Observations and inanities by a second-shift assistant supervisor in the Puppy-Grinding division of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy® (our motto: "Sure it's cruel, but think of the jobs!"), your host, Brent Rasmussen.
Something To Sneeze At
I've probably asked this question before, but I was just thinking about it again today. What do you do or say, if anything, when you or someone around you sneezes? We are a thoroughly godless family, so "God Bless You" just doesn't ever happen. Nor does "Gesundheit", because, you know, we don't speak German. If anything, we'll say "Good one!", if it's a particularly good sneeze. Or maybe, "get a tissue!" More often it is politely ignored.
But most folks feel the almost pathological need to acknowledge your sternutation by asking an imaginary superfriend in the sky to "bless" you with his magical sneezetastic anti-nose-demon ray - or something like that. I'm a little hazy on the details, to be perfectly honest.
So, what is your sneeze-acknowledging ritual, if any?
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"If you want to make a
"If you want to make a person feel better after they sneeze, you shouldn't say 'God bless you.' You should say 'You're so good looking!'"
- Jerry Seinfeld, in "The Good Samaritan"
nada
I was raised in a home where nothing was said when someone sneezed, I remember how peculiar I found the notion that most people actually did and how surprising it was to me that their deity had anything to do with it, I have seen many people get offended when I DON'T say anything when they sneeze, and I find the whole custom an idiotic mental tic that just needs to stop.
Many cultures acknowledge sneezing in others
Despite Hank's assertion:
I use the Russian "???? ??????(?)" [bood' zdorov(a)], which translates to "Be healthy." And, thank you, I'm quite sane.
Be Healthy
Yes, but what is the rationale for wishing someone good health after a sneeze? What is unhealthy about sneezing? And to whom, exactly, is this good health wish aimed towards? Who grants the wish? (And, if you contend that there is no wish involved, then how does telling someone to "be healthy" after a sneeze follow? It's a literal non sequitur. It "does not follow".)
I don't know, man. I just ignore it. :) You may be sane, but I think your reasons for wishing someone good health after a sneeze are probably irrational and unreasonable, if you really examine them closely. Not "bad", or evil or anything, or even insane - just unneeded and unnecessary. Silly. More of a "social momentum" sort of thing, I suppose.
Breaking the habit
I've been trying to break the "Bless you" habit for a couple of years now.
I do say "gesundheit" and I like Hasselhoff. I think Salud is good too.
The problem with ignoring it and saying nothing is that there are people who will get offended if nothing is said. I generally have no problem offending (or with offending for that matter) but fostering ill will in the workplace is not something I'm really shooting for.
i say...
HASSELHOFF!
I love it
Hasselhoff! I love it. I'm using that.
The proper response to
The proper response to someone else's sneeze is, "Nice push!"
The proper response to one's own sneeze is, "Whoopie!" This I learned from Ma, who said it when she sneezed. She said a sneeze made her feel good.
I find both exclamations well received most of the time.
It's because your soul escapes
Since you write
. . . as I understand it, the belief (circa year 1000 CE) was that the force of the sneeze might shoot your soul out of your nose (much as your soul leaves via your nose when you die - - you knew that anyway, I'm sure), and while the little guy is floating around out there, desperately trying to swim back into you the way it came out, the devil has a chance to grab it and run away forever with it, like a basketball player stealing an errant dribble. Thus "bless you" was to give god a suggestion that he should help stuff the thing back in.
I use
as an idiomatic expression which (regardless of German translation), in context, translates to something like
I suppose another choice would be to say "My, that was a corker! You probably feel uncomfortable for the moment. I sympathize." - - at a cost of 21 extra syllables.
or "whooo-eee! are you okay?"
.
Bless You
Despite being an atheist I do not see the the big deal of saying "Bless you" (or "Gesundheit" despite not being nowhere near fluent in German) when someone sneezes near me. I still say "God Damnit!" or "Jesus Christ!" if something bad happens also. Just because someone says for example "beer is the nectar of the gods", does that mean that he/she are Pantheistic in their beliefs? No.
I have a suggestion If
I have a suggestion
If someone sneezes, loudly say EVOLUTION!!!!
wouldn't it be cool if THAT caught on.....
Salud
...from the Spanish
Salud
...from the Spanish
I’m in the politely ignore it camp.
I’m in the politely ignore it camp. I really dislike it if I sneeze while I’m listening to someone else talk and that person has to stop speaking in order to tell me “God bless you” or “gesundheit”, and I don’t want to inflict that on anyone else.
here in sweden we say Prosit
here in sweden we say Prosit ("may be beneficial")
Sneeze Atheist
I say exactly the same thing I say when someone coughs, sighs or farts.
Nothing.
Sane people don't have special conversational rituals for honoring the expelling of gases from fellow humans.
Although, if it was an especially grand brontosaurus-quality fart, it might merit some notice such as running from the room.
......
On the other side of the equation, I'm a "photic sneezer," someone who sneezes -- always exactly twice -- when he passes from a dark place into a bright one. When I'm outdoors, I like to just let the sneeze rip -- what I call the Truck Driver's Delight.
I used to have nosebleeds all the time when I was a kid, and it got to be REALLY annoying that people would get excited about it, when to me a nosebleed was no more important than a momentary itch.
