I have a black and white old skool marble notebook with a Led Zeppelin “Houses of the Holy” sticker on it that houses a lot of good quotes and poems I’ve amassed over the past fifteen odd years. I think I’m going to start posting them because a number of them are really great. To start this project off, as I’m embarking on a trip to the Holy Land very soon, one passage about the how ridiculous some people are in the way they worship their chosen deity gave me pause and made me smile. It might do the same to you:

If God existed (a question concerning which he maintained a meticulous intellectual neutrality) and if He desired to be worshiped ( a proposition which he found inherently improbable but conceivably possible in the dim light of his own ignorance), then (stipulating affirmatively both the above) it nevertheless seemed wildly unlikely to him to the point of redictio and absurdum that a God potent to shape galaxies would be titillated and swayed bye the whoop-te-do nonsense the Fosterites offered Him as “worship.”
– Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein

Tradition is one thing but some people truly go overboard in “worship.” Everyone should keep in mind the quote above and the simple adage that its not what you do inside a house of worship that matters, its how you conduct your life outside of it that matters.