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Ritual is an act or ceremony carried out on a regular basis, with a specific intention. Ritual has been a part of life from time immemorial. Humans are creatures of habit. People adopt a habit if it proves to be effective, efficient, or serves as a reminder. However, they tend to continue that practice even after that habits usefulness has been lost. These habits have evolved into rituals that govern how people run their lives.
Religion for example is full of rituals that one may deem unnecessary or antiquated. For instance, In Shirley Jacksons short story, Lottery, there is a group of townsfolk that practice a barbaric ritual only because their predecessors before them had practiced it. One of the ancient practices that modern man deplores as inhumanly evil is annual sacrifice of a scapegoat or a god-figure for the benefit of the community. Rituals give people a prototype on how to behave in situations that they would not otherwise know how to behave. Some of these rituals may be appropriate but others may have lost their usefulness. People should consider their reasons for rituals.
Why do they believe in rites? The interesting fact is that people believe in rites mostly because of their parents influence in their upbringing. A child observes his or her environment, and learns from it. A major component and influence of that is watching his or her parents performing these rites. The Parents force the child to do the rituals and they try to convince him or her to believe them. For instance, in Lottery, Shirley mentioned, the children assembled first, of course.
The enthusiasm of the children can either be taken as the childrens willingness to please their parents or excitement at being allowed to participate in this grown up act. The children do not know where the stoning ritual comes from but they want to experience and take part in it to show they are also grown up and have an interest in the community. As I grew up in semi-conservative Jewish family, my parents were doing the rites and customs that they had learned as children and were passing them down to their own children. They sent me to the Jewish school and I learned Jewish ceremony and rules from schools. I never had chance to ask why I should perform these ceremonies. I was told that I was not mature enough to understand and that I could not analyze things by myself.
Whenever I asked them the purpose for a certain act or custom they could not produce a reasonable answer for it. We have many ceremonies in my religion; I knew them as I knew my parents. I was doing them because I thought because if I do not, god will not help me. For instance, in the High-Holyday Yom Kippur we have a long fast, which is 26 hours long. It serves as a penitence for unjust and wrong acts or thoughts of the past year. Yom Kippur is probably the most important holiday of the Jewish year.
Many Jews who do not observe any other Jewish custom will refrain from work, fast and / or attend synagogue services on this day. But the older I became I asked myself: If Yom Kippur truly makes a difference, does that mean that God will forgive me for all my unjust and wrong acts by merely fasting one day of the year? . Why do we fast for 26 hours? The only thing I knew was the good feeling I had after the fast, and the sense that I had done my part and played the expected role in the community. Like the childrens enthusiasm in Lottery I too was part of the community as a whole. After I started to analyze those ceremonies and customs I found out many of those do not steam from religion.
I imagine that people created them in the past. Some times scientists discovered facts that were threatening to peoples health and because people were uneducated, they had to present them as a ritual. For instance, keeping kosher is not a religious act. Its root comes from the time that foods were not clean and healthy and Jewish scientists had to present it as a special food for the people. New leaders garbled this rule and made it to a commitment for Jewish religion... At times rituals and ceremonies serve as reminders to certain culture of what happened to their people in the past.
Those rituals turn into habits and if someone fails to conform to those habits, it means he or she failed the god order. To understand why rituals exist, one must understand that they can be traced back to ancient times where they served a specific purpose. This purpose, whether it be practical, emotional or health related, might have been effective and useful at one point. As it was passed down through generations, and times changed, it often became useless. However, due to human nature, even a useless habit may continue as we learn from our environment, specifically our parents. We are not encouraged to question what our elders have done for generations and are passing down to us.
However, it is ultimately up to each individual to asses how important and useful a specific ritual is in his or her life, and decides upon its continuation.
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Research essay sample on Unjust And Wrong Acts Unjust And Wrong People
