If we broaden our definition of religion, it loses much of its descriptive power, and we'll have to invent a new word to describe the Abrahamic religions with their jealous God, which define clear in-groups and out-groups, that define modes of clothing and ritual that mark out believers and non-believers, that require some kind of sacrifice to belong, and that are fundamentally underpinned by the idea of a Covenant, a contract that rewards people for following the tenets and punishes those who don't.
Personally, I think religion is a fine word for this. I'd rather keep it that way. Ritual without belief and concomitant warm fuzzies of doing the Right Thing is something else.
That's a very interesting observation. I'd had to read an eye-opening book called "The Heathen in his Blindness" [1] to understand the cultural grounding I stand on.
As an Indian, whose own mother tongue has been neglected by the neo-colonial state, and thus whose own epistemological roots are muddied up with those from an over-bearing English imposition, it has become very difficult for me to see the difference between Abrahamic traditions and the contemporary Indian ones (in the city atleast). The latter simply don't make sense anymore (which is likely why a lot of people are irreligious).
On the other hand, more than half of the traditional schools in India don't believe in a creator, and it's not clear if any of them actually believe the "devas" (godlings?) exist. Buddhism for instance borrows heavily from the Indian pantheon of devas, but expressedly keeps mum about their existence; those on the "Astika" side like Mimansa, while attesting the grounding of the Vedas, don't believe in the existence or literal use of many of the categories in contemporary Hindu life. Other than these, there was also a school of determinism (slaughtered off by Ashoka), a (much maligned) materialist school, along with who knows how many others - many of them were atheistic (in the Abrahamic sense). I'm not even sure what the semantics of "creator" is in the Sanskrit literature; there is a lot it, but its study is seen with utter contempt (centers of Indic study are now in N.Y, Heidelberg and Kyoto). Likewise, Yoga, meditation... gained mass appeal in India, after they took off in the West.
It's almost a curse to be able to see all this, and be able to do very little to ameliorate it. Considering the poverty of my native tongue, it'd be very difficult for me to express it to the masses. Even if I learn the millennia old
language, no one would understand it.
I think the mistake is to conflate "religion" with "Abrahamic religions". In my opinion, a religion is characterized solely by an act of worship that has a supernatural justification.
> with their jealous God
Does not even describe what many catholics actually believe. Does ignore polytheist and atheist religion.
> define clear in-groups and out-groups
Living in Japan, I was surprised to discover that religion is not considered exclusive. A lot of people go both to Shinto places and Buddhist places here. And that's ok. They also don't mind when tourists come to say hello to a kami. It is not disrespectful as it would be in a christian church.
> Personally, I think religion is a fine word for this.
Well it is called "Abrahamic religion". Buddhism and arguably taoism are atheist religion. Sikhism, hiduism (and even some forms of islam) recognize some other religions as being on the good path.
Asking every religion to have the same characteristics as abrahamic religions is a bit like saying that a language that do not use latin characters is not really a language.
Well, Green ideology (environmentalism, recycling etc.) is also a religion IMO. It has rituals, it has targets of hate and love, it has a promise of salvation and a threat of doom, it requires daily sacrifices of convenience to follow, etc.
Whereas if you're very loose about what you think is religion, you can't use the word by analogy any more. Any old ritual might be described as a religion. A morning commute might be a religion. I think that's too dry.
Try the definition I gave: "An ideology that requires acts of worship that have supernatural justifications". Some ecologists are indeed close to having a religion. If you recycle your trash to help your own self-sustainability, it is not an action that has a natural justification. If you light some candles on the crescent moon to help the harvest, yes, you are acting religiously.
> Any old ritual might be described as a religion
Depends on the justification. Do you do that because of nostalgia or because of habit? Not religion. Do you do it because you think the ley lines will feed you energy for the day? Religion.
> A morning commute might be a religion
Are you doing your morning commute because you want a salary by the end of the moon (not a religion) or because you think that commute helps prevent the Ragnarok (religion)?
This is not an analogy, this is a pretty well-defined notion. And you need a wide encompassing definition if you want to be inclusive to all the religions usually recognized in the world. Jealous god, covenant and hell, these are far too restrictive christian-centric (protestant-centric actually) criterion, and would exclude the religion of at least a billion of believers.
> we'll have to invent a new word to describe the Abrahamic religions
Why not just use 'Abrahmic religions' then?
The fact that we apply the term religion to Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, etc. means that the conventional definition of the word does not coincide with those qualities of Abrahmic faiths that you described.
