I just roll with it.

"Bless his/her heart" is a Southern way of softening the blow. While gossiping, it's an attempt to make them seem charitable. After harshly criticizing an absent person, Southerners qualify it:

"Sam is a lying snake who can't keep it in his pants, bless his heart."

I think that people forget that language constantly evolves to have different meanings which are different from those of us all over the world .I imagine that Linguists have a hard time tracking where we are at - For me its like how cockney rhyming slang evolved for street traders to evade the Police. They made their own sometimes daily evolving language so if someone is not a cockney barrow boy it is very hard to make out what is being said. If a non cockney worked out a word or two it wouldn't make sense. I imagine everyone knows "lets have a butcher's' Butchers hook ='look'- lets have a look ! So you need the second part of the rhyme to get it - so - you don't get it . Old street slang plus new permeates our language as well as new words for new things that come into being like robots. its a good thing I htink that language is evolving because that means to me that we are too.

A lot of those bless you type phrases have been around way longer than christianity, so no, I'm not offended. If someone wishes me well, no matter how it's said, I'm generally ok with it.

Many people in the area I currently live say, 'bless' about people. I see that as condescending, but none of those terms really bother me. I take them in the vein that they're meant, usually kindly.

You know there is an old Arab saying : your enemy is not your teacher”. We as Agnostics and Atheists can behave like the religious right or Zealots or every day garden variety Christians . We don’t have be rude , unkind , disrespectful, dogmatic, brain frozen... but rather move on and don’t sweat the small stuff