This is going to sound like bullsh*t on my part, but I don’t 100 percent know why Christians pray before eating. I always thought it was to avoid food poisoning?
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I assumed it was gratitude to a deity they believed was providing the food, I bet the poor tippers among them don’t see the irony as well. Do they thank a deity when they get cancer or gout, or a bad case of Psoriasis?
Selection bias ahoy…
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I believe that this is a holdover from a time when starvation was rampant, and praying over food could be a survival stratedgy that emphesizes the sacredness of food and gratitude for avoiding (at least temporarily) starvation for another day.
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Whatever the reason, the typical jesusian way of praying before eating makes me cringe. Especially the US style that we way too often can see in movies and TV series made in the USA.
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If folks in the U.S. who are praying over their food really wanted to show thanks for the food they’re filling their gobs with, they would support the immigrant farm workers who make it possible for putting that food on their tables.
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So how is it done elsewhere? The family prayer around the table is cringy, but I find the “holier than thou” vibe of those that insist on doing it in public nauseating. The ones who do it at work are all Trump supporters, another reason to make me want to puke. They thankfully get pretty much ignored where I work now. One place we had to be “respectful” and not talk as they milked it for all it was worth. That was the same place that banned a free local paper in the break room because it included gays in it’s lonely hearts section. Land of the free indeed.
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Oh lord… ooh you are so big.
The cage-raised factory chicken is evidence of your bigness. You are huge enough to give us this rain forest destroying, indigenous people displacing palm oil. Omnipresent enough to take us ever one step closer to diabetes from this high fructose corn syrup.
In your name we give thanks for guiding the scientists perfecting the latest version of statin!
Now turn off that TV during dinner. Ain’t nobody interested in Somalia.
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[tone=sarcastic]
If the immigrant farm workers want better paid, they can just work harder, pray more, and demand less. Besides, they’re not real christchuns.
[/tone]
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I must confess that I have absolutely no idea how they do it here. I’ve never ever been exposed to that here, even when visiting people that I know are christians. If people do that, I suspect it must be the mostly religiousest of the religious, or among members of sects like JW, pentecostalists, adventists, BCC, etc. And apart from their door-knocking and street preaching drives plus the occasional new coverage, I largely see and hear very little from them. Even the extremely few work colleagues I have that I know are christians of the charismatic variety don’t speak about religion at all, they just keep their mouths shut about it, even when outspoken atheists (like me) on occasion bash religion (typically as a comment on relevant news events or politics or policies).
Yeah, it must be real torture to be exposed to opinions that differ from your own…
Edit: grammar, spelling, fixed a link
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Norway must be a paradise compared to the USA.
We had to study the Norwegian healthcare system in nursing school, as it seems that your people are doing better than us (in longevity and infant mortality) with less resources.
It also seems that you guys have a version of private gun ownership, yet you don’t have the mass shootings, suicides, and violence that we do.
And–most of all–you don’t have Donald Trump!!!
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Actually, come to think of it, I have a vague memory from first grade in primary school, where we sometimes had to sing a short song (12 words) at lunch time, before eating our packed lunches consisting of open sandwiches topped with sweaty cheese, room temperature ham, or similar delicacies. It went like this (verbatim translation):
O you who feed the little bird
bless our food, O God.
Amen!
I remember I felt somewhat awkward about this, and I guess you can say that already at such a tender age I cringed at it, even though at that time I had never been exposed to the concept of not being religious. This little “dinner table song” allegedly stems from olden times when christian beliefs permeated everything in society, from family life to the country’s constitution. By the time I started school, the firm grip that the church and christian dogmas had on society was crumbling. Today, school is entirely secular, and the kids nowadays have a subject called “Knowledge of christianity, religion, philosophies of life, and ethics”, whereas I had to endure the subject “Knowledge of christianity”.
Hi! Praying to me is like talking to yourself you get no results from it.
I’ve always wondered why we didn’t seem to take a closer look at systems that work. I guess we do. I hope it eventually makes a difference. Our system seems broken. I’m not real optimistic for the near future considering that Trump is turning our health care system over to greedy snake oil salesmen (Oz) and out right kooks (Kennedy). Dam, one step forward, two steps back.
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Since we don’t have to line the pockets of greedy insurance companies or hospitals to get even basic healthcare, and since the prices of medications are centrally negotiated to bring down the prices, it should follow that we need to allocate fewer resources to the system. Also, the full range of healthcare is available to everyone with legal residence.
Healthcare is also available to residents of the EU/EEA countries that happen to be here and that need healthcare, and vice versa for Norwegian residents in the EU/EEA countries. I’ve personally benefited from this, by being permitted to the emergency room in an EU country to be stitched up after an injury while on vacation. Total amount out of pocket for me: the price of a taxi to and from the emergency room.
Despite what the average USian may think, the laws regulating what kind of weapons you can own and use are in fact relatively liberal. The big differences are in the gun culture, that we have a real background check before you can buy firearms, and that there are laws regulating what you can use them for. You can not carry firearms openly in public (but you can of course bring them to and from firing ranges if properly packed, and carry them openly when out hunting), they must be stored in approved gun safes when not in use, and using firearms for self defense is not allowed, not accepted, and not expected (there are exceptions, but these are applied only very rarely, and only in retrospect).
Edit: Wrote EEC, meant EEA. Added link.
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You’re not ALLOWED to use a firearm in self defense? Are you saying that if someone breaks into your home, and starts towards you with a knife or a weapon, you’re not allowed to shoot the motherfucker that invaded your house?
That’s fucking ridiculous. If someone breaks into our place, and tries to hurt my wife and/or myself, it’ll more than likely cost them their life.
When you say hurt, do you mean an attempt to assault you or do you mean an attempt to kill you?
I suspect the point is that because they don’t have the insane gun culture the US has, such a scenario is vastly less likely. As of course it is in all the countries with strict laws on private ownership of firearms, which all have vastly lower rates of gun crime and gun deaths than the US, which ranks in the top two in the world, as of course it does for private gun ownership.
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Society here works differently than US society here in those respects. You cannot apply the US way of thinking regarding these things.
But to answer the question: You are allowed to defend yourself proportionally. In general, shooting someone as defence against a knife would be unproportinally, as you’re not supposed to just have a firearm ready to use outside your gun safe. Thus, using a firearm against such an attacker involves premeditated steps, such as unlocking your safe, retrieveing and loading the firearm, aiming, and pulling the trigger. There are special cases involving a concept called nødrett, which is a principle that allows you to break laws in order to save lives or prevent severe damage to property. For example, breaking and entering a cabin in the mountains to prevent you and/or others from freezing to death is deemed as nødrett. There have been cases where people that have been severely abused by e.g. their spouse or parent have shot the perpetrator, and it has been judged to be nødrett. But these are the exceptions, and the general principle is that you can defend yourself by proportional measures. Besides, house invasions like the ones you mention are - fortunately - a rare occurence here. We are just quite a bit more civilised here, you see 
Edit to add: Also, there is much less focus on self defense here, as 1. I live in a more peaceful corner of the world, and 2. we tend to focus more on prevention rather than active self defense.
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Well aren’t you quite special then?
It doesn’t matter, if someone breaks into our home, and lays a hand on either one of us, it’s going to cost them dearly.
As soon as you break into someone else’s house, you’ve forfeited any rights you might think that you’re entitled too.