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Payne: Cognitive Theories of Ritual and Buddhist Practice 79Whitehouse argues that the creation of repetitive ritual is actually moreimportant in the history of religion than the creation of print media:[N]otwithstanding those historians who emphasize the importanceof printing in the Reformation, it must be appreciated thatideas contained in print were only able to exercise a sustained anduniform influence on those they reached in so far as the writtenwords were continually reviewed and, in practice, rehearsed incountless speech events. 18In some places Whitehouse writes as if he thinks of the two modes ofreligion as forming something of a dialectic. The repetitive quality ofdoctrinal religion leads to boredom, and this sets the stage for imagisticpractices to be appealing.Pyysiäinen borrows this fundamental three-fold distinction (religiousmode, frequency of ritual performance, and type of memory involved) andapplies it to the way in which religious belief is created by ritual practices:“[B]elief in the truth and importance of religious beliefs is created in twoways: through repetition and through emotional stimulation.” 19 Thesedifferent ways of creating religious belief correlate with different kinds ofrituals. Rituals which are performed repetitively inform doctrinal understanding,and rituals which are performed irregularly create a memorableexperience. Pyysiäinen notes that the two are not mutually exclusive of oneanother—while repetitive rituals are not specifically intended to createemotional responses, emotional reactions to such rituals may still occur.However, “these emotional experiences are soon interpreted according tothe prevailing doctrinal schemata.” 20 When that happens, the memoriesbecome depersonalized, and are remembered in semantic rather thanepisodic memory. Emotion is still the key here according to Pyysiäinen, asit is emotion that establishes the sense of commitment to religious doctrines(or what he calls “schematized religious representations”), despite theircounter-intuitive character. Further, “doctrines too may be enhanced byimagistic experiences.” 21 According to Pyysiäinen, “religious belief” isdefined by this emotionally-rooted commitment. In contrast to religiousbelief is “religious experience” which Pyysiäinen defines as “emotionladenthoughts and perceptions that come to be encoded in episodicmemory as unique events.” 22 Pyysiäinen then attempts to ground bothreligious belief and religious experience in a neurophysiology of emotion:“The emotions that characterize both belief and experience are bodilystates that mark religious representations and bodily reactions that areexperienced as fear, sadness, happiness, anger or disgust.” 23Pyysiäinen draws on Damasio’s “somatic marker hypothesis” for hislink between the emotional basis of religious belief in the bodily responsesof fear, and so on, and the character of religious experience produced by