> for the concept of religion to remain a useful cross-cultural category it must be shorn of its Abrahamic assumptions and understood to refer to a range of concepts and traditions that not only cluster around supernatural beliefs, but also practices, like rituals and festivals.
I've been finding it interesting to look even at the Abrahamic traditions - what parts of the ritual / lifestyle / faith are valuable, even if you assume the supernatural claims are bogus?
On this topic I've been enjoying the work of Peter Rollins [1]. One of the points he makes is that often we desire certainty in our beliefs, and feel safe with certainty. And it's interesting to watch someone swing from being certain of the existence of a god, to being certain of the non-existence. What they believe has changed ("A god does exist" / "A god does not exist") but how they believe it is much the same ("I'm sure of this because of _____").
I guess that's the difference between being an (a)theist and an agnostic.
There are lots of patterns in my own religious tradition that I find valuable, separate from the aspect of faith.
Some examples:
- setting aside the Sabbath as a day of rest. Different from the rest of the days of the week. A day for analysis of the direction of your life, recommitment to your values, and taking a break from the burden of everyday responsibilities and work and play.
- ministering to neighbors. Watching out for and serving those around you. Having someone close by who cares and is willing to help.
- tithing - dedicating a fixed, significant percentage of income to charity.
- fasting - abstaining from food and drink for a day, and giving the money that would have been spent (and more if able) to help those in need. This has social benefit as well as personal physical and spiritual/emotional benefit.
> Try going to your temple/etc and telling them that you gave already. You'll quickly learn that it's an in-group fee, not charity.
Not sure where you're getting this but that hasn't been my experience at all. From my upbringing in several Catholic churches you're expected to "tithe" as a general principle but no one follows up with you on your accounts. My family always set aside our tithing amounts each year, but we got to distribute it as we saw fit, some to the church, sure, but others to scholarships or charities that we wanted.
The practice of tithing comes from a tax that existed to support the church and clergy. Saving ten percent of your income and distributing it as you please isn't tithing in the traditional sense, only the portion given to the church is considered a tithe.
I think that entire conversation has been spoiled by the organized abrahamic religions. More often than not when we say "religious" or "believe in god" we are referring to the concepts described by these religions in overly vague and at the same time overly specific terms. Do I believe that wine turns into Jesus blood, humans lived with dinosaurs, some guy talked to god who appeared as a burning bush or anything like that? Hell no! To me those stories are en par with fairy tales and all somewhere on the spectrum between opposing things we know as a fact and things that are so incredibly unlikely that they aren't any more worth thinking about than anything I might just make up or read in a sci-fi novel. In fact I think that it's scary that there are people who actually believe that those things are true. So in almost all conversations I will identify myself as a vehement atheist.
At the same time I have no idea if there aren't incredibly powerful beings somewhere that have the power to create whole universes that many would describe as gods. I also don't exclude the possibility that the universe is sentient or maybe even mankind or the entire earth is a sentient organism of some kind. Maybe the entire universe is a giant computer or simulation run by some more advanced beings. If those things were true they probably could be compared to religions believes. However, I have trouble calling myself agnostic. I think that that theoretically would make me agnostic. However, I have a hard time calling myself that because I am so repulsed by the naive fairy tales commonly associated with religion.
At the same time I also don't think it's worth devoting much effort to thinking about these things, since they are questions that tend to make no predictions that we can proof or disproof. I find it disturbing that society approves so much of asking childish questions like "where do we come from?", "where will we go?", etc. It's obviously just a mental rabbit hole and there are no real answers to these questions and anyone who claims to have answers to these is a liar or a fool. Unfortunately the big religions claim to have these answers. To me that makes any nuanced discussion about "religion" almost impossible with most people including myself, since I first and foremost want to distance myself from fairy tales.
Let's say there is a God, or a higher being running a simulation, it would then be completely rational at that point to then think that they could do highly improbable things (it's their simulation after all). Furthermore, with the story of Jesus turning water into wine as an example: Jesus claimed to be God, so its completely rational for us to believe that he could do something so trivial. If he couldn't do something like that, well then it would be obvious he was just a man.
If you assume that religion isn't just a club for ideologues, what you get is more of a research-program.
There's a technique, there's a mystery, you do the technique to address the mystery.
Techniques : meditation, fasting, hallucinogens.
Mysteries : God, Tao, Ultimate Reality.
Given the lack of technique in most of what we call religion these days, I think what we're looking at is a degenerate form of something that was pretty cool once upon a time. What we've got is basically fanfic.
