When prayer, rituals and ascetic life are just a means of self-indulgence, they are harmful rather than beneficial. This is quite obvious to people nowadays, when it is widely recognised that fixations are not the same as valuable and laudable observances. One should not pray if that prayer is vanity; rituals are wrong when they provide lower satisfactions, like emotional stimulus instead of enlightenment; he or she should not be an ascetic who is only enjoying it.
The conventions have become meaningless. They’re manufactured events
Much that was called religion has carried an unconscious attitude of hostility toward life. True religion must teach that life is filled with joys pleasing to the eye of God, that knowledge without action is empty. All men must see that the teaching of religion by rules and rote is largely a hoax. The proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you’ve always known.
Religion increasingly is tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life.
All outward means of grace, if separate from the spirit of God, cannot profit, or conduce, in any degree, either to the knowledge or love of God. All outward things, unless he work in them and by them, are in vain.
The first thing we complain of here is, that the people are entertained with showy ceremonies, while not a word is said of their significance and truth.
Religion can be the enemy of God. It's often what happens when God, like Elvis, has left the building.
Society is frivolous, and shreds its day into scraps, its conversation into ceremonies and escapes.
In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola; they promoted thirst without quenching it.
I'm in awe of the universe, but I don't necessarily believe there's an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, though, even though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance.
Spiritual life can certainly follow the pattern one sees in the fake martial arts, with most teachers making nebulous and magical claims that never get tested, while their students derange themselves with weird ideas, empty rituals, and other affectations.
We seek to find peace of mind in the word, the formula, the ritual. The hope is illusion.
You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.
Prayer is no mere exercise of words or of the ears, it is no mere repetition of empty formula.
People should try to know God and imitate him in their works. Repetitions and ceremonials are of no use.
To seek God by rituals is to get the ritual and lose God in the process
