(July 21, 2013 at 5:14 pm)oukoida Wrote: Yet as my present position developed I could not help but think about how rituality is actually the "centre of mass" (no pun intended) of any religion.
Repetitive routines are an effective way of sticking to a program of any kind, because we are creatures of habit. We reinforce habits by repeating them until they become second nature. I think it's our mind's way of being efficient; the more things we can reduce to near-instinctive behavior, the more things we can do concurrently.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
