Quotes About Rituals

There is no priest to interpret it or monopolize the performance of ritual actions, as in some other religions. This is also a reason why translations are not installed in gurdwaras and Sikhs insist on the importance of the original language, for all translations are interpretations to some extent. It is the message contained in the book that matters.

If the principle of impurity is admitted, then impurity is everywhere. There are worms in cow dung and in wood. Many though the grains of corn be, there is none of them which does not contain life. There was life in the primordial waters from which vegetation came. How can impurity be warded off? It is to be found in every kitchen. Nanak says, pollution is not removed in this way [through rituals]. It is washed away by knowledge of God. (AG 472)

Ritual disposal of the dead speaks clearly of an awareness of death, and thus an awareness of self.

It was cat's blood, used in a variety of rituals. Once a week, always at a different pet store or animal pound, he bought or "adopted" a cat, brought it home, killed it, and drained it to maintain a fresh supply of blood.

We need rituals for all traumas and loss, whether it is betrayal or infidelity or violence or murder. Ritual helps us heal, and ritual helped me heal and become ready to consider the person who murdered Angela, his story, his pain.

seemed a bit unsanitary to be burying people in the marketplace.

According to the vicar, many of the local folk thought the War was due in part to people turning away from their roots and omitting to take proper precautions, such as burying a sacrifice under the foundation, that is, or burning fishes' bones on the hearth—except haddocks, of course," he added, happily distracted. "You never burn a haddock's bones—did you know?—or you'll never catch another. Always bury the bones of a haddock instead.

TRADITIONS REASSURE US THAT WE BELONG TOGETHER

Le riflessioni che il negozio del macellaio ispira a chi vi entra con la borsa della spesa coinvolgono cognizioni tramandate per secoli in varie branche del sapere: la competenza delle carni e del tagli, il miglior modo di cuocere ogni pezzo, i riti che permettono di placare il rimorso per l'uccisione d'altre vite al fine di nutrire la propria.

during the last century doctors have affected epidemics no more profoundly than did priests during earlier times. Epidemics came and went, imprecated by both but touched by neither. They are not modified any more decisively by the rituals performed in medical clinics than by those customary at religious shrines

Sources of collective effervescence—ceremonies, musical performances, sports, dances, rituals within churches—shift the rhythms of our bodies to a shared biological rhythm, breaking down that most basic barrier between self and other, the idea that we are physically separated by the boundaries of our skin.

Isn't atheism just another religion?' No, it isn't. Atheism has no creeds, rituals, holy book, absolute moral code, origin myth, sacred spaces or shrines. It has no sin, divine judgment, forbidden words, prayer, worship, prophecy, group privileges, or anointed 'holy' leaders. Atheists don't believe in a transcendent world or supernatural afterlife. Most important, there is no orthodoxy in atheism.

Arriving here feels like landing on some remote island where a bunch of people have been living for years, in isolation, making up their own rules and rituals and religion and language—even, to some extent, inventing their own reality. This happens at all organizations, but for some reason tech start-ups seem

Take away religion and you seem to create a vacuum that shopping and the like rush to fill. Spiritualism, which is flourishing, isn't the same thing; it doesn't forbid much of anything except perhaps self-awareness. And religious practice without genuine faith doesn't seem to work either; apparently rituals have to be faith based, like any other placebo, to have any benefit.

Animals may perform rituals, even quite elaborate ones, but only humans commemorate and celebrate, and only humans tie these to a belief system.

Every 'Oprah Winfrey Show' has about it the aura of Oprah's own life, just as the rituals and sacraments of a religion are suffused with the life of the religion's founder. Above the testimony of Oprah's guests hovers what viewers know about Oprah's experience.

Where I grew up, in a remote village at the back of a valley, the old still thought the dead needed attending to - a notion so universal, it's enscribed in all religions. If you didn't, they might exact revenge upon the living.

In the villages in Europe, there are still healers who tell stories.

Friends and neighbors hugged, and even kissed. Though it felt strange, and even slightly naughty. Some still preferred to bump elbows. Others continued to carry their masks. Like a rosary, or rabbit's foot, or a St. Christopher medal, promising safe passage.

Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the first been captured and formalised by conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore.

Dice il professore che l'umanità si divide in quelli che si fanno la doccia e in quelli che si fanno il bagno.

We worked and we ate and we celebrated birthdays and gossiped and read and wrote and prayed and we woke up each morning to do it all over again.

I don't think religions are based on lies, but I don't think they're based on truths, either. I think they come about because of what people need at the time that they need them. Like the World Series player who won't take off his lucky socks, or the mother of the sick child who believes that her baby can sleep only if she's sitting by the crib – believers need, by definition, something to believe in.

Sexual gratitude is an emotion much less frequent in modern days than in mediæval times, owing to the fact that industrialism has cheapened the value of the sex-thrill by lowering the ritual-walls surrounding it. In modern times it needs a profoundly magnanimous and even quixotic nature to feel this emotion to any extreme degree.