Rituals in Religion

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Rituals in Religion
Since time immemorial, rituals have been a common feature of all human societies. As such, adherents affiliated with religions have had an affinity with diverse rituals for different purposes. Religious ritual refers to ceremonies that involve a series of actions stipulated or associated with a religious institution, custom, or belief. Ordinarily, their principal function is to communicate with supernatural powers or deities. Examples of rituals, which can be performed individually or collectively, include baptisms, prayers, and mourning performed after death. As Seligman et al. put it, rituals involve more doing than saying (4). By all accounts, rituals are an integral aspect of religion, and they play critical functions, such as allowing believers to exercise or reaffirm their religious beliefs.
Ritual and its Consequences
Observers have variously tried to fill rituals with diverse meanings and elaborate explanations. According to Seligman et al., a ritual is a form of orientation to action that provides a framework that makes it possible to understand human activities beyond what happens in conventional places (5). In essence, what makes an action qualify as a ritual is its framing or how people carry it out. For example, one can perceive the partaking of the Eucharist as a ritualistically framed action. Conventionally, eating bread and wine is a dime a dozen, but when done in the church to commemorate something, it becomes a ritual.
Undeniably, religion and ritual join at the hip, and trying to separate them would be an undertaking in futility since they share a mutual importance. In religion, ritual, for instance, makes it possible for people to live in a fundamentally fractured and discontinuous world (Seligman et al., 11). It does so by formulating temporary order by creating and recreating a world of social authority that transcends the will of individuals. Further, ritual plays the critical function of addressing the relational aspects of role, self, and other. In other words, ritual recognizes boundaries and provides a vehicle to overcome them (Seligman et al., 12). For example, in Jewish daily prayers, devotees proclaim their numerous weaknesses but almost immediately declare they are God’s people of the covenant who will overcome all challenges. In addition, doing away with boundaries instead of absolutizing them helps maintain interaction and solidarity. Equally crucial, ritual allows individuals to not only tolerate ambiguity but use it creatively as a tool to cope with contradictory demands and life impulses.
Basic Genres of Ritual Action
If her sentiments are anything to go by, Bell suggests that various theories of ritual have classification systems that enable analyzing a wide range of ritual activities. The classifications, often convenient in a descriptive way, support particular beliefs besides reinforcing assumptions associated with the ritual (Bell 93). For example, one classification theory distinguishes instrumental from expressive rituals. According to the theory, instrumental rituals attempt to accomplish a given objective while expressive ones voice feelings or communicate ideas. As Bell contends, some ...