I attended a family gathering recently. Before we ate, it was announced that everyone should bow their heads in prayer... and what followed was a minute or so of fundamentalist b.s. I didn't bother to bow my head or clasp my hands in prayer. What do you do in similar situations? Are you offended? Should we be offended?
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I don't think you should be offended by their prayer. You did what you want to do, that was not to pray or clasp your hands. No one at the table would have seen you do it, unless they were peeking during prayer.
"What do you do in similar situations?"
Go with the flow. Prayer is meaningless. It doesn't affect me, provided that it doesn't go on long enough for the soup to go cold. Getting involved in a theological argument is certainly going to spoil the food.
If they ask me to say grace (which just means "thank you") I'll say thanks to the farmers that grew the potatoes and vegetables, thanks to the animal that gave its life to give us meat, and thanks to the cook for creating this meal. If you want to get long-winded you can also thank the potters for the china, the metalworkers for the silverware, the carpenters for the tables and chairs.
Christians are rude and inconsiderate about inflicting their rubbish on thinking people, but they're more to be pitied than blamed.
No, everyone is entitled to their own special imaginary friend.
Do you think the people cared whether or not you participated in their ritual ceremony? Social expectation? Offer to give a humanist affirmation of the improbality & joy of being alive.
If they knew they would certainly care. Why would the person offering the prayer think that that I believed about the same god and jesus they believed in. The answer is of course they didn't care about any belief but theirs or the majority of the attendees
Do you think the people cared whether or not you participated in their ritual ceremony? Social expectation? Offer to give a humanist affirmation of the improbality & joy of being alive.
I have been known to follow up one of those prayers with: "A lonely prisoner sat in a cell because he'd committed a sin. The warden said, 'You have one hour of grace'. He said, 'Okay, pal, send her in.'"
Or, since I am Buddhist, I might add: "May Lord Buddha bless this meal."
Or, I might just ignore the whole thing.
I think its fine provided it is kept at 'your' home and does not ingress on other peoples, I enjoyed once something Christopher Hitchens said which touches on this.
"This stuff cannot be taken away from people, it is their favourite toy and it will remain so as Freud said, 'as long as we are afraid of death' which I think is likely to be for a long time. Secondly, and I hope I've made it clear that I'll be happy for people to have these toys and to play with them at home and hug them to themselves and share them with other people who come around to play with the toys! that's absolutely fine! But they are not to make me play with the toys, I will not play with the toys, do not bring the toys to my house!"
- Christopher Hitchens
I am not offended. I simply do not participate. Usually, everyone has their eyes closed and heads bowed. No one even notices I do not.
I just stay silent looking out in the room.
MCD: As you know, I'm European and live in Canary Islands. We're one of the most cosmopolitan places in Europe. Even though I am an atheist, it's no wonder that I'm invited to the celebrations of different religions, also to eat and to dine, and it isn't uncommon for people to pray before eating. For me the simplest thing is to get up from the table, to go to the kitchen and let them pray, so far no one has offended me, not even the Muslims when they go to dinner at Ramadan.
I get up from the table and go to the kitchen because I also understand that they have the right to profess their rites without me and they feel uncomfortable.
Greetings
@SBMontero
I haven't seen posts from you lately. I missed you and your thoughtful posts.
@mbrownec
It's summer here and most of us are on vacation, but I'm giving it a little more time and I'll be around.
Greeting.
Yeshua said that people should do all of their praying in private. Therefore if anyone professes to believe in Yeshua but prays in public it pisses Yeshua off.
I did not know that. And now that I know, I don't care
It's a ridiculous and unnecessary overt display of brainwashing that embarrasses me, vicariously speaking, and has absolutely no courtesy to it whatsoever for those in company, or in respect to situational awareness. In other words, it's yet another display of man's religiously induced stupidity.
Last time it happened to me I objected outright, told the offending individual that his prayers could just as easily be conducted internally with no outward display of his belief system's indoctrination upon him, and I considered it improper to push his convictions into a social situation that was not his privilege to do. He was quite surprised by my reaction but quickly apologized and agreed with me.
He was the Christian Brother who was teaching a History Of Christianity course at Lewis University, located in Illinois. It was a course I had to take as part of a degree program and he learned quickly who I was and my opinion of forced religious indoctrination. He invited me to the rectory lunch facility to sue for peace from my constant dismantling of the biblical claims his course was derived from but my objection to his saying "grace" was a last straw act that defeated him before the discussion began. It also put him off his lunch. Chubby dude needed to miss a meal or many anyway. As I understood it, he went back to missionary work because the intelligentsia of the modern world was a tough landscape to wax religious. Back to Africa he went to the blissfully ignorant.
The university's ultimate decision granted me a kitchen pass out of the course because it was decided that my knowledge of the biblical chronology (versus the actual archeological record) proved all that was needed from the course material objectives. Or, so they said in their pursuit of my silence, and I got an "A" for being an atheist.
I had the freedom to object. Some people don't. You must consider your surrounds and if the loss of social stature is the cost of religious freedom then that's a call you must judge for yourself. If someone openly saying grace is water off your back, pass it off as that and don't even consider the act thought-worthy. Growing up in my parent's homes grace was a normal daily occurrence that I mumbled my way through thoughtlessly. When stupid resides in your own parents you have some compromising to do until you're free from it. They will realize later that you silently tolerated them through the whole of their rearing you in their religious context and think either you or themselves the fool. That epiphany will leave a mark on them until they're gone.