Does anyone always feel totally insulted when someone says to them ‘blessed be’ or ‘be blessed’, etc, instead of ‘so long’ or ‘later, yo’, or what-have-you?
It totally pisses me off. I always want to yell back something satanic, or at least anti-christian for this unwanted imposition of their values on me.
It’s like how people say that it’s ok to pray for someone else.
No it’s not.
It’s not ok.
Ok, yes, there are far worse things you could do to someone besides pray for them, but, if push comes to shove, don’t pray for me.
If it makes you feel better, pray for yourself, but leave me out of it.
Shamefully (and I’m aware of it), I think I’m theo-phobic in the subtle sense: I’m ok with your religious beliefs as long as I don’t have to know about it.
And perhaps I’ve been soured on my own experiences with the religious --- I’ve had at least a half-dozen friendships end on account of religion, either because they can’t hang out with me because I’m not, or because I can’t hang out with them because they are.
While at university, not one but three seperate people who I counted as friends decided that I needed ‘saving’, and attempted to do just that.
So these days, as soon as catch the slightest whiff of evangelism, I’m so long gone; possibly to my own detriment. I’ve also learned that it’s virtually impossible to have pure debates about beliefs and religion: one cannot be rational while speaking on the subject, due to it’s very nature, so I’ve stopped trying to do that, so I’m left with simply walking away.
But I’m working on trying to not feel uncomfortable with public displays of religiosity, and trying to far less rude to those who feel the need to spread their beliefs to me.
(all this comes of having received a pseudo-RFP that was signed ‘be blessed’, and where the signature included a quote from Proverbs.
My immediate reaction was simply to toss out the RFP and write off the requester as a nut-case.
But quite possibly, he’s not at all, so the point of all this rant, I suppose, is my attempting to justify both my initial reaction, and why I shouldn’t go along with it)