Euripid,
Thanks for the link,,,I haven't read the entire article just a scan of it I thought I would clip and paste this small part which is the essence of it:
I am neither shocked nor depressed that Professor Staal has pronounced ritual to be complex and meaningless. It is complex, and full of significance, since it is a tenacious and vital part of human activity. What meaning ritual has may be intuitive, symbolic, subjective, and ineffable. But meaningful it is. Our business as students of religion is to understand how ritual is meaningful; how it assists us in expressing ourselves and our relation to our world and to the Transcendent; and how its ubiquity reflects the fundamental human need to symbolize and express our relation to what we understand as the Transcendent. It is in the final analysis a matter of human culture, enacted by men and women, sometimes alone, more often in community. It is therefore a question of subjective experience. As we describe it, soberly, and as objectively as we can, we are describing the real experience of a real person or group of people. As we describe, we are expressing our own subjective experience of ?the other?. Recognition of this essential fact frees us to step back into a more objective viewpoint, and thus we can begin to make real progress in the study of human ritual expression.[21]