Quotes About Ritual

A priest is not somebody who knows how to perform the rain dance and end the drought. A priest is somebody who knows how to justify why the rain dance failed, and why we must keep believing in our god even though he seems deaf to all our prayers.

Many religions have also made extensive use of books, yet that doesn't mean reading books is a religious practice.

Today in Nepal, devotees of the goddess Gadhimai celebrate her festival every five years in the village of Bariyapur. A record was set in 2009 when 250,000 animals were sacrificed to the goddess. A local driver explained to a visiting British journalist that 'If we want anything, and we come here with an offering to the goddess, within five years all our dreams will be fulfilled.'26

and there are even cases of religiously inspired human sacrifice.

Dios. El sacerdote exclamaba «Hoc est corpus meum!» («¡Este es mi cuerpo!»), y, ¡abracadabra!, el pan se convertía en la carne de Cristo.

His father, who had rebelled early against his Scots Presbyterian upbringing and declared himself an "intellectual agnostic"—or had it been "agnostic intellectual"?—had protested, but his mother insisted that the human animal had a need for structure, for ritual and discipline, for the ties with the community that the church provided, and for a sense of something larger than itself.

You have becomes used to administering your mother's medication. So perhaps it is as if you are coming off medication, too? You are using your mother like a shield to protect yourself from making a life. Medication is a ritual which I have now erased from both your lives. Attention! You will have to invent another one.

A life without swimming every day was not a life I wanted.

dining room. On Sunday, supper was eaten early

a dream world, a world of magic and ritual, yet there are images there of the burning cars and radar systems, which remind you there is a price to be paid in order to gain this dream in the face of a world of violence.

Those of us who preach religion: Preach the meaning of "ritual," and stop burying the people and enslaving the people by religious rituals, and then showing them a hypocritical example in leadership!

Breakfast is everything. The beginning, the first thing. It is the mouthful that is the commitment to a new day, a continuing life.

Sometimes life is merely a matter of coffee and whatever intimacy a cup of coffee affords.

Anna imagines that, were she able to visit the caves in which people first dwelled, she would find scrawled drawings that have been omitted from museums and history books. There would be scenes of ritual aggression and submission, painted in blood, caked with dried seminal fluid. They are the very antithesis of fresh, the rites between men and women; age-old and rotten to the core.

One tradition I have with my friends is that when one of us gets married, we have a ton of fragrance oils and pretty bottles at the bachelorette party. Everyone puts a drop or two in a bottle for the bride and makes a wish, and the bride wears our creation on her wedding day.

What's more, he could fall asleep with her and wake up with her, spend the day with her, go to bed with her, and begin the wonderful ritual all over again. His

in many cultures, mirrors were believed to be magical objects that granted access to supernatural knowledge.

Without the outside context of a political war between faith and reason, Epicurus does not fear that any single point he might award to the religious will be used against him. Nor is he eager to have his followers shunning prayer or ritual in order to demonstrate publicly their disbelief. Outside the context of a political war between faith and reason, more nuanced arrangements may be safely undertaken.

When dinner was just about ready, [Mother] would go freshen up, changing clothes and putting on makeup. When one of my sisters once asked her how come she got ready and changed clothes right before dinner, Mom smiled and said, Because my husband is coming home. [Dick Amman]

The conservatism of a religion - it's orthodoxy - is the inert coagulum of a once highly reactive sap.

The indispensability of play-acting in the grim business of dying and killing is particularly evident in the case of armies. Their uniforms, flags, emblems, parades, music, and elaborate etiquette and ritual are designed to separate the soldier from his flesh-and-blood self and mask the overwhelming reality of life and death.

Invented tradition' is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past.

thaumaturgy

Heathen, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something he can see and feel.