offenses like treason.

Each house maintained a cult of ancestors and hearth gods and the paterfamilias was its priest. The family was thought to posses a “genius” (gens) – an inner spirit – passed down the generations. The living and the dead members of the family shared the gens and were bound by it.

Legitimate offspring belonged to the father’s family. The father retained custody if the couple (rarely) divorced exclusively at the husband’s initiative. The father had the right to disown a newborn – usually deformed boys or girls. This led to a severe shortage of women in Rome.
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Where does starvation exist in the world today? What are some of the causes of world hunger? Are citizens of developed countries donating monetarily to the ongoing relief efforts? In this article I will address these questions with the hope that by creating an understanding of the current world hunger situation, morally conscious individuals will do their part in contributing to the eradication of this unseen suffering.

It is a well known fact that there is enough food in the world to feed every human being on earth. Sadly, malnutrition and hunger still afflict one out of every seven people in the world today. Or, from a slightly different statistical perspective, the current world population is 4,712,200,000. The number of malnourished is 797,900,000. Therefore 17% of the world population is currently malnourished or starving. No matter how you examine the issue, a current crisis is at hand. Why is this so?

The causes of starvation are complex, but there are some common threads that seem to be associated with this problem. First and foremost, starvation is caused by poverty. To address the problem of world hunger then the problem of global poverty must be addressed. Therefore, the question that we should examine is what are the causes of poverty. A thorough discussion on the causes of global poverty is outside the purview of this article. Entire textbooks have been written on the subject. For our discussion, it is suffice to say that one of the major causes of poverty is governments pursuing policies that inhibit self sufficiency.
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Despite adamant claims to the contrary, racism continues to plague many peoples around the world. The first step toward resolving issues of racial intolerance and prejudice is to develop an understanding of the underlying concepts and their labels.

This (rather long) article touches on the following topics:

• Stereotypes, Race, and Racism
• Culture and Cultural Imperialism
• Nationalism and National Imaginary

I hope you find this article helpful.

Stereotypes
According to Stroebe and Insko (1989), the term ‘stereoptype’ originated in 1798 to describe a printing process that involved casts of pages of type. The term was first used in relation to the social and political arena in 1922 by Walter Lippman, referring to our perception of different groups.

Since then, the meaning of the term has been vigorously debated. Stereotyping was considered by some as the oversimplified, biased cognitive representations of “undesirable rigidity, permanence, and lack of variability from application to application” (ibid, 1989, p.4). Others, such as Brown (1965), considered it a natural fact of life like any other generalisation; “many generalisations acquired by heresay are true and useful” (cited in Stroebe & Insko, 1989, p.5).

Stroebe and Insko (1989) settle on a simple definition which sits somewhere in between these two schools of thought. They define a stereotype as the “set of beliefs about the personal attributes of a group of people” (p.5). They obviously accept that stereotypes are not necessarily rigid, permanent, or invariable, but they do still distinguish between stereotypes and other categories, claiming that stereotypes are characterised by a bias towards the ingroup and away from the outgroup (p.5).

Yzerbyt, et al (1997) attempt to explain the existence of stereotypes, suggesting that stereotypes provide not only a set of (often unjustified) attributes to describe a group, but also a rationale for maintaining that set of attributes. This allows people to “integrate incoming information according to their specific views” (p.21).
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