The Welcome to the Stone Choir podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler.

And I'm still, whoa. On today's Stone Choir, we're going to be discussing honor and shame.

At the beginning of the year, we did an episode on the nature of religion, true religion, and we made the point there

at the beginning of that five-part series, actually I think six-part arc. I'd recommend you go back

and listen to after this episode. In the true religion episode, we made the point that a man's

true religion is the source of his morality. Where are you getting your right and wrong

from? Today's episode is we're focusing on honor and shame. It's kind of a rehash of that

premise, but we're going to take a different lens to approach the subject. So we're going to be

repeating ourselves with things we said about morality, but I want to connect to the fact that

the way a society honor certain things, the way a society shames certain things, is fundamentally

the same thing. You know, morality is right and wrong, and then honor and shame are

enforcement of what we believe are right and wrong. So where honor and shame are applied,

it's not always exactly right and wrong, but underlying both of them is a fundamental premise.

You have a group of people that have collectively decided as a culture. These are the rules.

Here's the benchmark for outstanding performance. And then the further

you get away from that benchmark, the more shameful you are. You know, you have people who are just

kind of average. You have the heroes to whom we accord honor. And you have those who are

shamed. So by the end of the episode, I hope that you'll have another way of kind of evaluating

fights you see online, things you see in politics or anywhere in the world.

If something is being upheld as an honorable task or activity or manner of speech or whatever,

or if something is being specifically highlighted is, this is the most shameful,

despicable, wicked stuff in the world. If all the opprobrium, all the shame in the world

...