UNDERSTANDING how RELIGION and RITUAL and SUPERSTITION works

by Terry 22 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  Terry

  When you look (actively) for patterns you find patterns.

  How you fit them into a meaning is religion. (Or, Witchcraft....or anything else).

  Rituals appeal to a certain personality type. (Verging on the obsessive.)

  Rituals that purport to grant power fill a need. (Especially when you are powerless.)

  It would be statistically impossible for a ritual to NEVER work!

  WANT TO KNOW HOW PRAYER WORKS? How MAGIC works? How WITCHCRAFT works?

  Try this experiment.

  Take 100 pennies and shake them up really well in your hands.

  Now, you are going to take a sheet of paper and write either HEADS or TAILS on it. (Let's say "Tails")

  Next, make up a really silly ritual such as rubbing an egg on your crotch and belching three times while saying aloud: TAILS, TAILS, TAILS.....

  Then, Throw the pennies all at once on the carpet.

  Now count the number of heads and the number of tails.

  Why?

  Because, the number of TAILS you get is statistically how many times the ritual you just performed REALLY WORKS!

  40 Tails is 40% success. 45 Tails is 45%, etc. Your expected long-term outcome is 50%!!

  Not bad, eh?

  You see, you can make any damned stupid nonsensical rattle-brained activity meaningful when you attach it to a repetition and a desired outcome.

  40% ain't bad.

  Question is this: NOW DO YOU GET IT?

  Whether you pray for something to happen or perform any ritual to bring it about know this:

  As long as your expected outcome is somehow possible it would be impossible for it to NEVER happen after you perform your ritual.

  The lie is believing you MADE it happen with your ritual.
• 

  darth frosty

  Nice one as always terry. Like the new avatar(the shirtless thing wasn't you, loved the black and white pic .)
• 

  fifi40

  How many times a day do I have to do this and does it matter if I use five pences instead..............................and what do I get at the end of it.........
• 

  trevor

  A good post by a smartly shirted Terry

  As any competent conjuror knows belief is everything. The audience must believe that what they witness happen is only possible because the performer possesses invisible, special powers, or that invisible special powers are at work. Because we cannot work out how the trick was done - it must be magic!

  It is all a matter of faith. We tend to see what we want too or what the performer wants us to see. Deception is presented as reality and in such a convincing way that it becomes reality in the minds of the observers. This happens in everyday life far more than we realize.

  Religious leaders are only one mind control group. Advertising, medial coverage, fashion, spin and government control direct and mesmerise us to accept whatever fabrication is being presented as reality.

  In my humble opinion, the biggest influence that is presently at work on the minds of the Western population is the infliction of political correctness. It is designed to make people afraid of being out of step with what is acceptable. Should we resist, there are severe penalties imposed mainly at corporate level which filters down through government funded departments.

  What we really think cannot be spoken out loud. Then it is wrong to even think in a way that is not approved at the top of the pyramid. George Orwell's 1984 summed it up.

  Haven't we been ther before and walked away?
• 

  JamesThomas

  make up a really silly ritual such as rubbing an egg on your crotch and belching three times while saying aloud: TAILS, TAILS, TAILS.....

  If i didn't know better, I would be extremely concerned that you have been looking through my window. You forgot to mention that this very special ritual must be performed nude....except for the douche-bag tied around your head. A Foster farms, chicken droppings colored bag is best...which can be acquired on Terry's website. Sadly, he over charges. The pink ones are cheep though, but they don't conjure up the same exquisite results when wishing for tails. Pink may be good for other things though. I haven't investigated too deeply as this is all pretty new to me. I'm hoping to find a website devoted only to douche-bag color experimentation. Perhaps I should start one.

  j

  douchebagresearch.com
• 

  Scully

  I was just listening to a snippet from a new book called God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens.

  Publisher's Summary

  In the tradition of Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian and Sam Harris' recent best-seller, The End of Faith, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the major religious texts, he documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos. With eloquent clarity, Hitchens frames the argument for a more secular life based on science and reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope's view of the universe, and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty of the double helix.

  ©2007 Christopher Hitchens

  I think I will get this one.
• 

  daystar

  I hear you Terry.

  The first woman I dated, shortly after having left the Witnesses, was a Wiccan who lived with her parents still (we were 19 years old) in Austin. One weekend when I drove down to see her, we wanted to go out on the town. She didn't have much money, and so she decided to perform a short ritual over a green candle in the hopes that she could get some money from her parents.

  Of course, when asked, her parents handed her some cash. I rather laughed at her since it would have been unusual for her parents to have turned her down when she asked for money. Of course, she was none to thrilled with me.

  When I have performed ritual, I understand that I am dealing with my own psychological devices. I use it as a tool to increase or reduce the impact of certain influences of my character (and others') upon my life. For example, the last time I really performed ritual, I spent several months with a particular ritual with the intent of clearing negative influences upon my life. I didn't exactly expect some supernatural force to enter my life and change things for the better. In fact, with most "advanced" ceremonies, it's insisted that ritual must be performed without "lust of result", allowing the meaning of the ritual to sink into the unconscious mind and do its work there with as little interference as possible.

  Would the results that I attribute at least partially to this working have occurred anyway? Probably so. Situations and events were already in place. However, I can say with no hesitation that the results within myself are undoubtable, and that the events that occurred at the end of my performance were at least partially related to the working. My strength of character had increased, my will, my integrity... I saw things that had only touched the edges of my perceptions before (and I don't mean little spirit thingies, but details of my life and of those around me that hadn't quite registered before).

  I see what you're saying here. And on a very simple level, very, very true. I suspect that most people work on the level you're describing and I tend to laugh at it as well. But it's deeper than you make it out to be.

  In direct relation to your experiment, I found this - http://www.parapsych.org/mind_over_matter.htm

  More on Dr. Mario Varvoglis - http://www.a-lab.org/article_useecd.html?id_article=117

  I am a skeptic at heart. But I have seen the power of belief and ritual in action. Poo-poo it if you like, but it moves the human heart. And something as powerful as that, I intend to make use of.
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  jaguarbass

  Very good, Terry. I will have to reflect on your words when I find myself falling into the trap of praying for an outcome.

  Thats easier now with a zen out look of not really wanting anything, just accepting. Or maybe I am just complacent, today.

  In the past before my enlightenment, I think prayer helped me mentally focus on my desire. And belief in my silent partner, friend, God, maybe at times motivated, energized me to get up and get going.

  So now I have to take the frog out of my pocket . I cant say we no more. It's just me.
• 

  Hortensia

  "religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos."

  I've never heard it said better and more concisely. Religion is a reflection of the people who create it - it has nothing to do with a creator, there's not even any evidence there is a creator, but still religion has the power to ruin lives, cause death and destruction.
• 

  Terry

  How many times a day do I have to do this and does it matter if I use five pences instead..............................and what do I get at the end of it.........

  Hush! You get change for a dollar, silly!