There's more to it than that though. Christianity for example exists in multiple aspect in people's lives. The aspect you're talking about is the actual belief. But there are other aspects. There is a set of traditions and ceremonies that people perform. There are the local communities. There is a set of values. Then there are the overarching organizations. And at the same time, there is a set of mental tools for reasoning about things that while they look like belief may not be. All of these fit into a ball of mud that can be called religion.
I think what you describe would nowadays better be described as "spirituality". The term "religion" has mostly been hijacked by organizations that give you a book and claim they are the only ones to have the authority to interpret it or worse claim it has to be taken literally and interpretation is a sin. It's all very sad.
But we also have to bring into question Christians that claim they are Christian but do not act like they are. Those people may claim to be religious, but they are clearly not. Does having no belief in your religion but still participating in some things mean you aren't religious at all?
Really, most of this is about definition vs. Practice.
Agnostics can be considered atheists in practice but their definitions differ a bit.
I don't think we need to define anything for anyone. If you identify as areligious but engage in rituals associated with one or more religions, you're areligious. If you identify as Christian but never attend services, you're Christian. If you're unsure whether there's a god or not... well it's actually hard to even be inconsistent with that, so pretty much that has to be taken on faith.
I have a friend who prays before every meal, but has never held religious belief. Who the fuck is any one of us to tell them they believe something they don't?
If your friend prays, obviously they believe there's a reason to do so. The same as if they took vitamin supplements.
> Who the fuck is any one of us to tell them they believe something they don't?
Who the fuck is any of us to kick down their door and yell it at them? Nobody here is doing that though. In fact, that's something religious people do to areligious people.
But who are we to use the correct terminology to ourselves? Thinking beings. What's it to you?
> If your friend prays, obviously they believe there's a reason to do so. The same as if they took vitamin supplements.
Maybe so. Do you know what that reason is? Are you confident in that knowledge? Would you be willing to contradict my friend if he said otherwise?
> But who are we to use the correct terminology to ourselves? Thinking beings. What's it to you?
How is correctness determined? If we are discussing what other people believe, we are not in a position to define it for them. We can do all sorts of other kinds of analysis: understanding how the specific beliefs affect the believer's actions; understanding the impact of those actions on the world; understanding the way those beliefs intersect with and influence other beliefs.
But it is not up to us to assign belief systems to others, even if what we perceive about their beliefs or their actions doesn't conform to our idea of how beliefs work.
I don't have to. But something motivated him to act, and if he's consistent he must believe it's important.
> Would you be willing to contradict my friend if he said otherwise?
Yeah. Of course. The same as if he said anything else obviously counterfactual. I don't care to, because your friend isn't my windmill, but...
> How is correctness determined? If we are discussing what other people believe, we are not in a position to define it for them.
We don't need to. The original goalposts are merely that your friend believes or not.
> But it is not up to us to assign belief systems to others,
"You, you'll be Muslim", "you, Hindu", etc. Funny, but that's not what we're doing. We're pointing to someone praying and saying there must be a reason.
Anything less would be denying your friend's humanity. I'm sure that he has what feels like a good reason for what he does...
> something
> The original goalposts are merely that your friend believes or not.
> there must be a reason
> I'm sure that he has what feels like a good reason for what he does...
So wait. You're saying my friend is religious? Or aren't you?
> obviously they believe there's a reason to do so
Habit is a reason. So is social conformity.
A lot of people don't think it's worth upsetting their closest loved ones and family just to make a strong point about their personal beliefs.
I personally have said grace when eating hosts who did, simply because I felt it was the polite thing to do. Doesn't make me religious though, and I don't think they would've been much bothered by the fact that I hadn't yet truly accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.
Nope! For an interesting look at "what is a Christian", you might like reading about the question "are Mormons Christian?" Mormons say they are, but other Christian churches say they are not - here's an example argument http://www.patheos.com/blogs/bibleandculture/2012/08/27/why-...
A more clear example would be that in the U.S., most people claim to be either theists or atheists. But in fact very few of them are actually telling the truth, in that most of them are neither theists or atheists, but that's just how they self-identify for whatever reasons.
The point is that whether people self-identify as being religious or not has basically zero correlation with whether or not people are actually religious. E.g. the media often claims that atheism/non-religious/SBNR is the fastest growing religion, but there isn't really any strong evidence to support that.
> But in fact very few of them are actually telling the truth, in that most of them are neither theists or atheists, but that's just how they self-identify for whatever reasons.
Just that they're neither atheists or theists. I.e. you're not really a theist unless you believe in an anthropomorphic god, just believing in an abstract conception of god isn't enough. And similarly you're not really an atheist unless you wouldn't believe in god even if you saw him, a position which even Richard Dawkins admits is untenable.
