Many a times I’d tell my kid that we should be grateful for the things we have in life, that we didn’t get Covid, etc. etc.
So the objective analysis (or maybe not) is that there is nothing to be grateful about. That everything in life is because you worked for it with a fair bit of randomness built in.
Even though I am an atheist, I dislike ingrates. What do you think ?
Gratitude is often a positive force in social interactions and therefore has value even to a Machiavellian.
Dwelling on negatives can also lead to depression, so there is a mental health benefit to having at least some gratitude. Even if you don’t show it.
~Max
What does being grateful have to do with belief in a god? I am not following the connection here.
I didn’t work to develop the Covid vaccine, but it didn’t get in me at random; in your opinion, what follows?
Gratitude is often directed towards God.
~Max
As is hate, fear, wonder, and every other emotion you can imagine. Are atheists supposed to be emotionless robots?
Uh, no. That’s a false equivelence, in my opinion.
~Max
In what way? What makes gratefulness especially godlike?
One can be grateful that scientists were able to quickly develop effective COVID vaccines, and that you and your family were able to get them.
One can be grateful for the kindness shown to you by friends, family members, and strangers.
One can be grateful for having a good job, a safe home, etc. Many people who do work hard can’t say those things.
There is no need for a deity to be grateful for such things.
Gratefulness isn’t more godlike. Gratitude towards God is more prevalent than hatred towards God, fear of God, wonderment of God, etc. In my opinion.
~Max
Being grateful to a god for anything is inconsistent with atheism, I suppose. Being grateful to someone who exists isn’t. Things we get aren’t purely random, plenty of people do things for us, sometimes not for money, and I hope we all do things for other people, again not for money.
Now for things no one is responsible for, I don’t know if gratitude is the word I use. I can eat just about anything and not gain weight, even at age 70. Should I be grateful to my genes or just consider myself lucky? I don’t know for sure.
That has not been my experience. Most Christians I know are proud of being “God fearing” people.
I could be misreading people. In my experience people don’t dwell on fear of God like they do gratitude towards Him; when dwelling on a fear of God it goes hand in hand with gratitude that the fear isn’t realized.
~Max
Atheists have a range of all emotions, just as religious people have a range of all emotions. There is no meaningful way to distinguish them as groups just because of their belief or non-belief in a deity of any sort. Everybody builds feelings of gratitude or anything else based on their own individual, personal experience. No one can say what any other person should or shouldn’t feel.
(Feelings toward a deity may vary, certainly, but IMO that’s a hijack to this discussion. As is any mention of god.)
Do you find this to be true in regards to all gods, or just certain gods?
False dichotomy, surely, since you can be grateful for your good luck.
I think what may underlie Max’s concern is the idea that it only make sense to be grateful to an intentional actor. God would be such an actor but, if there is no god, who is the intentional actor to whom you can be grateful for the various good things in your life for which you yourself are not responsible?
But I quibble with the premise. In the right circumstance you can be grateful to fate, or circumstance, or the workings of the free market, or other impersonal phenomena, or things that are done by actors who have no intentions at all with respect to you. The condition for being grateful, I suggest, is not that someone else should be the author of your good fortune; just that you yourself are not the author.
And you probably should feel grateful, partly because it’s good to be aware of how little you are the author of your own good fortune, and partly because an awareness of how interconnected everyone and everything is provides a basis for reflecting on how what you yourself do can bear on the good fortune of others.
You opinion is perfectly valid. However, in my opinion, most religious folks (not just Christians, but a certain type of Prosperity Christians are especially bad at this) give lip-service gratitude towards God for their success, but if you mention that means that they didn’t therefore have to work hard/study hard/get lucky to succeed, they are 100% happy to take all the credit. And every religious person I’ve seen will blame God or the Devil (same basic thing, they’re blaming their own religious structure) for bad things.
So I doubt the premise that gratitude towards god is truly prevalent, it just gets a lot better PR.
Back to the OP - gratitude / goodwill is arguably more important to atheists than religious folks. After all, if one gives thanks to God (a duty in many, but by no means all religions), you’re improving your chances of a positive afterlife. Giving gratitude to another person can also be considered a religious virtue, whether charity, humility or the like. You are rewarded in the next life for the actions of this one.
If you’re an atheist, you’re doing it without that reward, only the same rewards the social contract all humans, religious or not, abide by. But this is a tired argument, as is trying to insinuate that non-religious folks can’t have morals without spirituality interfering.
Can’t one simply be grateful for white privilege? Or male privilege? Or American privilege? Certainly no one worked for that. Those states may be part of the randomness of the universe, but everything is. It’s futile to say that therefore no emotions are valid. That leads to a nihilism that is just an inverse of solipsism.
But everything gets back to a definition of gratitude. And definitions of vague emotions are a sinkhole.
What even on earth are you trying to get at? Most people are only grateful toward zero or one gods, but which god it is is immaterial for the purpose of what Max is saying. Reread what he wrote and check your understanding.
Given that gratitude toward God is a pretty key underpinning of most modern branches of Judeochristian religions, it’s silly to treat his statement as controversial or to try to muddy it with irrelevancies.
That said, as an atheist, I feel plenty of gratitude toward other people who do good things. I also feel gratitude toward my garden when it grows (which, since I’m a middling gardener at best, it doesn’t always do), and toward a rainbow when I see one, and toward chill autumn air, and toward a bluebird that gives a flash of color to my day.
It may not be strictly objectively rational to feel that way. But what is strictly objectively true is that feeling that way makes me happy, and so I may as well.
Gratitude = thankfulness, and thankfulness requires having someone to thank.
At least, I assume that’s the logic. It depends on your understanding of what gratitude is.