I feel the same way about sneezes. I've never actually said anything to anyone who blesses me from across the room (well, other than a co-worker, jokingly), but what I THINK about saying is something like "Jeez, shut UP. It's just a sneeze, fer chrissake."
i actually do go with "Gesundheit".
but sometimes i'll say "are ya gonna make it?" instead. because everyone likes to have their viability questioned. or the less morbid, "you ok over there?"
Around here...
I tend to say "bless you" out of habit. My wife says "salud"
it's just a convention
I just say "bless you". It's just a convention. Doesn't have to be taken literally.
I do the same
I say "bless you" and then feel weird about it.
I was afflicted with Christianity for over twenty years. Saying "bless you" predates that delusion. So it never had a particularly religious connotation for me in the first place.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with a non-metaphysical blessing. Like the Bentley automobile up in Chicago with the license plate that says; "WSH U12".
Bless You: A Particle of Religion
Words are IMPORTANT to thought. They matter, a lot, in how and how well we can think. (Plenty of other ways to think than through language, but it’s one of the ones we have some conscious control over.)
There's an entire linguistic set that undergirds religiosity. Most of that linguistic set is installed in us before we're able to think analytically about language, so we assume it's okay. "Hey, I'm doing okay, right? It's ME."
And yet for both individuals and for humanity, I see it as ... well, imagine that you've been in a wheelchair as long as you could remember, and you lived in a society in which everybody was in wheelchairs. For you and your people it would definitely be "normal." But in any comparison to the average healthy state of your species, in any view that included the ultimate physical accomplishments of which Homo sapiens might be capable, in no way would it be "healthy."
Still, if you never saw those others, you'd be perfectly content to be as you are. Just as we’re content to use the religious linguistic set, with no thought to what effect it has on us.
Our species grew up without parents, without healthy, sane people to teach us and measure ourselves against. And we grew up crazy as hell. We're might be sanER than we’ve been through most of human history, and you can occasionally find fairly sane individuals, but compared to what I think might be true sanity – optimum mental software for the fully realized possibilities of human existence – our society as a whole is bugfuck insane. And I mean obscene-serial-killer-monstrosity crazy.
For instance, we can happily participate in the casual murder of thousands or millions of people, including kids, in the most ugly ways imaginable, and not even care to learn the details. And I mean right now, TODAY. (And it’s not just other humans – we're so fucked up that killing other living things is not just fun, but an organized SPORT which has complex rules, a wide array of beautiful and well-loved killing tools, and an active cadre of defenders who can’t imagine why everybody else can’t love it too. And no, I’m not talking about anybody here.)
I think our entire society is a sort of bonsai of what it could have been. We’re a California redwood in a 10-inch pot. Beautiful to those familiar with it, but sick and runty as hell compared to other redwoods.
Out of all the pruning and stunting forces that have made us like this, religion – a thousand times worse than mere superstition, because it's organized, and taught, and because its conscious aim is to destroy human reason, confidence and freedom and replace it with guilt, fear and control – is the chief one.
You could torture to death a billion people, one at a time, with slow, studied care, and not equal the horror that religion has visited on us.
At least I think so.
And that’s why I shy away from using any of that polluted, poisonous linguistic set.
I agree that in some
I agree that in some instances, religion is the means for spreading guilt and fear, with the aim to gain control. However, I see no reason to suppose that the social institutions associated with religion are unique, or even particularly significant in this respect.
Selfishness, greed, and a penchant for power games are constants in the scheme of human affairs, and any widespread social institution provides another outlet for them. Ditto for generosity and the milk of human kindness. When you feel the urge to hold a particular system of beliefs responsible for ordinary human rottenness - or give it the credit for ordinary human kindness - just keep in mind the difference between correlation and causation.
Also, the idea that a particular linguistic set has non-trivial effects on a person's world view is hotly debated even within the field of linguistics - see http://158.130.17.5/~myl/languagelog/archives/003055.html
and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Wrong link
Sorry, the correct link is http://158.130.17.5/~myl/languagelog/archives/000129.html
You know what I think?
I think some people take this whole "godless" thing W-A-A-A-A-Y too seriously ;-)
Rob Miles
--
There are only 10 types of people in the world;
those who understand binary and those who don't.
Tell that to...
You think we take the whole godless thing too seriously? Tell that to some gay person who's been disowned by his family. Tell it to the survivors of 9/11, or for that matter to an Iraqi family whose breadwinner got blown up by a tank with the slogan "Jesus killed Muhammad" on it. Tell it to American school children who get a watered-down science curriculum because some people think it diminishes them to have a billion-year lineage instead of a 6,000 year lineage.
I pass up a lot of opportunities to knock religion, but religion is no friend of humankind. It deserves scorn and ridicule.
That's the thing.
All of your examples are excellent reasons to rail against religion. An innocuous "bless you" seems kind of trivial in comparison.
Besides, didn't you see the ;-) in my response?
Rob Miles
--
There are only 10 types of people in the world;
those who understand binary and those who don't.
Bless You, No.
I've worked deliberately to get all this sort of stuff out of my head, even the little, seemingly-insignificant bits. I want to know what it feels like to have a mind totally free of superstition and religiosity.
Hey, somebody has to try it.