Culture

Culture, to me, is simply a way of life, testified by those for whom it worked, to be effective ways of surviving through specific situations in their times. These situations may be external, such as earthquakes or the ice age, or internal, or "cultural", arising out of simply subscribing to the very paradigm the culture presents.

This way of life is typically accumulated through trial and error, similar in spirit to scientific methods - except that those who failed either died from their failure, or were rendered unable to testify by mechanisms built into the system to protect itself.

As such, it is difficult to gauge the value of subscribing to a culture. Situations in which prescribed solutions are effective may or may not happen again, or in cases may not happen often enough to justify the inconveniences of situations internal to the culture. Mechanisms built into cultures to preserve the culture may work positively or negatively when encountering situations not addressed by the culture. Maybe in done cases, the culture may "cause" more problems than it addresses. More often than not, internal issues form most of the experience of subscribing to the culture, thus you need to be "inside" to really "understand".

Whichever the case, while science gives verifiable explanations for its ways and religion gives explicit internal explanations, cultures don't offer any. Probably strategic I think - in that it's targeted to become your basic assumptions with which you explain everything else. In that way, it'd take you a long time before you figure out that you can question culture, just like you can question any philosophy, science or religion.