Quotes About Rituals

It was here that Euday caught up with her. He said, "You notice the graves all face to the east?" She hadn't, but they did. She said, "What's the reason for that?" "So their spirits could fly home to Africa.

All acts of love and pleasure are my rituals

In short, liturgies make us certain kinds of people, and what defines us is what we love.

My aunt Lina will be waiting there with her apron open, ready to catch the head. She makes the best souse—that's from the tongue, ears and feet—this side of the Cumberland Gap. But my favorite part of the whole day, since I was small, is when Daddy tips all the innards into a tub and we get to choose the best bit to roast.

Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.

Among the most important such innovations is the human love of using symbolic markers to show our group memberships. From the tattoos and face piercings used among Amazonian tribes through the male circumcision required of Jews to the tattoos and facial piercings used by punks in the United Kingdom, human beings take extraordinary, costly, and sometimes painful steps to make their bodies advertise their group memberships

But when secular organizations demand sacrifice, every member has a right to ask for a cost-benefit analysis, and many refuse to do things that don't make logical sense. In other words, the very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship.

singing in choruses, performing in marching bands, listening to sermons, attending political rallies, and meditating. Most of my students have experienced the switch at least once, although only a few had a life-changing experience. More commonly, the effects fade away within a few hours or days.

You've got to look at the ways that religious beliefs work with religious practices to create a religious community.11 Believing, doing, and belonging are three complementary yet distinct aspects of religiosity

Gods and religions, in sum, are group-level adaptations for producing cohesiveness and trust. Like maypoles and beehives, they are created by the members of the group, and they then organize the activity of the group. Group-level adaptations, as Williams noted, imply a selection process operating at the group level.

But even those who reject all religions cannot shake the basic religious psychology of figure 11.2: doing linked to believing linked to belonging.

the very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship. Irrational beliefs can sometimes help the group function more rationally, particularly when those beliefs rest upon the Sanctity foundation.33 Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.

It was bizarre, getting to know for the first time a woman whose body I'd entered. In the scrambled word game of contemporary mating rituals, there was greater intimacy in her tales of woe than there had been in the opening of her thighs.

Part of the beauty of Judaism, and surely this is so for other faiths also, is that it gently restores control over time. Three times a day we stop what we are doing and turn to God in prayer. We recover perspective. We inhale a deep breath of eternity.

Al final será verdad que el fin del mundo no está tan lejos. En realidad se ha visto venir siempre que ese fin no podía estar muy lejos. Mientras lo esperan, los seres humanos se entretienen celebrando funerales, pequeñas imitaciones del gran final por venir.

Individuals who are not comfortable or adept with rituals sometimes evade them by substituting procedures. They can be found, for example, among people who like to help the hostess with preparing or serving food and drink at parties.

Games are clearly differentiated from procedures, rituals, and pastimes by two chief characteristics: (1) their ulterior quality and (2) the payoff. Procedures may be successful, rituals effective, and pastimes profitable, but all of them are by definition candid; they may involve contest, but not conflict, and the ending may be sensational, but it is not dramatic. Every game, on the other hand, is basically dishonest, and the outcome has a dramatic, as distinct from merely exciting, quality.

We might laugh at the notion of plastic tea sets in the jungle, but it is a time-honored ritual for Western travelers to collect preindustrial artifacts to use as home decorations...Possession of primitive artifacts suggests worldly knowledge, just as in the highland communities of Borneo an electronic wristwatch that plays "Happy Birthday" is the mark of a great traveler. Funny thing how travel can narrow the mind.

Hebrews 10:4 says, 'For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins." This lets us know that all of the sacrifices that have been made never took away sins. Although God valued them-in that their sacrifice was a sign of obedience-they didn't act as an eternal propitiation for our sins.

One attended one's church, and one stood and one kneeled and one sat at the proper times and did what was required of one, but to scratch beneath this highly lacquered surface was to venture well beyond the pale in that society and invite stares and whispers and certain banishment.

You have to be a medicine cat....

I give you this life for honoring old traditions on behalf of the future.

Many of us cling to particular vessels, fetishizing over this mug or that plate.

It's not birthday cake in itself that is the problem. It's the surrounding culture of food, where sweet treats are ever-present, consumed without ceremony.