I know they mean well, but when I sneeze a number of people will automatically respond with, “Bless you!”. They then expect me to say, “Thank-you”.
But I don’t thank them.
Neither do I tell them to “Fuck off with your pointless mumbo jumbo mutterings”. I just sit or stand in silence.
You see, I don’t want to be ‘blessed’. It doesn’t mean anything.
And why just when I sneeze? How come they don’t bless me when I emit one of my super concentrated fart clouds? Eh? No blessing me after one of them. Nor when I belch with a roar that would scare the most ferocious of lions. Why no blessing then?
Instead it’s a blessing only when I sneeze slime and plasma all over the place.
Well, the concept of blessing people when they sneeze (and not when they fart) seems to be traceable back to sneezing being the first stage of the plague or something, and so onlookers would ‘bless’ those sneezing as some form of protection from the plague. Personally, I’d prefer an injection of actual medicine or a vaccination, but before any of that was invented people were ‘blessed’.
So, here I am sneezing, not because I’ve got the plague, but because something has gotten into my nose, tickled it, and my natural instinct is to sneeze. As natural as farting. Even though my farts smell like a family of now rotting ferrets had crawled up my arse before they died, farts are natural. Heck, even a belch so loud that it rivals a hound howling to the moon, is natural.
But to the ‘blessing’.
My understanding of blessings and prayers and that sort of malarkey is that they are messages sent directly from the human doing the blessing to their imagined god-head, a superior being that they believe invented them and so therefore must be forever bothered by ridiculous requests and whimpering about trivia with an annoyance factor that rivals four or five hours of a fly buzzing around and around and around one’s head.
So, I sneeze, and they bless me. Are they asking their god to not let me catch the plague?
Surely if I am destined to catch the plague, the decision for this event to have to happen will have been made by their god. So are they trying to contradict their god’s will? It seems so.
I mean, it can’t be that they are asking for clemency for just me – maybe because I am a wonderful bloke who drops excellently matured farts and so deserves more than dying from the plague – because they ‘bless’ anybody sneezing. Yep, it’s indiscriminate. Why are they asking for clemency for everybody? Do they not accept that their god wants some to die horribly from the plague? If their god is all knowing and all seeing, then he has his reasons why some are to be smite with the plague, so why are his damn followers damn well interfering?
You’d think he’d get so angry with all the noise of whimpering pleading from followers who disagree with his decisions. You know, angry enough to give them the plague. Yet he doesn’t give them the plague. Would that be because he is not listening to them because they are always whimpering about something? Or is it because he doesn’t exist? Either way, those whimpering should have a good long think about that.
Most of the people saying “Bless you” to my snot explosions say they have no idea what they are actually blessing, some thinking it might be that they are trying to stop me dying from the plague, others reasoning that they might be asking god to give me a good place in heaven. Which is nice.
It’s quite alarming that those doing the blessing actually have no idea what the function of the blessing is. Bit dangerous even? Supposing ‘Bless you’ was historically a code for a message to their god for, “This is the one, yeah, kill the farting and sneezing bastard! Kill him now. With the plague.”
Not very nice are they these religious types, bless ‘em.
England's England 