Among Moslems the focus on family is extreme and seems to indicate survival of the old paganism.
In Asia large business was mostly impossible except as enterprise of the ruler or of strictly family concerns until the Christians came. Viet Nam now has about 10% indigenous Christians and they make up the core of the business class because they can trust each other without having to have family connections. The nonChristians have learned to work with the Christians and do it the same way.
The Chinese, for all their great flowering of enterprise are still pretty much stuck with the ruler's businesses and family businesses. The great Chinese businesses outside of China proper hit ceilings where they need to take on foreign CEOs or Financial officers and it doesn't work. The Family cannot learn to trust the foreigner and the foreigner cannot work well in such a milieu.
Islam is the most exaggerated of family cultures. There is no trust in anything outside of the family. The religion doesn't help development because it specifically renders it "moral" to cheat a nonMoslem and to take from a nonMoslem at every opportunity.
All non JudaeoChristian major religions produce lying as the main everyday method of interaction beyond the family. In Hindu paganism and in the various paganisms of Africa and Asia, to tell a nonfamily person a true thing is to give him power over oneself and one's family. Truthtelling is a liability. Bhuddism is not a major religiion in this reckoning because the great majority of its nominal adherents are, in fact, pagans or Confucianists and Daoists.
Confucianism and its partial replacement, Maoism, produce obedience to the center, to the ruler and trust only vertically , none laterally outside of the family.
Congress cannot make any law respecting an establishment of religion. Under God in the pledge is not an establishment of religion. Neither is prayer in the schools. Establishing religion is making one religion the only legal religion or taxing to support a religious organization or it is an official religious test to hold office.
The morality that makes modern society possible is the morality of Torah extended to the world by Christianity. That morality cannot be sustained solely by legislatures and courts and Wise Men who study and decide what is useful without a background of JudaeoChristianiat. The more Christianity is pushed out of our public life the more are the laws that must be made to regulate life and the finer and finer are the aspects of life that will be the subject of laws.
From time to time I see ridiculous aryanesque justifications for why Christianity is "superior" to all other religions, like yours. And like yours, they all are also premised on ignorant medieval concoctions of what other religions are really all about.
But hands down the majority of these kinds of diatribes come from islamists.
Great thoughts on the centrality of Christianity to current world civilization. Christianity is really the only one of all the religions that offers a sense of redemption for sins - not even Judaism does that. Somehow I think that frees Christians to trust others in economic transactions, though I am at a loss to further explain this hunch.
"The Chinese, for all their great flowering of enterprise are still pretty much stuck with the ruler's businesses and family businesses. The great Chinese businesses outside of China proper hit ceilings where they need to take on foreign CEOs or Financial officers and it doesn't work. The Family cannot learn to trust the foreigner and the foreigner cannot work well in such a milieu."
I worked for billionaire Cyrus Tang, richest asian American. Cheap bastard. I was writing software to manage his $30 million petty cash stock market position, but his white CFO couldn't handle paying the last $500 of the first installment. As you state, "the Family cannot learn to trust the foreigner"