What Is The Ritual Necessity Of Religion

Rituals are events that provide a sense of acceptance and that are done regularly and enjoyed by many. Rituals mainly refer to a family, religious or community ceremony, rituals also express emotions such as love and togetherness. The ritual of the Eucharist has changed dramatically over the past years from the last supper, where Jesus shared his body to his disciples.

I see ritual as one that holds all the aspects: the language and clothes, of a culture and is the glue between everything. I would also religion as a ritual in the context of providing a foundation and merit to ones actions. Religion does not have to be faith based, although it could be, but more of a constant apathy towards something – being sport, trading, or social life.

Through ethnographic research, Durkheim can explain the fundamentals of religion and its relation to society. We are not born with the innate knowledge of structural situations or cultural effects that occur within a society. Nor, are we aware of the effects our behaviors and attitudes have on a society. Durkheim’s worked untimely explained how the moral realm functioned by focusing on primitive religion. Religious ceremonies closely resemble social life, containing highly routined acts. The essential elements of religion include rites which are expressed by rituals and practice. Rituals unite social groups regardless of individual differences, which are found in both modern and traditional societies because rituals are a part of both. Durkheim noted, to have a

In this article, Oliver Thomas discusses how important it is for people to have a religion and why religion is much needed in everyone’s life. He informs people that the answer to this question could be just to worship, but at the same time he believes that there is an answer that deals with a person’s deepest concern in a spiritual sense. He also discusses the idea that religion makes us want to live; in addition to, Viktor Frankl’s research conclusion of the Nazi death camp and how it was not the youngest, strongest or even the smartest that survived, but it was those who had found a meaning to their lives. He believes that religion makes things easier to become a decent person. In addition, the positive core values and the constant striving for self-improvement that religion push people to look for actually help them to be

After reading the article, I think rituals have some basic structures of meaning, and there are number of ways to show that rituals are meaningful. In the following thesis I choose Hinduism as an example to show how rituals are meaningful, how it relates to the living context of the Indian people, how the Indians enact the Hindu rituals, and so on.

In today’s society, people are including less religion and faith in their daily lives. In fact, religion is apart of our culture. It plays an important role in our faith and culture despite how people secularize it. We learn where we descend from and how being religious had always been apart our whole life. Anthropologists included how religion helps us understand big questions in order of us to grow, be better people. So as to understand, we have religious rituals like receiving communion or even attending mass on Sunday’s. Society nowadays would rather separate from religious connection and influence. Society is slowly moving away from the Church but we can prevent that by showing how important religion is in our culture.

Eid-al-adha: The Festival of Sacrifice which occurs 70 days after Eid-al-Fitr. It commemorates Abraham 's willingness to sacrifice his son for God.

I think that initiation rituals are an important part of a religion. From both the primal perspective and a contemporary perspective, I believe that the initiation rituals were/are important because they mark the first time a person is formally introduced to the community as a member. I think initiation rituals are a way for the people to feel like they truly belong to their respective religious communities. During the primal religious period, there was virtually no knowledge about the origins of the world and life itself. Therefore, rituals were valued because they proposed some answers and a sense of unification for the people. For many people/religions the initiation and rituals were a way of life in the face of an unknown world. They were also a way for the community members to prove that they were willing, in some cases, to suffer for their religion.

A ritual is a set of actions done in a specific order for a specific reason. Rituals are meant to signal the importance of an observance because the ritual is unique, in that, it is only used for a special purpose.

Religion is a sincerely challenging word to define because there is a vast amount of religions that are categorized and there hasn’t been an exact standard definition. In, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life by Emile Durkheim, the author explains how beliefs, rites, and religions are components of the human experience. By comparing primitive and modern religions, Durkheim concludes that every religion needs a Church, which is a place where all of the people who practice specific religions gather. Furthermore, Religions are constructed by human societies because it provides a meaningful explanation of why the earth is in existence. Although rites and beliefs are different for every religion, they are significantly essential in defining religion, and without them, religions would not exist.

Although religion and ritual may have been relevant in the context of the past, it is acceptable to view them as outdated, and irrelevant in today’s societal context, and hence useless. Religion and ritual have been of significant cultural importance throughout the history of mankind. People, in which these spiritual activities were originated from, invented and relied on religion and ritual as key tools for finding answers to the unknown. Thus, these spiritual activities are the reflections of the historical context, which is vastly different from the context of today’s science and technology driven society. Therefore, although treasured in the past, religion and rituals no longer serve a meaningful purpose anymore, thus may be viewed as anti-modern

The main intention of worship and ritual is to show “service” to God, which is known for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as “avodah,” “liturgy,” and “ibada” respectively. Each sentiment holds a strongly similar meaning to each of the Abrahamic faiths. While the interpretation of how exactly to execute “service” deviates with each religion, the reason for it remains constant: to pay homage and show surrender to God. Worship then “is the ongoing personal translation of faith into forms of devotion suited to the activities and responsibilities of a person’s daily life” (JCM 157). Prior to the destruction of the Second Temple, the Jewish people partook in sacrificial rites as a means of worship and ritual. However these rites could only be done in a holy temple by a priest and, since the second Temple was destroyed, the Jewish people could

To resolve these selection pressures, religion is composed of three major elements: the sacred, the supernatural, and rituals and beliefs about the supernatural. According to Turner, believing in the sacred, like objects and events that symbolize the supernatural, can be “a very powerful motivator of humans”. In fact, many times religion offers a system of values that provides guidelines to how one should act in order to be accepted into the after life. Rituals and beliefs about the supernatural vary within societies. Rituals can include anything from dancing, to singing, to praying, etc. and they serve to link the natural and supernatural worlds together. Turner states that such rituals can be calendrical or non-calendrical, where calendrical rituals are performed on a regular schedule, like mass, for example. The non-calendrical rituals are then performed on special occasions, like rites of passage. As stated, however, these vary widely across societies.

As a student of religion I have learnt that religion is an indispensable part of human life. History shows that every religion, it may be revealed or not, has risen in the crucial moment of the human history. According to the Semitic tradition human history has began with Adam and Eve, first prophet in Abrahamic tradition. In Indian tradition, though God is omnipresent but he directly intervened into this world, what we called Avatara, to make a clear distinction between right and wrong. In primitive society also people’s lives were highly motivated with religious affiliation.

Throughout history, religion has proved to be the main source of social stability in different communities and cultural groups. Everything that is part of a societal system, including law, is influenced by religious beliefs and practices of that society. This being said, most religions are based on the theory that there is a single more powerful entity, that has control over aspects of which humans do not. For the longest time in history, sociologists have argued that peer group, political movements, schools and most importantly, the family to be agents of socialization. Because of this reason, they have ignored the role played by religion in the perpetuation of cultural as well as social