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Those with physical disabilities with using their right hand are not treated differently,but those who are able to use their right hand are to be reminded of the good habit and help them try to make it a habit.
With all my blathering on about the subject, this probably became lost in my original post. It answered FB's question and she might not have noticed it. It states what you have said.
Quote:
Originally Posted by RubyPitbull
With the advent of our sanitary laws and being taught from a young age, that we must always wash our hands after relieving ourselves, western society does not insist that we use one hand over the other anymore.
I think the difference is that in Western society (at least in the U.S.) most of us tend to follow our social etiquette rather than religious/cultural. Of course, there are muslims here and I am sure that more than a select few follow the cultural/religious laws of Islam, as FB does.
FB, thank you so much for explaining. It is very interesting. Do you know if any of the other cultures/faiths of India, follow the same rules or is this just in the Islamic culture?
By the way, I tried accessing all the links you provided and they all denied access. ???? I definitely have an interest in reading them.
From what I know about Indians(all religions included), most of them prefer the right hand,giving or receiving things,eating.One of my teachers(a Christian) from India will never take anything if we offer it with our left hand, she would politely ask that we give it with our right hand.
http://www.indax.com/trculture.html
"Left hand right hand - A very important, yet subtle, factor in India is avoiding the use of your left hand when interacting with others. In India, you use your left hand to clean yourself after using the toilet so it has extremely negative associations. ALWAYS give and receive anything with your right hand, or at least with both hands together. If you give change, accept something, or eat something with your left hand, it will be noticed, though politely not commented on. Using your right hand only is one of the easiest things for Westerners to forget to do, but it makes a difference. A friend who has been coming to India for more than a decade, but only recently made it a point to only use his right hand, said he really noticed how much people appreciated him making an attempt. It may mean a bit of extra effort at first, but it will be appreciated, and will soon become automatic. Even if you are left handed, try and adjust as much as possible."
As India is a very mixed country as far as religions go, the practice of using the right hand could have come from any of them, Hindus,Christians,Muslims,Buddists,Sikhs etc.
It's a tradition that dates back to the days before soap was invented and I think it has more to do with table-manners than hygiene today. Think about it: Imagine that you are preparing food, you have a knife in one hand and food in the other.. which hand is the food in?
Up until the seventies teachers use to smack lefties hands if they tried to write with their left hand so left handed people tended to learn to use their right hand for everything.
They thought that if you used your left hand there was something wrong with you and they were correcting the wrong. Then they realized that many artists are left handed and quit making them change from their left.
Until I was 18 yrs. old, I only used my right hand. Then an unfortunate accident left me with a broken right hand, and I had to learn how to eat, wipe, write, etc... with my left hand for 6 weeks. Over the years I've become quite talented with both hands. In some country's it is an insult to use the left hand for anything other than in the bathroom.
When I got bored in class, I practiced writing and printing using my left hand. That's what it takes practice. I use what's more convenient.
Feet is somewhat the same way. The right foot normally operates tha accelerator in a car. The left foot really doesn't really need any control until you put a clutch in the equation. Initially it's clumsy, but improves with practice.
A long time ago I heard an interesting "twist" on hand shaking from my grandfather:
He told me; acknowledging a person by shaking their right hand was a greeting. However by shaking the right hand you were somewhat assured that the other person could not use that hand to harm you and thus there was no weapon. Obviously; unless they were left handed but most people were and are now right handed. He said this was the origin of handshaking.
Left Behind
"I’ve read at least half a dozen contradictory accounts of the origin of the handshake. Because handshakes clearly predate written history, all these explanations are ultimately somewhat speculative. But the most popular story is that an open right hand showed you were not carrying a weapon; if two men met and displayed empty right hands, this presumably meant a basic level of trust existed that neither would stab the other. In one variant of this story, the handshake evolved from an elbow-to-wrist “patdown” to check for hidden knives; in another, the shaking motion was supposed to dislodge any sharp objects that may have been kept in the sleeve.
Of course, this explanation, while plausible enough, doesn’t account for left-handed men, who presumably would have been happy to extend the right hand in greeting while wielding a dagger in the left. But in many parts of the world, since ancient times, the left hand has been considered the “bathroom” hand, the one never used for eating, giving, or receiving—nor, by extension, for greeting—whether you’re left-handed or not.
Meanwhile, the “I’m-not-going-to-stab-you” story doesn’t tell us why the handshake won out over other greeting gestures in the West. After all, in some cultures the standard greeting (even between people who don’t know each other well) is a kiss on one or both cheeks; in others, people hug, rub noses, bow, or even stick out their tongues. Writer Margaret Visser suggests one possibility. As she noted in her book The Way We Are, at one time the English were more demonstrative with their gestures of greeting—for example, English men routinely greeted all women with a kiss on the mouth. As part of the Victorian behavioral “reforms,” public kissing of any kind became socially unacceptable and the handshake came into fashion for both men and women as a convenient way to keep a person at arm’s length. So to speak."
Nohelp4u, I agree with you, with everything that you can carry away that is 'free" to the "touch"(and people not hand washing.) It is simply amazing that we even shake someone's hand, knowing where it probably was.
I agree with you, but did you ask yourself why those people prefer using the right hand for honorable deeds or not, and where does this idea come from. As I am muslim I know that it came from Islam. there are so many things that non muslim ignore, they recently started to find some answers in sicence but how come all these questions were already answered in koran before and they don't know, this must make a human think once again about humanity, Allah (God) and Islam.
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