> you're not really a theist unless you believe in an anthropomorphic god, just believing in an abstract conception of god isn't enough
This is based on a pretty specific set of jargon that most people probably don't even consider. I have a hard time believing that there's enough evidence either way to say whether more people who claim they're theists are actually deists, but it doesn't serve any purpose to conclude either way. As far as colloquial usage is concerned, there are a lot of people who are honest in their conviction as believers in "god" in some form or another, even if it isn't as specific as you'd like it to be for the purposes of that classification.
> And similarly you're not really an atheist unless you wouldn't believe in god even if you saw him
That's just... I don't even know how to address that. Your first claim was extremely specific and conforms pretty closely to very well defined criteria, but this one drifts much further from the same set of criteria.
> a position which even Richard Dawkins admits is untenable
I wouldn't be surprised. Literally no one would find it tenable. Not even Richard Dawkins, who is wrong about nearly everything he says outside his professional career.
alan watts said this best. You can walk into a eastern temple and enjoy it. laugh. do all the "silly" little rituals. Religion is _supposed_ to be fun and NOT serious. The min you make it deadly seriously and tell children THIS IS REAL you defeat the point. i.e. life is one big ride and silly. Life is very very silly and not even a little bit serious. Even when people die. Espeically when people die. Live your life this way and you won't fear death. You'll enjoy your silly number of X years you get on earth and want to live a good life cuz that's the most silly fun you can have. And _that's_ how you get people to be "reglious". NOT BY PREACHING or saying do this "moral" behavior. No no no. Live it up. Go to Burning Man. Enjoy the ride is what religion was trying to tell us but the message is all mixed up now.
Life is very silly when you're the kind of person who tends to read HN. For others, in this age and throughout history, life is not so silly, but quite serious and scary. Through common cultural themes like shared religions, communities can band together and survive. If I stop practicing my Judaism tomorrow, there will still be those who want to kill me for being a Jew - my life will not get more "silly" by losing my religion.
I think this is completely culturally and moronically ignorant to such an extreme degree. You wish this were true. I wish it were true. But it's complete, utter, bollocks. Life is one big ride and silly? Are you fucking high? You've traveled no where. You've read no history at all whatsoever. Yeah, what's going on in Syria is silly. Being drawn and quartered is one big ride. What the fuck ever. Idiot. You clearly got Alan Watts wrong.
oh I get your position. I felt that was true for years. The real question is, is a human death tragic? Even your own? And the answer has to be no. It's not. It's a goof this life. Dying is not the worse thing that can happen. Not living is. How do I think terrible things like torture and kids dying in Syria is silly? Because each human is NOT really a seperate thing that has to survive at all costs. Think of humans like pids or threads. They come and go. When a linux process dies is that tragic?
You're having a hard time keeping a coherent train of thought. In your computer simulation of people, if you're modeling individuals as processes, then another process feels pain when a process it cares about is killed. If you're deliberately killing people in a computer simulation where you know the simulated people are sentient, you are an asshole. Your computer analogy only holds when simulating sentient people; the whole point of computers is that they are capable of arbitrary computation. Since we cannot currently use that arbitrary computation to simulate a person, kill -9 in 2016 isn't analogous.
If I start a program that creates pids, and each pid is programmed to feel like a little simple human that does stuff, and I slowly slowly make that program more and more complex until it's the level of the AI girl in a movie like ex-Machina at what point is ctrl-c and killing the whole program being a cruel god that wipes out millions of pids/humans without caring?
Don't move the goalposts; removing reality is entirely different than causing pain within the reality.
A simpler scenario; I meet you and decide, for whatever reason, to kick you in the dick. In this moment, you are no longer an absurdist: your whole world is pain; pain is literally the only thing you can perceive. Now, post dick-kicking, when you eventually convince yourself again that nothing really matters, does your perception of me change? If so, why? If not, why? And why do you value your pain over the war widow's?
absolutely I'll feel the pain. And it's a challenge to realize my indivual pain is no big deal to the master program. I'm just a pid. By my pid is programmed to feel pain. So yes, I'll feel the pain. Ouch. But i'm a very smart pid that can see I'm like 1 liver cell. If you fry and kill 1 liver cell, but the rest of the liver keeps working perfect. Does that 1 liver cell's pain matter? To that one cell sure, but humans make up 1 "thing" like a liver too. One big organ. 7 billion humans all working together and are part of something but don't even know what it is. All we pids can do is follow our programming.
You ignored the questions about how and why you'd revaluate someone who deliberately hurt you.
