I'm sorry, I may have either rounded you to the nearest cliche or lumped my responses to other people's comments into my response to yours.

Your comments about "social pressure" and "how can something be consensual if you enshrine it as a ritual" did make me think there was a consent aspect to it, and your comment about "using ritual to insert things deep into your psyche is something that I think is just bad" was where I got the feeling of brainwashing from, but I can see how I might've been misunderstanding them.

So you're saying you have such strong anti-ritual preferences that you assumed people must have been awkwardly attending something they didn't like in order to fit in? Hm. That makes sense.

I guess what I've learned from this is that I still can't describe the reasons for why I like things. "Community bonding" sounds good, but when you press me on it I admit it's kind of dumb and the ritual wasn't really about that at all. "Sense of the sacred" sounds good but there were a lot of other easier ways to get that feeling I didn't go for. I'm just going to say I have an unexplained preference for rituals of about the same magnitude as an unexplained preference for playing fantasy role-playing games, and although I can come up with just-so stories for it ("group bonding", "search for meaning", whatever) I can't explain it but would like to keep doing it anyway.