Blessings
Someone in the finance department of the institution I work for always finishes his phone calls with 'bless you'. I just took a message from him for an officemate, and received his blessings along with his thanks, and thus was born a poll:
Poll Blessings
I 'bless' people who sneeze, and I accept 'blessings' when I sneeze, but being 'blessed' over the phone by a man I have never met, and whose religious inclinations I know nothing about, makes me uncomfortable.
So now I'm trying to work my way out of the contradiction by changing my response to people sneezing (probably to 'gesundheit' or nothing). I dislike the way Christianity is sometimes seen as the default in this country - this seems to me to do a disservice to the people who genuinely are Christian, as well as to people who are not - and I try not to buy into it with my own actions, but sneezing has been an oversight. So no more dispensing blessings on behalf of a god I do not believe in - feel free to remind me of this if you notice me slipping ;-)
Poll Blessings
I 'bless' people who sneeze, and I accept 'blessings' when I sneeze, but being 'blessed' over the phone by a man I have never met, and whose religious inclinations I know nothing about, makes me uncomfortable.
So now I'm trying to work my way out of the contradiction by changing my response to people sneezing (probably to 'gesundheit' or nothing). I dislike the way Christianity is sometimes seen as the default in this country - this seems to me to do a disservice to the people who genuinely are Christian, as well as to people who are not - and I try not to buy into it with my own actions, but sneezing has been an oversight. So no more dispensing blessings on behalf of a god I do not believe in - feel free to remind me of this if you notice me slipping ;-)