Quotes About Rituals

Masonry is not a religion. He who makes of it a religious belief, falsifies and denaturalizes it.

My own view on religion is . . . It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and . . . to chronicle eclipses . . . These two services I am prepared to acknowledge.

Each religion by the help of more or less myth which it takes more or less seriously proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.

Religion as a philosophy is superior to religion as a practice.

This worship of Humanity, with its rituals of Liberty and Equality, always struck me as like being a revival of the ancient cults, in which animals were gods or the gods bore the heads of animals.

When prayer, rituals and ascetic life are just a means of self-indulgence, they are harmful rather than beneficial.

People easily understand that 'primitives' cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together around the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis.

If you want to make people believe in imaginary entities such as gods and nations, you should make them sacrifice something valuable.

If you want to make people believe in imaginary entities such as gods and nations, you should make them sacrifice something valuable. The more painful the sacrifice, the more convinced people are of the existence of the imaginary recipient.

For religions, spirituality is a dangerous threat.

distortions of ancient traditions characterize all religions.

In ancient agricultural societies, most religions revolved not around metaphysical questions and the afterlife, but around the very mundane issue of increasing agricultural output. Thus

Religions, rites, and rituals will remain important as long as the power of humankind rests on mass cooperation and as long as mass cooperation rests on belief in shared fictions.

It may well be that foragers switched from gathering wild wheat to intense wheat cultivation, not to increase their normal food supply, but rather to support the building and running of a temple. In the conventional picture, pioneers first built a village, and when it prospered, they set up a temple in the middle. But Göbekli Tepe suggests that the temple may have been built first, and that a village later grew up around it.

A verdadeira especialidade dos sacerdotes e dos gurus nunca foi provocar a chuva, curar, fazer profecias ou magia. A sua especialidade foi sempre a interpretação. Um sacerdote não é alguém que sabe fazer uma dança da chuva para pôr fim à seca. Um sacerdote é alguém que sabe justificar por que motivo a dança da chuva não resultou, e por que motivo devemos continuar a acreditar no nosso deus apesar de ele parecer ignorar as nossas orações.

Según los legisladores franceses, si un abogado autorizado seguía la liturgia y los rituales adecuados, escribía todos los conjuros y juramentos en un pedazo de papel bellamente decorado, y añadía su adornada rúbrica al final del documento, entonces (¡abracadabra!) se constituía legalmente una nueva compañía. Cuando

Daca vrei sa-i determini pe oameni sa creada in enitati imaginare precum zeii si natiunile, ar trebui sa-i faci sa sacrifice ceva de pret.

The average Christian believes in the monotheist God, but also in the dualist Devil, in polytheist saints, and in animist ghosts. Scholars of religion have a name for this simultaneous avowal of different and even contradictory ideas and the combination of rituals and practices taken from different sources. It's called syncretism. Syncretism might, in fact, be the single great world religion. The

Of all rituals, sacrifice is the most potent, because of all the things in the world, suffering is the most real. You can never ignore it or doubt it. If you want to make people really believe in some fiction, entice them to make a sacrifice on its behalf.

This network of artificial instincts is called 'culture'.

pero los humanos necesitamos creer en ellos. Así, ¿cómo hacer que el relato se perciba como real? Es evidente por qué los humanos quieren creer en él, pero ¿cómo se lo creen realmente? Ya hace miles de años que sacerdotes y chamanes dieron con la respuesta: mediante rituales. Un ritual es un acto mágico que hace que lo abstracto sea concreto y lo ficticio,

and there are even cases of religiously inspired human sacrifice.

There are Tantrics who deliberately break taboos and social norms and then there are other Tantrics who, by means of their practices and the way that they practice, that to society in general, it may have the appearance of breaking social norms but in fact that is just the manifestation of the progress of their practice.

Donata didn't have a problem with being naked, per se. Witches didn't have the same attitude toward the human body that Christians often had; nudity was accepted, and many Witches performed major rituals "skyclad." But she sure as hell didn't want to end up running through the building with her boobs flapping in the breeze if things went wrong.