Haha, I'm still laughing at the title, well done sir!
So what I'm about to write down is supposed to be taken as mostly oversimplification but hopefully it'll be a bit useful to you.
You can perhaps kind of think of absorption as a parameter that will affect how deep the light rays will go inside the volume. The deeper they go (and depending on the setting) the dimmer they'll become. So eventually after traversing through the volume for a certain distance, they'll be smothered. So kind of like saying after a certain distance the ray will completely "disappear". If you add color to the absorption then you know it's a similar story except only a certain light wavelength (color) will bounce back to your eyes.
So thinking about it like that the absorption will mainly only result in things becoming dimmer. (again, trying to oversimplify things).
Then, when you add scattering you can think of adding some "substance" to the volume. Tiny particles that will cause the light to scatter and not just pass through the volume in a straight line. Now once the light starts scattering that's when the visual magic happens because then you'll get the "god ray" effects going and all those fun things.helpdes
Emission then sort of adds some kick to the light as it travels through the volume. So light as it passes through the volume it will gain emissive properties (think glowing plasma effects).
Again, I'm trying to oversimplify things here and I'm not sure its entirely helpful but... Hopefully it helps :)