I feel gratitude all the time, but it is not directed at anyone.
I feel grateful for my privileged white American male experience, a feeling that goes along with awareness that not everyone is or has been as lucky as I have – lucky in my parents, and their parents, in the era in which I have lived, in being relatively tall, and a whole bunch of other stuff. The things I am grateful for were none of my personal doing. You could say I am grateful to circumstances that benefited me. That’s how I usually think of it. I make an effort to remember this gratitude to counter all the other things that circumstances have cursed me with.
Nowhere in these feelings is there any deity involved.
I tend to be grateful towards people, groups of people, and or their actions where someone more religious would direct their thanks toward a god. If I survived a car accident I’d be grateful to the first responders, doctors, 911 caller, etc. rather than thanking a deity.
For things without a human influence (good weather, dodged a falling rock, etc.) I don’t think I feel grateful but rather lucky.
I was going to reply but I think this encapsulates the issue so neatly I don’t have anything more to say in answer to the OP’s question, as such.
Ask someone if they believe that people are more likely to be successful if they are good at cooperating with a team, socialising effectively and having a good attitude and they will say “yes”. But some theists say that - but for the moral diktats of their deity - logically we would have no reason not to descend into “every man for himself” chaos. Which makes no sense.
Atheist gratitude takes the form of awe when looking at the facts.
A night sky full of stars, but how few of them have planets can support life. Of all the forms of life, but how few are as sentient as humans. Of all the quadrillions of human spermatozoa, yours impregnated one out of all the trillions of human eggs. And once born, you are in a rare society able to learn and reflect instead of grubbing for a miserable existence. There may be many forces out to end your existence, but their number is invisible compared to the once against your being here in the first place. You beat those immense odds, by no real effort of your own. So since you can’t pat yourself on the back for it, you might as well be grateful.
I am not an atheist, so perhaps I should not offer an opinion. But honestly, it seems to me that if you’re happy with a given outcome, you can feel grateful without having to designate an entity to direct the gratitude towards. Atheists appreciate things worthy of appreciation, they just don’t embrace theistic concepts.
The poles of rigid theism and atheism are always darker to me than the middle of wonder and doubt.
Having a planet where beings like me can live, beating the trillion to one odds in having my sperm/egg combo being born, being at the top of the food chain, not being hungry, being able to experience pleasure, I think a word like “lucky” is truly, woefully, pathetically inaccurate. And so much of it is indeed luck, or good fortune, NOT someone deliberately acting on my behalf. I am grateful to have experienced the life I have had. It is a true blessing.
Now exactly what I am grateful to, I am not sure. I think the universe may actually be intelligent in itself. The many rules of the universe or nature that need to exist for ME to exist are too many to comprehend. Seems a whole bunch easier for matter and universal forces not to exist at all. For there to be nothing. Why is there something rather than nothing? Dunno. But if I’m actually alive and experiencing pleasure, drink it in, folks. A lot of what I hear from the rigid theists and atheists makes me think they’re damned fools.
Well I don’t know what a “rigid atheist” is exactly, but I might be one. The pragmatic point is that I can dwell on stuff that goes wrong or I can say “meh, overall, things aren’t so bad and I’ve been lucky in many ways”. I function far better doing the latter. No further reason for human tendency towards gratitude is required.
That’s why I was unsure that gratitude was the right word. For instance, I could be grateful for the wind that cools me, but that would be personifying the wind. Sinatra treated luck as a lady, after all. It’s a human thing to do - we likely got gods out of personifying nature - but fallacious.
If I were grateful to something for being good at math, should I be mad at something for sucking at music? So I don’t believe there is an intentional actor responsible for these things.
I assert this makes one humble. If what you are is in large part due to the roll of the sperm dice, you shouldn’t feel superior about it, since you had nothing to do with it, and you shouldn’t act like someone not as good as you in something is somehow responsible for it.
That kind of stuff leads to the “if person A with an IQ of 180 can get out of poverty, why can’t person B with an IQ of 90?” Seeing this is wrong should lead one to help person B, not blame him.
I suppose I could be grateful that my parents had sex at the exact time and position to form me, but that seems weird. I can be grateful enough for plenty of things they did for me intentionally.
I don’t agree. I have a lot of gratitude towards the endless millions of scientists, technicians and workers who have made the world today possible. All the health care, infrastructure, education, innovation, etc that makes the world we live in today possible. I have clean water, access to endless medications, surgery if I need it, protection from the elements, education about how life and reality work, justice and equality, and so do the people I love. And it was all due to human innovation and human efforts. Life now is far less brutal and cruel than it was three centuries ago due to these endless millions of people.
From what I’ve seen, as time passes and society becomes more advanced, the role of religion shrinks. So we’re moving towards a post theist society which means as time passes less and less gratitude will be directed at god and more and more will be directed at human efforts. In the 23rd century I’m sure people will be even less grateful towards any religion or deity and more towards what humans have accomplished.
Some events, good and bad, are random. And some events, good and bad, are self-directed. But many events, good and bad, are the products of the actions of other people. So atheists would have no reason not to feel gratitude towards the people who caused good things to happen in their life. Like, for example, the people who develop vaccines.
Being grateful is a feeling of appreciation for the actions of someone, or something, else. This ‘something else’ doesn’t have to be a god. I find it bizarre that anyone thinks that it must be.
I don’t put any moral valence on the category of being thankful for non-human action. If you win the lottery, I don’t care if you are grateful to either god or whatever non-divine placeholder you use.
That being said, I think that “count your blessings” as a form of inanimately-directed gratitude is an important and beneficial part of being at peace in your life. If you’re not doing that, you tend to think that you’re worse off than you are, causing your outlook to be bleaker than necessary. So it’s a good pragmatic self-care practice.
“gratitude” towards non-sentient sources is for me simply a state of self-awareness.
A recognition that things could have been otherwise, could well indeed have been worse and something of a reminder to consider if there were factors at work that I could have impacted.
If so, learn from it.
If not, just be thankful in general.