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If air comes up involuntarily from your stomach and exits out through your mouth, what do you do? You say, "Excuse me." If air escapes from your intestines and exits out of your ass, what do you do? Well, you probably try to pretend it wasn't you. But if there's no escaping the truth, you say, "Excuse me."
But if air instead travels at high speed out of your nose and mouth due to a tickle in your nose, a very different ritual occurs. Most people say nothing after they sneeze, and they expect those around them to say, "Bless you." What in God's name is that all about?!
Most of my life I believed one popular explanation of this: "God bless you" started being said during the time of the Black Plague in 13th and 14th century Europe because a sneeze was a sign of the plague, and people were trying to avert further spread of the disease with some magic God-juju.
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While this sounds like a pretty good explanation, it's not true, because the first written record of the practice goes back to the 1st century CE - long before that particular plague.
Snopes lists a half dozen possible reasons that people started saying "God bless you" to sneezers, from aversion to disease, to fear that people's souls would pop out of their mouths, to trying to stop demons from entering the body, and even as a recognition that sneezing is just plain lucky. (So the blessing is more affirmative than precautionary.)
Whatever the actual reason it became common practice, clearly in retrospect that reason was dumb. And I hate sounding dumb if I can help it. So I really hate saying, "God bless you" to people when they sneeze.
On the flipside though, I don't like being impolite. (I mean, unless you're an asshole, in which case I'll be an asshole right back.) I don't want to be stuck in a room with someone who sneezes, and then I'm silent, and the girl thinks I'm being rude.
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So this wish to appear neither dumb (mostly to myself) or like a savage (to others) causes me many social dilemmas each day.
Now look, I'm an atheist. So any time the concept of "god" gets brought up, the thing is going to look pretty silly to me. But I get it - that's not everyone. Lots of people think a god or gods are real. I'll respect that for the purpose of this post. Because if you think about it, you don't have to be an atheist to think that saying "God bless you" in response to a sneeze is pretty fucking silly.
As noted above - people make all kinds of involuntary bodily noises. None of those noises require a blessing, so why should a sneeze? It's all part and parcel of the same idea: your body just made an irritating/disturbing/disgusting sound that infringed on the people around you. The rationally polite thing to do is say, "Excuse me."
You may believe in God, but I'm assuming (hoping?) you don't believe in demons or escaping souls or lucky sneezes or even that saying the words "bless you" will stop a plague.
So join me in being civilized! When you sneeze, just say "Excuse me," and let's leave the superstition to the Middle Ages.
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