Ceremonies are lightweight brainwashing, designed to make people act and/or think in certain ways. Always have been. No matter if they are religious or secular.

Consider graduation ceremonies. You are being handed a piece of paper, that basically signify you did what some teachers asked you to do for x years, mostly memorizing useless shit. But they don’t want you, and employers to think what that paper really is. They want everyone to think the paper is important. So they have hours long ceremony, where everything is designed to make the fact you are handed the paper feel important.

I don’t think anyone really likes ceremonies as such. They like the feeling the ceremony is designed to evoke, or what the ceremony signifies.