But yes, we can only follow our programming. Part of that programming is creating narratives and assigning value judgements to elements of those narratives and our sensory experience. Your narrative overvalues your understanding of basic structures you have a naive understanding of, while suppressing creation of those of a social level. If you find life absurd, its because your outlook leads to internal schisms.
You asked why we dance, and then referenced Ex Machina. Kyoko has no free will and is programmed to dance on command, and yet dancing seems like the one thing she actually enjoys. Is there meaning in her dancing?
In the moment of sheer misery you will not be a smart pid that will give two shits about the grand scheme. You'll only care about yourself, you'll only recognize that reality, that is your fundamental programming. You will not be thinking life is just all fun and games and that your personal pain doesn't matter. That it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things will not give you comfort.
but it seem inevitable that we will be able to create simulated worlds like our own soon. So fast forward 2000 years or however long that will take to have tech like The Matrix and humans inside don't even know the world is simulated. And if that's obviously going to happen at some point, isn't it silly to think that it didn't already happen 2000 years AGO and I'm in the simulation?
Even if you're 99% sure that we're in a simulation, treating the lives of others as if it were already a foregone conclusion and ignoring that 1% possibility is IMO immoral.
And if you choose to cause suffering for others in the belief that somehow it doesn't matter, then aren't you just shoving your beliefs down other people's throats?
You're even dumber than I thought. No fool, it's not death that's tragic, it's human suffering. Torture for years before dying. Oh yeah, that's just a goof. Asswipe.
Well think about who taught you that life was serious. What was their agenda? Well they want to rule the world of course. What's the best way to rule over someone. Tell him to fear death and that their only choice is to do what you say and they will avoid a horrible fate. How can you be "saved"? just stop caring about your fate. Bring it on whatever is is. Torture, hard work situation, any adversity in your life. Laugh at it and you can't be ruled. That makes people very dangerous of course.
Believe what you want about the meaning of life, but you're misrepresenting the messages of almost all religions. The one I'm most familiar with, Christianity, says this life is your one chance to prove your virtues before being judged forever, which is why they are expected to do some pretty serious things instead of whatever amuses them.
what do humans like to do when the work is all done? Sing and dance. Why? What is this all about? It's all about nothing. Its all about ba ba ba do do do, one big dance the universe over, Look at the atomic level, nothing but one big rave. Atoms dancing like crazy in all sorts of weird patterns just because.
People create more tasks to do when the current tasks are done. Singing and dancing is communication. Your answer wasn't objective, and neither was mine.
If I understood you correctly, your answer to "what is the objective measure of silliness" is essentially to say our best model of nature is of particles in spacetime adhering to certain rules. My, and what I assume is the common definition of silly, is inconsequential incoherence. Perhaps your definition is different? Nature is not silly, since the consequences of its rules are both measurable and consistent. If you're saying its absurd to think of human society in terms of physics, well sure. Don't do that, its the wrong layer of abstraction.
>Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship-be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles-is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things-if they are where you tap real meaning in life-then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already-it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power-you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart-you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race"-the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
I think the article is a bit misguided there. The purest form of atheism ( = belief that there is no deity, as opposed to the rejection of belief in deities ) it is just another fundamentally unprovable belief system. If you wind the clock back far enough you always arrive at an undecided point where both assumptions - chaos vs. intelligent creation - become equally valid from our point of view.
I don't see how worshipping is universally linked to the human experience - except if you define following the scientific process itself as 'worshipping'. The whole point of it is that previous knowledge can be overturned by evidence, so there should not be any dogma - and if you find any in your field, there is something deeply wrong with it. There does seem to exist an uncomfortable trend of going down deeply untestable rabbit holes in theoretical physics however - string theory is the best example currently.
Now, when it comes to Computer Science, this field seems to be still full of dogma - for me a sign that it isn't really a scientific field (yet) to begin with. E.g. "X considered harmful" type statements by certain influential people become way too dogmatic way too quickly, without actually requiring evidence outside of a few usage examples.
>But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line-maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Department who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible-it just depends on what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important-if you want to operate on your default-setting-then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars-compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.
See, the problem with going through the day this way is that it's difficult to express to anyone else, and then it doesn't really give you extra options for how to act. It's very rare that you are the one who can commit the small act of bureaucratic kindness, or that the awful woman in front of you can actually benefit from anything you might say or do.
Which is unfortunate, but on the other hand, I'm fairly sure that most people I meet would simply feel oppressed from constant exposure to the Force That Lit The Stars, like a room that's got too humid.
Personally, I think religion is a fine word for this. I'd rather keep it that way. Ritual without belief and concomitant warm fuzzies of doing the Right Thing is something else.