Genuflecting on entering a church, candles, incense, kneeling all in one direction, hectoring priests. It all seems a bit much for me and puts me off organised religion. An omnipotent god surely isn't bothered whether we adhere to church etiquette. It must be more important that we're just good people.
My personal view is a belief in God, or Gods if you wish to view the various aspects of god separately. I just can't bring myself to subscribe to any of the organised religions. Looking back at history, the divisions and wars caused by what are often very minor differences in belief seem plain crazy.
Religion is a great power for good as well. Having faith in a greater power gives reason for altruistic acts and reason for behaving well towards your fellow people. It also makes it easier to put up with bad behaviour if you think the perpetrator is going to rot in hell for it! Don't forget the social aspects either - services can act as a uniting influence on a community, the start of coffee mornings and social clubs and gatherings for a community.
Returning to the original point of the rites the various churches use. I've been having a look at shamanism - a fairly woolly belief in spirits and energies running through all things. All things are interconnected through these energies and we're just a part of the system. While there isn't anything labelled god here, the universal spirit moving through all things isn't that different to a pantheistic notion of a conventional god. Again the similarities are greater than the differences from other systems.
There's no book of rules, no bible or Koran and there are no laid down activities that are required - so I found it rather unsettling that I started adopting strange little rites of my own.
This started when I was doing a tracking course and we were engaging in 'energy tracking'. The idea is to engage with the energies laid down with the tracks so as to be able to interpret tracks even when they're completely hidden. This produced some remarkable results - I'm from a programming background so want everything to be logically explicable. The leader produced exactly the right atmosphere for this exercise, allowing belief in something that at other times would have seemed quite mad and impossible.
Working in pairs, one student turned their back while the other walked, or did some other action, across a swept area. The area was then covered with a beach mat and student 1 then had to interpret what had happened. This is when I adopted my own little rite. I knelt briefly a couple of yards from the mat (rationale, you can see entry/exit marks more clearly at a shallow angle) before approaching the mat. I then 'dowsed' hovering my hands a few inches above the mat. And it worked.
Looking back, what I was actually doing with the quick kneel and handwork was providing a sop to my concious mind in order to 'let go' and allow instinct and the subconscious to take over. I've seen on scientific studies the human mind deals with 3-7 items of information at one time. Now think of the amount of data hitting your brain all the time - sight, smell, touch, time, balance - millions of data items, most of which get filtered out and discarded. Since then when tracking or in the woods looking for wildlife, I've found these little rituals can quieten your consciousness and allow your instincts to identify clues you'd have no chance of spotting deliberately.
Talking to another bushcrafter, who is similarly put off by the rituals of religion the connection suddenly became clear. All the ritual activity involved in religion isn't there to worship or please god, it's there to prepare you for worship. Whether god is a supernatural person, or the sum of the cosmos' natural energies, the way to connect is through instinctive, unconscious though rather than through conscious structured logic.
I'm coming round to the way of thinking that God is not external to us. Man has developed over tens of thousand, millions of years of evolution. We have evolved from the chemicals of the rocks, we share the evolutionary path that every living thing has followed. There is indeed a connection between all living and non living things on the earth and beyond. We have animal instincts and race memories that are the echoes of our developmental experience. To hear these echoes we need to listen, we need to drop the shell of our industrialised civilisation for few moments. We all share the same echoes - whatever rites we use to prepare ourselves to hear are equally valid - lets not squabble about it.
The answer is still 42. ;o)
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