Why cant you say bless you when a Jehovahs Witness sneezes? It started during the Black Plague. Since one of the first symptoms was sneezing, people would say God Bless you as a prayer (blessing) for your recovery and for your soul if you die. Think about it, people may have not been able to read back then but they were just as sharp as we are today. They would know that if the soul is our spirit (personality and life force) and we sneeze it out, we are dead. The person wouldnt be standing there anymore continuing to sneeze. It logically couldnt come back. Nothing more superstitious than that. First, let me explain why we dont make it a practice to use that expression. It is actually derived from an ancient superstition that a person who sneezes, might actually sneeze their soul out of their body. So, it became customary to give some sort of blessing to a person who sneezed to, in some way, help the persons soul get back into their body, or wish for them that their soul wasnt sneezed out (kind of like wishing them good luck that their soul is still in their body). JWs have a problem with that on a number of different levels. But, suffice it to say that since this is based on a superstition, we do not practice it. Our religion is free of superstitions, good luck practices, and stuff like that. Its for the same reasons that we dont do the whole knock on wood or throwing salt over the shoulder type things. All these things are traced back to ancient worship of non-christian gods and non-christian religious practices. How each one of us handles each situation, is really up to the individual JW. We dont have this big list of dos and donts in our religion. What we do have is the knowledge of where these things come from, such as the custom of saying bless you when someone sneezes. What else we have, is the Bibles principles that are plainly shown to us. Each one of JWs handles these seemingly small matters how he sees fit. If someone says this expression to me, I just accept that they are carrying out an act that they view as customary. The other person has no idea what my beliefs are, and Im not going to feel that I have to give them a history lesson on the custom. Its a trivial thing, and I simply go on about my business. The other persons act of saying bless you was likely done as a reflex action, without them actually thinking about it anyway. Just offer them a tissue. Fact: Superstition is a Sin in most religions. But without research how would you know what is superstitious and what is not!
Posted on: Mon, 01 Sep 2014 16:17:47 +0000
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