Atheist Thanksgiving

Jeremy: thanks for the link. I tried to add a comment to the original blog, but my e-mail address is unacceptable. Rather than waste my comments, I'll post them here.

I'd start out with a different account of thankfulness.

Someone does something that makes me feel good. I want them to feel good that I feel good, so I share the good feeling with them somehow. We are biologically inclined to express gratitude. This is an instinctive response, and the fact that we have this response builds up social relationships. I am not saying that we always express gratitude with the ulterior motive of securing further assistance in the future, but it is partly because having these expressions in our repetoire of behaviour results in increased co-operation that we have reached a stage where such behaviour comes naturally to us - and not just to us. I think that non-human animals engage in behaviour that can be accurately described as an 'expression of gratitude'.

However, as humans, we are capable of much more complicated behaviour, including speech-acts. The speech act of giving thanks has developed as a form of expressing gratitude. However, as a speech act, it is under our control in a way that instinctive behaviour is not. I can say 'thankyou' when a well-intentioned action has given me much more pain than joy, because I prefer to give my intended benefactor a little of the joy they chose to give me rather than the pain that they in fact gave me.

As to which benefactors I thank, why lay down rules about whether their help is deserved, was the fulfilment of an obligation, or was a surprise? I'll thank whichever benefactors I want to thank (which is not to say that I want to thank every benefactor).

Of course, there are different kinds of thanks for different occasions. Routine help often gets a routine thanks, which doesn't give the benefactor any joy, although perhaps if the routine thanks were withheld, that would cause pain.

What would seem to break the rules of thanking is if I thanked someone who had given me no help whatsoever. If I win the lottery, its very nice if I give some money to my neighbour, but unless she somehow helped me to win, or I think she helped me to win, it is out of place to thank her.

Now, my suggestion is that giving thanks originates with a biological impulse to share happiness with the benefactor who made you happy. So, if its a beautiful day and I'm an atheist, who can I thank? Unless I think that someone capable of feeling happiness made that day beautiful, there is nobody to whom it is appropriate to express gratitude. So, in such circumstances, giving thanks is odd.

But this oddness need not prevent one from doing it anyway. We have the speech act because of the biological impulse, but I don't think that means we are bound to restrict the speech-act only to those cases where the biological impulse fulfils its evolutionary purpose. The atheist who feels the impulse to express gratitude, but cannot name an appropriate receiver of that gratitude can give thanks, and thus alter somewhat the conventions of the speech act. Well, why not?

If we alter the conventions so as to give thanks even to people for things that they had nothing to do with, the speech-act seems to lose its meaning completely. If I give thanks to something that cannot be glad that I'm thankful, the meaning of the speech-act is diluted, but perhaps it can stand a little dilution.

So, I don't condemn such a move as irrational, or breaking some rule that we are bound to obey, but I sympathize deeply with a friend of mine who lost his faith in God. He said that he woke up one beautiful morning, was about to thank God, and realised, to his sadness, that there was no God to thank. I know he wasn't the first to have this thought - I know there's a quotation by some famous thinker about this which I don't quite remember. Still, in his case, it was not merely a cliche but a truth, and a sad one, that he had nobody to thank. I can cuddle a pillow at night and feel a little better than I otherwise would, because it is a bit like cuddling a person, but there is a touch of sadness, because I know the pillow isn't a person really. I think the same could be said of someone who gives thanks to an unfeeling universe.

And by the way, thanks to prosblogion for providing a home for these stray comments.

An Atheist says Thanks
By
Marilyn La Court

I am thankful for my good fortune. Because of a zillion times a zillion or more miniscule incremental steps that have occurred through eons too vast for me to even begin to comprehend, I am.

I am thankful for my husband who is my best friend and life companion. The one who holds me accountable when my thinking is fuzzy and my motives might be mean spirited. I am thankful for caring family members who have hung in with me for the long haul and who accept me even when we disagree. I am thankful for friends and colleagues, old and new, who stimulate me to think, to question, to work and to play.

I thank the doctors who saved my life on several occasions and the scientists who developed the technology and the medicines that allow me to continue to enjoy living.

But most of all, I am thankful that I live in a time and a place where I have the luxury to mourn the death of one loved one at a time. I am thankful for the men who so wisely wrote a constitution that separates government from religion, and that I do not live in a place where bloody religious wars are being fought in my back yard.

I thank my children and their spouses for raising my grandchildren to be moral individuals, skeptics and critical thinkers, unencumbered by superstition and the bigotry of religion. They, and others like them, are the hope for the future of humankind.

I value my life here on earth because I know that’s all there is. So why do I care what happens after I’m dead? I value the survival of our species because I am one of us. Survival is in my genes.