Freedomain Radio

While Christmas rituals can be exciting for children, they certainly don’t have any of the high drama of those practised by other faiths. Take the Australian Aboriginal religious initiation rites that includes scalp biting, fingernail extraction and cutting the initiate’s penis with a stone knife, without which a man is not considered spiritually mature.

Or the extremes of the sacred fire dances performed in New Guinea, where in order to commune with their ancestors men enter a trance state wearing masks decorated with blood drawn agonisingly from their own tongues. By contrast, the most extreme ritual a Christian is likely to engage in is being dunked during baptism. Why do some religions have rituals that are so much more traumatic than others?

The whole article - New Scientist

I think Christianity is really extreme. They just pretend it's not.

The believers worship the sacrificial altar of a God who inseminated himself by raping his own mother and then they devour his flesh and drink his blood.

Cannibalism, deicide and incest! What a nice religion!

Catholic rituals are especially insidious, because they are so heavily cloaked in metaphor, allegory, and a kind of hypnotic mythological symbolism. You're conditioned to split your understanding of cannibalistic nature the rituals, from an EXTREMELY early age, through the use of repetitive language, music, and ceremony.

For example, the communion ritual includes the VERY SPECIFIC phrase "Body of Christ", chanted by the priest over and over, to each person in line who receives the communion wafer (a thin tasteless disk of yeast). After hearing that phrase droned repeatedly, you start to "forget" what the words actually mean - consciously, anyway. It becomes simply a kind of rythmic audio pattern, that accompanies eating something awful that sticks to the roof of your mouth. 

I found I had to concentrate hard, to keep the picture of "flesh" and "blood" in my mind, and not let myself get lost in the hypnotic nature of the mass.

I also find now, that this is why I have so much suspicion and hostility for meditative practices -- and I believe it may be why its impossible to hypnotize me now.

Because they have more power over the people. The more power the religious officials have relative to the people the more brutal things they can make them do.

OutSider:

While Christmas rituals can be exciting for children, they certainly don’t have any of the high drama of those practised by other faiths. Take the Australian Aboriginal religious initiation rites that includes scalp biting, fingernail extraction and cutting the initiate’s penis with a stone knife, without which a man is not considered spiritually mature.

Or the extremes of the sacred fire dances performed in New Guinea, where in order to commune with their ancestors men enter a trance state wearing masks decorated with blood drawn agonisingly from their own tongues. By contrast, the most extreme ritual a Christian is likely to engage in is being dunked during baptism. Why do some religions have rituals that are so much more traumatic than others?

The whole article - New Scientist

Are you familiar with the Lloyd De Mause Psychohistory articles?  If not, one basic premise of his work is that the more primitive a society the more violent and dissociated it (and its members) are due to horrible childrearing practices.  Religious rituals may be seen as unconscious reproductions of child abuse.

Just thinking about what some others have said about Catholicism, its strange that some South American Catholics go through that crazy Jesus Wannbe parade on Easter when they get whipped and crucify themselves, and in Canada Catholics just stand around bored shitless for even longer than usual as an Easter ritual.  Same church, wildly different rituals with wildly different intensity levels.