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{"id":671,"date":"2011-10-20T15:46:11","date_gmt":"2011-10-20T19:46:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/?p=671"},"modified":"2012-11-20T17:27:51","modified_gmt":"2012-11-20T22:27:51","slug":"high-octane-ritual","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2011\/10\/high-octane-ritual.html","title":{"rendered":"High Octane Ritual"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Yesterday I made a case for authority among atheists<\/a> and today I\u2019m addressing ritual without religion.<\/em><\/p>\n

$\"\"$ <\/a><\/p>\n

In the big discussion about Greg Epstein\u2019s humanist chaplains and the twitter forum on #humanistcommunity<\/a>, PZ Myers claimed<\/a> setting up atheist rituals that paralleled religious tradition was \u201ca cheat and a waste.\u201d At their essence, Myers claimed, ritual is just another world for \u201cwaste of effort, feel-good displacement activities that take the place of thought.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to think of fairly harmless secular rituals that might not meet with Myers\u2019s ire. My technically-Jewish family still sticks by the highly traditional custom of going out to a movie and eating Chinese food on Christmas Day. Other deracinated rituals I can think of off the top of my head include graduation ceremonies and the recitation of entire Monty Python sketches.<\/p>\n

At their heart, these toothless rituals are jargon<\/em>. They are enacted by members of some group and not by others. They may not be particularly emotionally resonant, but they are shorthand for some kind of community bond.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the use of shorthand that I suspect puts Myers off. Compressing and ritualizing ideas can be a pretty good way to make us stop thinking critically<\/a> about them. A person used to mouthing a prayer may not notice they no longer mean the words they\u2019re used to saying. And, in the secular world, plenty of academic disciplines<\/a> end up so turned in on themselves that they look more like performance art than scholarship.<\/p>\n

But shorthand is too valuable to be cast off because it\u2019s risky. If we\u2019re all on the same page, it\u2019s nice to be able to talk about ideas paying rent<\/a> without having to summarize Yudkowsky\u2019s formulation every time. That\u2019s a convenience; ritual becomes a necessity when it\u2019s a way of gesturing at ideas we don\u2019t know how to express and formalize. I can reach for a parallel in literature<\/a> when I don\u2019t know how to work through a feeling on my own. When I want to comfort a friend, sending flowers, or some other ritualized act can express my empathy more effectively than an explicit declaration. And, for people who don\u2019t have time to master every subject, shorthand can give them enough of a grasp of a difficult topic to get by.<\/p>\n

$\"\"$ <\/a><\/p>\n

But shorthand and abstraction don\u2019t really capture all of what ritual is about. If regular old discourse is prose, ritual is poetry. It\u2019s emotionally charged and cognitively sticky. So why should we want to imbue these inside jokes with content and emotional resonance? I\u2019ll definitely concede to Myers that it will make it harder to abandon them.<\/p>\n

But most of us aren\u2019t striving for a world of detatchment. We\u2019re going to become emotionally attached to something, we\u2019ll decide some group memberships are essential parts of our identity. Shouldn\u2019t the constraints we embrace be tied to some actual content? Embracing ritual means doubling down on the thought patterns\/traditions\/values you want to embody.<\/p>\n

If you don\u2019t have a philosophy\/ethics\/telos<\/em> you feel comfortable turbocharging, get looking.<\/p>\n

Again, this is getting long, so I\u2019ll hold for a separate post a few briefer thoughts on ritual and historical continuity, along with an example of secular ritual from my summer camp<\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"