Stop Blessing Me!!!

I’m not a scrooge, but ... please don’t bless me through your voice mail message.  Why religious expression in the workplace does more harm than good.

I’m a Humanist and I’m all for freedom of speech, freedom of expression and freedom of religion. But that freedom has limits when it imposes itself on others. This is especially true when you are in the workplace. Unless you work for an explicitly religious organization – don’t tell people to have a blessed day.  Here’s why.

Contrary to popular belief, we non-believers aren't offended by religious speech.  I certainly am not. But I do get annoyed by it when it is forced on me in a business setting. Generating intentional and avoidable annoyance is not polite. And is that really the impression you want to have on your customers?  Unless of course, you  don’t care about keeping your customers – in which case, you have other problems.

For the record, I am not offended by someone telling me to have a blessed day in their voice mail message. What I am worried about is how this employee will treat me if they found out I'm not religious like they are. This worry is especially acute if the employee is a public employee working for the government who has the power to deny me services based on my non-adherence to said public employee’s personal religious beliefs.  And yes, that would be illegal and yes, it happens anyway. I doubt that people who leave these sorts of voice mail messages mean any harm, but lots of religious people are scared of people who don’t believe as they do, so while they wouldn't intentionally discriminate, their fear might cause them to. It’s a real concern. And keep in mind. This isn't me inflicting my non-belief on them. It’s them forcing me to either go along with their religious belief or be exposed as a non-believer. It’s a very uncomfortable position to be in – especially when the stakes may be high.

Aside from the fear that I will be actively and openly discriminated against by the employee who “harmlessly” wishes me a blessed day, I also have to actively translate this peculiar bit of religious speak into secular speak so that I can understand what they are saying.  Do they mean for me to have a good day? Or are they making some sort of political statement under the guise of telling me to have a good day?  I have no idea.  But the attempt to figure that out is exhausting. And it’s pointless because I can’t really know for sure.  So, while I would like to think - this person means well, I can't always be sure.

“Have a blessed day” is an obviously overt religious expression and the secular expression to "have a nice day" is so ubiquitous that to choose the blessed option is rather obnoxious and that makes me wonder why this particular person felt it was important to use that particular phrase in such an overt and inescapable way. And all this is way too much thinking to think for a simple phone call message and so I become super annoyed that the person who just attempted to bless me put me through all that extra annoying unnecessary thinking and I no longer really want to do business with them at all – unless I absolutely have to.

If you want me to have a nice day - say so. Don't annoy me by making me do extra unnecessary thinking and worrying. It isn't very nice, it isn't very Christian, it isn't very professional and it certainly isn't very humanistic. Religion is your personal business. Don’t make it mine.

Religious Tolerance

Why evolution may help us be more tolerant with intolerant people of faith.

Ok – so if there is anything I am not tolerant of, its intolerance.  The problem is that there are a lot of intolerant people in the world. I think good people who do tolerate and accept diversity are in the majority – but you wouldn’t know that by how vocal and obnoxious the chronically intolerant are.

Anyway – I was asked the other day, by a militant atheist, why reason and atheism hasn’t won the day and why I spend hardly any time railing about religion. My answer was simple.

Religious people aren’t going to go away any time soon. This isn’t a matter for reason. It’s how our brains are wired. Our brains clearly evolved to see patterns and to imagine intent in other actors. I personally think that we atheists, who don’t see patterns but randomness in the universe, are mutants, outliers. Clearly we are in the minority. Perhaps evolution will favor our brains in the long run, but in our lifetime, we are stuck with the wide variety of people who are alive on planet earth with us. And those people see and experience the world in a profoundly different way from us.

And this gets me to the topic of tolerance.  Religious belief and non-belief appears to be both a product of nature and nurture.  Nature gives us our basic brain structure that makes us more or less likely to see supernatural influence in the world. And nature dictates how we culturally assign values to those basic beliefs and experiences of how the world works.

The more we accept these differences, the less we have to tolerate them because it’s not a matter of toleration; it’s a matter of acceptance.

The limit of this is when people use their beliefs to oppress other people. That should never be tolerated. Accepting that people experience the world differently doesn’t mean they have the right to oppress or kill other people. Just as we don’t tolerate people with serious anger management and/or mental illness killing or harming other people as a result of their illness, we should not tolerate people with different religious brain wirings using their religious beliefs as an excuse to hurt or harm others either.

People will experience the world the way they experience it. What we need as a society is an agreement that these differences don't give you permission to harm or oppress anyone.  This is why as a Humanist, I’m both for freedom of belief, but I don’t tolerate religious based violence or oppression. I’m not anti-religion, unless the religion is anti-human.

I accept religion.  I just don’t tolerate the oppressive forms of it.