What does it mean to "bless" something?

[Angrboda]

The "Blessed" question goes hand in hand with the "Sacred" question. What does it mean when something is sacred?
How is the wood from the cross any more "Sacred" than the wooden seat my ass sits on? They're both grown from trees and fabricated by man.

I'm on my tablet, so if I'm more curt than usual, consider it a blessing.

I'm not a Christian, so I can't quote you chapter and verse, but a quick scan of wikipedia informs me that a blessing is the opposite of a curse, and that it basically means to make holy. As someone else noted, this has to do with the concept of the sacred, and is related to the notion of ritual purity. The best explanation of the concept of ritual purity for the non-religious is one that I heard in a lecture on Hinduism. Let's suppose you're in a restaurant eating a salad. You pick the food up on your fork, put it in your mouth and swallow it. Now suppose that as you're bringing a forkful of salad, dripping with dressing to your mouth, it falls off your fork and lands on your tie. When it was going into your mouth, it was perfectly clean. But now that it is on your tie, it has become something wholly different; it is now dirt, and has made your tie unclean. The food on your tie is no different than the food that went in your mouth, but we think about it differently, probably on account of its relationship to function and teleology, along moral, practical, or spiritual dimensions. In your mouth, the food is serving its purpose and not interfering with your tie's purpose to make you look beautiful. On your tie, it has perverted its purpose and that of your tie. That in a nutshell is ritual purity.

It brings to mind a couple of anecdotes. I used to be a smoker, and one of my friends from college is a professional clown (honest, he is). One afternoon, I put a cigarette in my mouth, and he grabbed it and stuck the filter end in his nostril. When I exclaimed, he plucked it out of his nose and offered it back to me. When I told him that I no longer wanted it, he retorted that "now I thought it was dirty!" It might have been a bit obnoxious, but the fact is that the tar and other pollution that I would have inhaled into my lungs would have been far more disgusting than putting a few smudges of his snot in my mouth. But we don't think of it that way. And as an ex-smoker, even though I can rationally, abstractly acknowledge the absurdity of considering his snot unclean and my smoke acceptable, emotionally I'd never be able to "see it that way." That too is ritual purity. Things like snot and spit and semen are seen as disgusting if encountered, say, in our food, though there's nothing inherently dangerous or unclean about them in and of themselves. (Mmmmmmmm..... semen.)

A closing anecdote. The Ganges river in India is one of the most polluted rivers in the world, yet Hindus trek their daily to wash themselves in the waters, thus purifying themselves. Obviously, the purity being sought isn't one of freedom from material contaminants. One of my philosophy groups was discussing morality, and the subject of the juxtaposition of the material dirtiness of the water, with that of the belief that contact with the water was purifying was brought up. One of the members commented that if anyone who bathed in the Ganges thought that they were getting clean by doing so, then they were in denial. To which my friend remarked that he thought that that was in Egypt. (ba doom pah!)