Quote:
Originally Posted by pknopp
Comparing kneeling to walking into Mass with your dick swinging.
Do I really need to explain the hyperbole here?
Kneeling has never been disrespectful. If this is the length one has to go to show it is........
Walking into anywhere outside of a locker room with your dick swinging is of course going to be considered unacceptable. Probably get you arrested.
Kneeling has always been a sign of respect
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If you kneel, the action supposed
SUBMISSION and that supposition is accepted under most circumstances.
But there is a reason why we do not take a knee at meeting the president and can you tell us what is that reason ?
Humans are wired to be emotional and even irrational. We are first emotional before intellectual. We act only
WHEN we feel, not
BECAUSE we think. And that goes even for the most intellectual of us. We only fool ourselves into believing that our thoughts compelled us into actions when in reality, our intellect only lends support to whatever it is that we consider worth taking actions to support and/or defend.
Rituals are all about emotions, not intellect. Rituals are about hyperbole. You have to act a certain way to promote a positive idea, therefore, the absence of that action promote the opposite. Actions and their meanings inside a ritual is
ALWAY binary: good/bad or black/white or yes/no. If you cannot perform an action, it has to be from physical inability, not from intent, if you do not want the absence of that action to be construed negatively.
For example...If I cannot render a salute to a superior officer, as the ritual expects the right hand, then either my right arm is missing from combat or is somehow otherwise occupied like working with the left arm at carrying something. In that case, the ritual expects an alternate path to express my
RESPECT to that officer. That alternate path is at least a verbal acknowledgement of his presence, but not kneeling.
Imagine a private, instead of kneeling, takes to one knee at meeting the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Imagine the private argues that even though his right arm is available, his admiration for this superior officer compels him to get down to one knee. The next meeting for that private would be with his CO, then a psychiatrist.
The ritual expects the salute to be rendered from the
STANDING position. If you cannot stand, that means either your legs are lost from combat or that you have them but they are temporarily unable to support you. In this case, the ritual still demand an alternate gesture of respect. You do not have to render the hand salute, because the ritual expects the hand salute
WITH the standing position, but if you render the hand salute anyway, the ritual will allow that deviation and still expects the other party of return the hand salute.
When you stand, it is a stressor position. Even more stressful if you stand at what the military calls the 'at attention' posture. Ritualistically, it signifies undivided focus to a target, whatever that maybe. It is absolutely irrational as we know that you can focus even if you lie flat on your back. But as long as the ritual persists in interpreting non-standing as less than full focus, the ritual resorts to its binary condition and promote the idea that that being non-standing as being
DISRESPECTFUL. The fact that if a ritual was formulated to contains standing, it further supports the argument that a ritual is first and foremost emotional in scope and to evoke from inside the participant certain feelings. Not intellectual musings. And we accepted these requirements when these rituals were created.
Religion and the military are the only two social groups that formally codifies rituals and exacts punishments for failures to perform those rituals. Nothing hyperbolic about my previous arguments.
If we can infer so much from a military ritual that contains just one simple physical movement, it is no strain of the intellect of what we can interpret from a civilian ritual -- that of standing for the national anthem.
This ritual was informally codified and informally accepted by Americans. But despite this informality, once the ritual was created, it contains all the inherent characters of what is a ritual. Just like formally created and accepted rituals, it expects no deviations of its requirements and if there are any deviation, it automatically implies the negative. So if standing implies respect, non-standing implies disrespect, unless a person is physically unable to do so.
That is why this image of Zachary Stinson at the 2012 Olympics...
...Is so
EMOTIONALLY powerful.
Stinson is fully excused from the ritual, military and civilian versions, and yet he persists in putting himself into a stressor posture because internally, he felt that anything less implies
DISRESPECT to the objects of the ritual.
It is not that Americans are ignorant of whatever other interpretations of kneeling, but we criticize the kneeling position from inside the ritual.
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