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I don't think that anybody's trying to stir isht up with this post -- this is a pretty normal reaction, IMO. After I went through initiation, I can't say that I expected something better, but I definitely expected something different. After studying our rituals more in-depth, I've been impressed by them not only from an emotional standpoint, but from a technical one. Our ritual is not very "showy," but the minutiae of it is pretty amazing -- every time I look through the ritual book again, I'm struck by a new thing that I hadn't noticed or realized before.
And yes, you do get out of it what you put into it. This is why I think it's hard for a lot of fraternity and sorority members to take ritual seriously, because if you're not raised in a church background, we have very little of it in our culture. Many Greeks don't internalize the ritual at all or find ways to apply it to their own lives, which makes it pretty boring and irrelevant to them. Ritual is kind of like religion in that sense.
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