What I Learned from Gods Who Don’t Exist

For those of us with secular backgrounds, the power of ritual is mostly untapped

Photo by frank mckenna on Unsplash

Here’s a question: if I asked you to draw the causal relationship between belief and action, what would it look like? Take a minute to think.

The simplest answer — the one we’re usually taught in school, whether implicitly or explicitly — would be something like this:

The assumption here is that we come to our beliefs by some process of reasoning or experience, and when our beliefs are established, act in accordance with them.

But I’d like to argue that the relationship is frequently this:

Where an action, once taken, strengthens the belief that caused it. And sometimes, it’s just this:

In a nutshell, instead of acting because of our beliefs, we often believe because of our actions. And fundamentally, that’s what ritual — and magic — is all about.

I started to make the connection between ritual and belief in the early months of this year, when I had a chance to escape the Canadian winter to train in the Indian martial art of…