Quotes About Rituals

I hate predicting football scores that mean a lot to me, because even though I'm an absolute materialist and don't believe in anything superstitious, I get superstitious.

Who knew we had all this O.C.D. in the world? Well actually, I suppose it's pretty obvious. It explains Sudoku, doesn't it?

To be clean in body and spirit, they went to water, bathing often in clear pools and mountain streams. They considered water, the sun, and fire to be holy gifts of Kanati , the Great Spirit.

loving, instead of depleting and effortful. Some pussification practices have become daily rituals. I take a bath instead of a shower because it makes me feel more relaxed and beautiful. I use lavender-scented Epsom salts because they smell nicer than the plain ones. After the bath I use coconut oil on my skin; it smells beautiful and nourishes the skin deeply.

The Romans may not have understood the Jewish religion, with its strange observances and its overwhelming obsession with ritual purity—"The Jews regard as profane all that we hold sacred," Tacitus wrote, "while they permit all that we abhor"—but they nevertheless tolerated it.

RELIGIONS BECOME INSTITUTIONS when the myths and rituals that once shaped their sacred histories are transformed into authoritative models of orthodoxy (the correct interpretation of myths) and orthopraxy (the correct interpretation of rituals), though one is often emphasized over the other.

manism (ancestor cults)—but it was not as concerned

Our Paleolithic ancestors lived in small-scale communities—an extended family sharing a shelter. Their sense of solidarity was engendered first and foremost by birth and blood, not by symbols and rituals.

Religion, it must be understood, is not faith. Religion is the story of faith. It is an institutionalized system of symbols and metaphors (read rituals and myths) that provides a common language with which a community of faith can share with each other their numinous encounter with the Divine Presence.

Acesta este locul in care vei fi cel mai aproape de Dumnezeu. Duhoarea carnagiului este imposibil de ignorat. Intra in piele si in par ca o povara otravitoare de care vei scapa cu greu. Preotii ard tamaie pentru a alunga duhoarea si boala, dar amestecul de mirt, scortisoara, sofran si tamaie nu poate masca mirosul pestilential al macelului.

Literal religion is full of pitfalls.

Though the details differ across the world, no known culture lacks some version of the time-consuming, wealth consuming, hostility provoking rituals, the anti-factual, counter-productive fantasies of religion.

The American comedian Cathy Ladman observes that 'All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays.

Blind faith can justify anything.* If a man believes in a different god, or even if he uses a different ritual for worshipping the same god, blind faith can decree that he should die—on the cross, at the stake, skewered on a Crusader's sword, shot in a Beirut street, or blown up in a bar in Belfast. Memes for blind faith have their own ruthless ways of propagating themselves. This is true of patriotic and political as well as religious blind faith.

To an evolutionary psychologist, the universal extravagance of religious rituals, with their costs in time, resources, pain and privation, should suggest as vividly as a mandrills bottom that religion may be adaptive. —MAREK KOHN

I suddenly discovered that cooking was a rich and layered and endlessly fascinating subject. The best way to describe it is to say that I fell in love with French food- the tastes, the processes, the history, the endless variations, the rigorous discipline, the creativity, the wonderful people, the equipment, the rituals.

The Fourth Crown Princess of the blue Cresent Islands had sixteen rituals to observe from the moment of waking to when she broke her fast.

Judaism offered no Shivah for lost love. There was no Kaddish to say, no candle to burn...no injunction against listening to music or going to work.

It was quiet; so quiet. Didn't these people know how to grieve for a good man? Didn't they know how to weep, and scream with rage, and curse the powers of darkness in their sorrow? Didn't they know how to hold one another, and dry one another's tears, and tell tales of the things he had done, and of what he had been, to see him safe on his way? Where were the great fires, and the toasts in strong ale, and the scent of burning juniper?

Both my mother and father regarded a traditional ceremony as old-fashioned and redundant. Both she and my father wanted to get rid of rituals like that, which they felt had nothing to do with their feelings. Love was the only thing that mattered to these two revolutionaries.

Yet my study of the history of religion has revealed that human beings are spiritual animals. Indeed, there is a case for arguing that Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus

Like any skill, religion requires perseverance, hard work, and discipline. Some people will be better at it than others, some appallingly inept, and some will miss the point entirely. But those who do not apply themselves will get nowhere at all. Religious people find it hard to explain how their rituals and practices work, just as a skater may not be fully conscious of the physical laws that enable her to glide over the ice on a thin blade.

A primitive capitalism had developed, which had quite different priorities. The lavish sacrifices had been designed to impress the gods and to enhance the patron's prestige. By the fifth century, these eastern peoples had realized that their improved trade and agriculture brought them far more wealth and status than the Vedic rites.

Many Islamic rituals, philosophies, doctrines, sacred texts, and shrines are the result of frequently anguished and self-critical contemplation of the political events of Islamic society.