That I’ve horrified many flight attendants across the globe with my oft-thought morbid ritual of listening to Tuesday’s Gone as we fly through the sky is not my concern. My declaration evident, my truth now burns: there is no preordained destiny ...
A priest is a functionary of a social sort. The society worships certain deities in a certain way, and the priest becomes ordained as a functionary to carry out that ritual. The deity to whom he is devoted is a deity that was there before he came alo...
And I was remembering that time in our lives together, the time of those ritual walks. I was remembering the way it feels at just that moment when you begin to turn, when you’re poised exactly between the things in life you want to do and those you...
Every organized religion holds that certain behaviors, rituals, personalities, places, and/or books are sacred. These organized teachings are proper in their own place, but they are mere options for the one infused with devotion. To such a one, God i...
We must uncover our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary things, tied to our bourgeois way of life; it is good-and that is the real theater-to transcend them in the manner of play, by means of games and irony; it is good to be dirty and be...
Regarding 'Jabez's Prayer', I will say at once that I am a very poor Christian, and indeed a bad man. My besetting sins are many, and the least of them are the fleshlier ones: the really deadly ones are pride and intellectual arrogance. But I can hon...
It is one thing to accept something intellectually, but to accept the same thing emotionally is an entirely different matter. The one thing psychiatry cannot fill is man's inherent need for emotionalizing through dogma. Man needs ceremony and ritual,...
I don't have any particular rituals, I sometimes like to write in longhand when I'm searching for ideas but I do the vast majority by typing, I can't always keep up with my thoughts longhand. I'm not a coffee shop writer because I feel obliged to ord...
One ritual is that I don't speak to anyone before I write in the morning. I like to get to my desk before I say anything out loud. And I use everything I dreamed the night before. I work on a computer, but I also work almost as much in longhand on ye...
My religious convictions and scientific views cannot at present be more specifically defined than as those of a believer in creative evolution. I desire that no public monument or work of art or inscription or sermon or ritual service commemorating m...
[seeing a poster for the Enchantment Under the Sea dance] Dr. Emmett Brown: Look! There's a rhythmic ceremonial ritual coming up. Marty McFly: Of course! The Enchantment Under the Sea dance! They're supposed to go to this. That's where they kiss for ...
When I used to teach civil procedure as a law professor, I would begin the year by telling my students that 'civil procedure is the etiquette of ritualized battle.' The phrase, which did not originate with me, captured the point that peaceful, develo...
The ritual sacrifice of children has been taboo for thousands of years. Yet tragically it is practiced every day across our world. We sacrifice children on the altars of our most destructive sins. When the sickness of pornography has run to its most ...
I smiled ruefully to myself, knowing I had already experienced a far greater and deeper union with this man than that which propriety was so busy guarding against. I had seen and accepted our fate here, tonight, on the crest of this ancient hill, and...
Scapegoating worked in practice while it still had religious powers behind it. You loaded the sins of the city on to the goat’s back and drove it out, and the city was cleansed. It worked because everyone knew how to read the ritual, including the ...
We can offer women what they want most of all, cures for the most common ailments of this world... When children are ailing or babies refuse to be born, when men are unfaithful, when the sky is empty of rain, when the amulets buried beneath holy wall...
He did not wish to be divine. If there had never been a God, the emperor thought, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was. This business of worship, of the abnegation of self in the face of the Almighty, was a distraction, a false tra...
By employing classical concepts of idealized beauty and changes in perspective, icons speak to us of reality transformed and transfigured, both in and through God's presence. They speak of transcendence and mystery. As iconographers, we point to a re...
Definición de un Sufi Para aprender, la gente debe abandonar mucho, y esto incluye el ritual como algo de lo cual imaginan que pueden aprender. Es para recalcar esto que Abu-Yaqub al-Susi, citado en Taarruf, de Kalabadhi, declara que el Sufi es “a...
It is of the extraordinary insights of Imam Malik that the first section of his Muwatta', which precedes even the section on ritual purity, is on the times of the prayer. It is the times of prayer that obligate purity. Observing the times of prayer i...
Ayahuasca ceremonies are usually very structured rituals where the shaman or shamana holds the space and guides the drinkers on their journeys of discovery. The shaman is not just administering the hallucinogenic brew; he or she is also calling in th...
