I am not trying to dance around. And I am not even necessarily going to ever bring up the actual standards of this community into this thread. I am trying to understand what universal principles one is supposed to use to determine which societies we are supposed to look at to determine what the “universal” standard of modesty is. I’m sorry if you feel as though I am trying to trap you or some such thing. Thats really not what I am doing at all. I have heard various people make a claim before that there is such a universal standard, most of them never even begin to attempt to explain how we can possibly know what that standard is though. You, and one or two people I have talked to before, have tried to explain it, and since I like to try and understand other people’s positions and understandings of a subject so that if they are correct I can modify my own understanding of things, I am trying to understand how, concretely, one determines whether or not a society can be considered modest for the purposes of determining this universal standard of modesty. I am not trying to trap you. Honestly, I don’t understand why it matters whether or not this particular society even exists for the sake of the current discussion, but, as it happens, it actually does. I am trying to understand how, without any prior knowledge of what the universal standard of modesty is, determine which societies are to be looked at in order to determine what the universal standard of modesty is. And, to be honest, I am beginning to think that your reasoning actually is circular. I, of course, am willing to be corrected on that, but the thing is that you seem to be claiming that in order to determine whether or not a society can be counted in these “modest societies” we need to know what that societies actual rules about modesty are, and then base our judgement of whether or not the society is modest off of what their particular standards of dress are. However, if that is true, then you are relying on having a set determination of what is and is not modest clothing in order to determine what societies are supposedly showing us what the universal standard of modesty is. In other words, your attempt to give a universal way to determine standards of modesty looks like it is actually resting on a pre-assumed idea of what the standard of modest clothing is. The reason this seems to be the case is because of this part of what you wrote above
Perhaps I am misunderstanding you about this, and if so I would love to be corrected.
To be honest, though, we really do seem to be going around in circles, and that is because I am looking for a set of all the information needed to determine whether or not a society is modest. The problem is, though that every time I try to apply the requirements to a particular society you say that there are actually more requirements than those you have already stated. If you can give me a list of
all the requirements for determining that a particular society is one to look to for determining the universal standard of modesty then we will not keep going around in circles anymore as I will have the answer to my question, namely, I will understand the reasoning behind the claim that there is a universal standard of modesty.