Suggested alternatives include: a community under the pressure of starvation or extreme social stress, dismemberment and cannibalism as religious ritual or in response to religious conflict, the influx of outsiders seeking to drive out a settled agricultural community via calculated atrocity, or an invasion of a settled region by nomadic raiders who practiced cannibalism ; such peoples have existed in other times and places, e. g. the Androphagi of Europe.

Likewise a popular Hindu ritual form of worship of North Malabar in Kerala, India is the Tabuh Rah blood offering to Theyyam gods, despite being forbidden in the Vedic philosophy of sattvic Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism, Theyyam deities are propitiated through the cock sacrifice where the religious cockfight is a religious exercise of offering blood to the Theyyam gods.

" Rav also exercised a great influence for good upon the moral and religious conditions of his native land, not only indirectly through his disciples, but directly by reason of the strictness with which he repressed abuses in matters of marriage and divorce, and denounced ignorance and negligence in matters of ritual observance.

The funerals are themselves involved in the ritual of hoarding: the deposition of sacrificial objects with both religious and socio-economic functions.

It is important to note that, although li is sometimes translated as " ritual " or " rites ", it has developed a specialized meaning in Confucianism, as opposed to its usual religious meanings.

" Attributes that are seen as religious — such as ancestor worship, ritual, and sacrifice — were advocated by Confucius as necessary for social harmony ; however, these attributes can be traced to the traditional non-Confucian Chinese beliefs of Chinese folk religion, and are also practiced by Daoists and Chinese Buddhists.

If a distinction is to be made between divination and fortune-telling, divination has a formal or ritual and often social character, usually in a religious context, as seen in traditional African medicine ; while fortune-telling is a more everyday practice for personal purposes.

The ritual and religious treatment of meditation functions so that the individual learns to take the practice with seriousness ; learning to gradually control their degree of relaxation such that undesired and harmful schisms do not occur to the psyche.

These beings may be the origin of the Greco-Roman Galli, androgynous beings of the third sex, similar to the American Indian berdache, who played an important part in early religious ritual.

In all cases, however, sharia ( Islamic religious law ) calls for burial of the body, preceded by a simple ritual involving bathing and shrouding the body, followed by salah ( prayer ).

These pronunciations are still used in synagogue ritual and religious study, in Israel and elsewhere, mostly by people who are not native speakers of Hebrew, though some traditionalist Israelis are bi-dialectal.

In cases where the couple belong to a specific religious or cultural tradition, there may be a specific form of the ritual used by all or most members of that particular tradition.

Examples of Upper Paleolithic remains associated with religious beliefs include the lion man, the Venus figurines, cave paintings from Chauvet Cave and the elaborate ritual burial from Sungir.

Some people have drawn analogies between certain aspects of hypnotism and areas such as crowd psychology, religious hysteria, and ritual trances in preliterate tribal cultures.

In North West England, there is little evidence for religious or ritual activity in the Iron Age period.

In Mormonism, an ordinance is a religious ritual of special significance, often involving the formation of a covenant with God.

Tantra, literally meaning " formula ", " method, or " way ", ( parallel to the Chinese Tao, which also means " the way " or " the method "), and also having the secondary meaning of " loom ", " thread " or " warp and woof " is the name scholars give to a style of religious ritual and meditation that arose in medieval India no later than the fifth century CE, and which came to influence all forms of Asian religious expression to a greater or lesser degree.

However, it may have been for religious reasons, and would coincide with the development of religious practices thought to have occurred during the Upper Paleolithic .< ref > Nonetheless, it remains possible that Paleolithic societies never practiced cannibalism, and that the damage to recovered human bones was either the result of ritual post-mortem bone cleaning or predation by carnivores such as saber tooth cats, lions and hyenas.

They are used in shamanic forms of ritual healing and divination, in initiation rites, and in the religious rituals of syncretistic movements such as União do Vegetal, Santo Daime, Temple of the True Inner Light, and the Native American Church.

