More on authority

Last week I was thinking about how the current two poles of polarized Catholicism can be distinguished by where they think authority for judgments of truth and goodness comes from. Does it come from outside yourself, from an institution that was founded by God, or does it come from inside yourself, from your cultural formation and reasoning about all you have heard and seen. This week I am thinking that cultural formation is the whole answer.

When you are a kid, there is a source of authority. You learn what you learn about what is true and good from parents, teachers, religious leaders, the conventional sense of the people you live with. Even later, there is a source of authority for stuff you can't know by yourself: the cause of gravitational pull, the inner workings of the nervous system, what medications to take to cure the disease, most things scientific. There are innumerable bits of information in the universe, and most of the known bits we have to take on the authority of the community of inquiry that has studied the questions.
So the question is not about authority really. It's about where your cultural formation has taught you to look for its source and the language you use to talk about it. Anybody likely to be reading this is convinced the source of authority is human discovery. And I suspect most would say that the "divine" quality, or the mysterious something beyond us, is in the knowledge-discovering consciousness of humans that drives cultural evolution. If we use the word "God" it is in a non-theistic sense, reference to the mysterious creative force we can't comprehend. However, if you were formed entirely within the language usage of the Roman Catholic Church, you are likely to say it comes from God and given to men, the particular men who make up the institutional church. Voila! All about cultural formation and the language usage of your thought patterns.
Thinking about it this way makes me feel better. There is still a point in going head to head with someone who is formed in a different culture and using a different language, but there is no sense to indignation and blame for the other's lack of comprehension. What do you think?