Passage 6 Religions and Rituals
宗教和儀式 《新科學(xué)家》
[00:00]But while Christmas rituals can be exciting for children,
[00:05]they certainly don't have any of the high drama of those practiced
[00:10]by other faiths. Take the Australian Aboriginal religious initiation rites
[00:17]that includes scalp biting,
[00:20]fingernail extraction and cutting the initiate's penis with a stone knife,
[00:25]without which a man is not considered spiritually mature.
[00:30]By contrast, the most extreme ritual a Christian
[00:33]is likely to engage in is being dunked during baptism.
[00:38]Why do some religions have rituals that are so much more traumatic than others?
[00:45]In recent years, several researchers have developed the idea
[00:50]that religion taps into intuitive ways of thinking.
[00:55]Even as young children we seem predisposed to believe in the supernatural,
[01:00]which probably explains why we develop beliefs in spirits,
[01:05]an afterlife and gods as we get older.
[01:09]This appears to explain many of the shared characteristics
[01:13]of religions across the globe. But it cannot be the whole story,
[01:19]says Whitehouse. Whitehouse points out that even when religions
[01:24]are founded on intuitive ideas,
[01:27]acquiring religious knowledge often comes at a cost,
[01:31]and it is this difficult-to-acquire knowledge that is most highly valued.
[01:38]Indeed, it is the complex concepts that are hard to acquire and understand
[01:44]that give any religion its unique identity. This, he believes,
[01:50]is what distinguishes religions from other beliefs, such as superstition.
[01:56]And this is where the rituals come in, he argues.
[02:00]It helps the religious grasp the hard ideas underlying the religion.
[02:08]It is not clear whether the willingness to indulge in ritual
[02:12]is an inherited trait. Whitehouse suspects it is,
[02:17]and is planning studies with children to find out.
[02:21]Clearly, though, ritual is not the exclusive preserve of religion.
[02:28]Obsessive hand-washing, drinking tea in a certain way
[02:32]and crossing oneself with holy water all have one thing in common:
[02:37]"Rituals are by their very nature puzzling activities
[02:41]that invite interpretation," says Whitehouse.
[02:45]Rituals also have an emotional aspect ranging
[02:49]from a comforting feeling of security or togetherness to extreme terror.
[02:56]And rituals can be repetitive
[02:59]although the frequency of repetition varies enormously.
[03:04]These three traits are what make religion and ritual such good bedfellows.
[03:10]They provide the all-important elements that allow a religion to flourish:
[03:16]meaning, motivation and memory.
[03:20]A complex web of interactions link rituals to religion, but for Whitehouse,
[03:27]any attempt to tease out a thread must start with memory.
[03:33]"The reason why there are only two types of religions
[03:36]is that there are only two basic systems of memory that matter," he argues.
[03:43]The first is semantic memory,
[03:46]which deals with things we are conscious of remembering
[03:49]and stores what we have learned about the world.
[03:53]Then there is episodic memory, which hangs onto memorable events
[03:58]from our own lives. Whitehouse argues that to persist and spread,
[04:04]a religion must elicit the help of rituals that reinforce memories
[04:09]in both these systems.