There are religious significance and aspects of the rooster and the cockfight which are exampled by the religious belief of Tabuh Rah, a religious and spiritual cockfight where a rooster is used in religious custom by allowing him to fight against another rooster in the Balinese Hinduism spiritual appeasement exercise of Tabuh Rah, a form of animal sacrifice, where ritual fights usually take place outside the temple and follow an ancient and complex ritual as set out in the sacred lontar manuscripts.

The labrys also appears in African religious symbolism and mythology ( see Shango ).

My curiosity was sharpened a day or two before the interview by a conversation I had with a well-informed teacher of literature, a Jesuit father, at a conference on religious drama near Paris.

My mother was deeply religious.

There was one further step in my religious progress.

Two of the principal addresses were delivered by prominent Protestants, and when the speaker was a Catholic, one `` discussant '' on the dais tended to be of another religious persuasion.

The characteristic thing about this church was its Amen corner and the weekly religious orgy.

Wilson stressed the fact that clear as this was, they must have a better church, a more business-like conduct of the church organization, and an effort to get this religious center out of its rut of wild worship into a modern church organization.

In one debate he supported the freedom of judgment as opposed to dogma, in another he held that the practice of science was in fact an act of religious worship.

Our last joint venture, Sainted Lady, a deeply religious film based on the life of Mother Cabrini, and timed so that its release date would coincide with the beatification of America's first saint in November, 1938, was a fiasco from start to finish.

To try to oppose the general religious and moral conviction of such a majority by a legislative fiat would be to invite the same breakdown of law and order that was occasioned by the ill-starred Prohibition experiment.

Moreover, for those few there was almost no ecclesiastical representation in the city to care for their religious needs.

There were many letters of strong protest against the portrait of the Anglican clergyman, who was indeed portrayed as a man not particularly concerned with religious matters and without really very much to do as clergyman.

Of course, the crowning event that has dramatically upset the traditional pattern of English religious history was the friendly visit paid by Dr. Fisher, then Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, to the Vatican last December.

We have not the leisure, or the patience, or the skill, to comprehend what was working in the mind and heart of a then recent graduate from the Harvard Divinity School who would muster the audacity to contradict his most formidable instructor, the majesterial Andrews Norton, by saying that, while he believed Jesus `` like other religious teachers '', worked miracles, `` I see not how a miracle proves a doctrine ''.

Because your soul was made to be filled with God Himself, not religious functions `` about '' Him.

For the Lo Shu square was a remarkably complete compendium of most of the chief religious and philosophical ideas of its time.

Pakistan was created in 1947 expressly as a Muslim state, but when the army took over eleven years later it did so on a wave of mass impatience which was directed in part against the inability of political and religious leaders to think their way through to the meaning of Islam for the modern political situation.

During the years when Israel was passing from crisis to crisis -- the Sinai campaign, the infusion of multitudes of penniless immigrants -- it was felt that the purpose of national unity could be best served if the secular majority were to yield to the religious parties.

The `` belaboring '' is of course jocular, yet James was not lacking in fundamental seriousness -- unless we measure him by that ultimate seriousness of the great religious leader or thinker who stakes all on his vision of God.

To help him on this religious aspect of primitive jazz he had `` Big '' Miller, as a preacher-singer and Hannah Dean, Gospel-singer, while Oscar Brown Jr., an extremely talented young man, did a slave auctioneer's call, a field-hands' work song, and a beautifully sung Negro lullaby, `` Brown Baby '', which was one of the truly moving moments of the festival.

By the time we arrived and entered the building sacred music was already swelling out into the chapel-like auditorium with its discreet symbols of religious faiths.

I felt no conflict between what I was doing and my strict religious upbringing.

The naked bodies of the statues are associated with the cult of the body that was essentially a religious activity.

This type served certain religious needs and was first proposed for what was previously thought to be depictions of Apollo.