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题目：ISSUE207 - "Rituals and ceremonies help define a culture. Without them, societies or groups of people have a diminished sense of who they are."

In recent years, the topic of the value of ceremonies is so hot that people varying from personalities as well as backgrounds tend to observe this same issue from diversified perspectives. A widely accepted viewpoint claims that rituals let people to know who they are in the way of helping define a culture. In taking various factors into consideration, I fail to persuade myself to agree with this conclusion totally and reckon that definition of human beings is such a complicated concept that will eternally be in discussion.

First of all, I have to concede that rituals have served as an important part in our society for centuries and are still popular up-to-date. During the Thanksgiving, turkeys are always the indispensable main dishes on our dinner tables; When the Halloween comes, if an American is abroad in eastern countries at that time, he may feel as something lost without the naughty voices of "Trick or Treat"; To be the most representative, the colors of red and white on Santa Claus's clothes together with the greeting of "Merry Christmas" have been looked as the symbol of the western cultures in many people's eyes. All of these details help construct the culture of US and have a wide influence in various places in the world.

Nevertheless, if we spend too much time on appreciating the rituals and ceremonies, the kernel of the contemporary society may be, to large extent, overlooked and the stake are too high to afford. As sciences and technologies have been highly developed nowadays, the speed of peoples’ lives is becoming much quicker than ever before. It is a hard task for us to tackle with tremendous amount of works and studies everyday. What's more, the time costing on the way to schools or companies is not so tiny that can be ignored for modern citizens. In such occasions, there is little time left for us to enjoy rituals and ceremonies. A wiser choice may be going to bed earlier in order to get sufficient energy to fight with a tomorrow as tough as today.

At last, the topic of "who I am" is one of the ultimate questions for human beings which will never get a correct answer. The simple identification of nationalities may be too narrow to define a person as the science of revolution has told us that all humans have common ancestors- a species of monkeys, but our scientists have not been able to provide further details of them, which means we are still not so clear about the exact forebears of us. What's more, even if we finally get a seemingly appropriate result to the question of "who we are", will our god agree with us at that time? Considering the stubborn conflict between sciences and religions, our emphasis may not be supposed to place on such a vague problem. There are many other serious tasks that are still waiting to be settled firstly such as pollutions or lack of recourses, which have a more obvious threaten to people’s properties and lives.

To sum up, even if realizing the significance of the rituals in modern society, they have not been so inevitable in peoples' lives. What shall we emphasize more is the internal essential of customs rather than the skins such as ceremonies. In addition, a rational person is responsible for solving practical problems rather than thinking about visional questions such as "who he is".