You can make fun of the strange hat of a pope or of a bishop, and you think that that's funny, but somehow you still understand why you need a uniform to play sports.

You know, it's like these are all different levels of the same reality.

You know, it's like, these are all. Welcome to the symbolic world. One of the reasons why it's difficult for several people to understand religion and religious behavior

is because they tend to want to isolate religious behavior from other human behavior.

And so they have this little category here called religion, and it's broken off from all the other things that humans do.

So because of that, the religious behavior can appear arbitrary, superstitious, ridiculous.

Sometimes also people want to reduce religion to a set of things that you believe rather than understanding it as a coherent set of behaviors and beliefs that kind of go together.

I found that the best way to understand religion from a secularist perspective or even from a

purely materialist perspective is to see it as an extension of other types of behaviors. And even, I would say,

as an extension or similar in nature to some behaviors that animals have. And so one of the things

that I've noticed is that looking at the way that animals ritualize behavior is actually a good

way for humans to understand why it is that we

ritualize behavior and what it is that ritualizing behavior can do. And so the first thing to

understand is that actually all behavior is ritualized. That is anything which is moving towards a goal

has to be ordered. And so if you don't like the word behavior,

let's just use the word ordered. So ordered behavior will happen as you move towards a goal. So if

you have a purpose, the things you do, you know, you'll probably experiment a little bit at the

outset. But at some point, you'll realize that, you know, if I want to get to the river, this is the best way to go. At first, maybe I'll zigzag, I'll do

this, but then a trail will set itself up in the forest to go to the river, and then that behavior,

going from the village to the river, for example, will become ritualized in the sense that it will become ordered and will have kind of reduced itself to its best

to its best line you could say to get to the river and so this is something which happens in all

types of behaviors where there it is you know the way to hunt or the way to prepare food all of

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