With the decline of organised religion, many in the modern world have become sceptical of the importance of rituals. Some have gone even further and argued that rituals are themselves harmful because of negative effects they produce. But might there be indispensable value in ritual? In this piece, Michael L. Raposa draws on the work of American pragmatist philosopher Charles S. Peirce to argue that rituals, religious and secular, are essential in modern life. Raposa argues that, paradoxically, it is through certain habits formed by ritualistic behaviour that we are able to escape our rigid modes of thinking and perceive realities which have previously gone unnoticed. There is considerable ambivalence concerning how we ought best to evaluate human ritual behaviour. Negative assessments take many different forms; here I want to consider only two of them. Behaving ritualistically, it is sometimes suggested, undermines creativity and our…
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