Occasionally. Maybe.
Not necessarily.
I can’t imagine a person thanking God for his salvation at the hands of doctors and nurses, who doesn’t liken those people to angels or at the very least regard them as instruments of God’s mercy.
~Max
Whereas I can imagine not thanking any gods for anything, then thanking, and being extremely grateful, to the doctors and nurses that have saved my life.
In fact, I can imagine it happening three times…so far.
Oh, sorry. My post #60 assumed the person “wakes up, is told that they are fine, and thanks god for his salvation.”
~Max
I agree that historically it’s probably theistic values that have given human society the notion of gratitude as a default state for our relation to the universe, and that modern secularized “gratitude spirituality” is a cultural adaptation of theistic ideals about gratitude towards a deity.
So although the ideal of gratitude as a general spiritual condition is not necessarily inconsistent with atheism, I doubt that a purely atheistic society would have independently developed it as theistic societies did.
In regard to feeling emotions, evolutionarily, it is probably biologically-based, neurophysiological changes that influenced behavior in social situations. These neuerophysiological changes then came to affect people’s behavior in non-social situations, e.g. stubbing one’s toe against a table leg and striking the table in anger. It may have to do with the earliest instances of religion, i.e. animism.
A while back I read an article about people believing they’ve met angels (that stupid TV program was running) where a woman said that she met an angel who carried her heavy bag for her at the airport. She didn’t say the guy was like an angel, she said he was an angel.
I’ve done that for people. If someone said I was a real angel, I drop the bag on her feet.
(Not really, but I’d be tempted.)
If someone said “you are an angel” to me, I’d just think they were being metaphoric and saying I’d done a good deed. It would never occur to me to think they might be accusing me of being a real angel.
It would be weird except life-saving scenarios.
~Max
Meaningless, IMHO. I see no connection of these two things in the OP.
Hard to explain, maybe; but right now I’m certainly grateful that we only got a bit under an inch of rain, instead of the up to three inches they were predicting. But I don’t think there’s somebody in charge of the weather who I’m grateful to that it worked out that way.
And I once responded to somebody’s insistence that I say grace by thanking the sun, rain, fields that had grown the produce on the table, and the animal that had given its life for the main course. In the last case you could say I was being grateful to someone in particular, but the sun and rain and fields I don’t think are conscious beings. (Though sometimes I wonder a bit about the fields. There’s a lot of life in there, after all.)
Even by that definition, of course atheists can be grateful. Atheists don’t generally think that other people don’t exist; and there’s very often reason to be grateful to other people.
I very much doubt that people can be taught to have an emotion; though we can certainly be taught to associate an emotion that we have with particular other things, or even be taught to think of having a particular emotion as good or bad or as not worth talking about.
I think it’s more likely that the emotion led to aspects of religion being developed.
Only if you took it literally, and why would you do that? “You’re such an angel” is a common metaphorical expression.
Yeah obviously as I point out above, the example of being grateful to you neighbor for helping you out, is not dependent on a higher power.
I was specifically calling out the generic secular “gratitude movement” for want of a better word. Where, as a self help technique, we are called on to enumerate the things we want to show gratitude for. To me that doesn’t make sense unless you are showing gratitude towards someone.
I think it makes sense. I’m very grateful that I happen to have been born into the situation I was born into. I’m not grateful to any entity though, I recognise it was pure chance, but I can still “thank my lucky stars” that I am me now and not someone else in some other time.
There’s nothing in there that requires you to be grateful to some entity, you’re taking the word “grateful” too literally, all it means is to focus on the positive things in life. To help you do that it suggests you pick several positive things each day. Being “grateful” for those things doesn’t require you to have an entity to thank.
I think we’re not all using the same meaning of the word.
I’m using @Richard_Pearse’s; though I’ll note that the emotion doesn’t feel any different to me whether I’m grateful that we got 3/4 of an inch of rain instead of the 3 inches the weather report was threatening, or I’m grateful to my neighbor for offering to cut firewood for me this year. In the first case there’s nobody in particular for me to feel grateful to; but I’m still grateful.
From the Cambridge Dictionary:
You’ll notice they say “especially to another person”, but not “only to another person.”
Two of their examples:
After the earthquake we felt grateful to be alive.
No someone required.
I’m just grateful that I’m not still working for him.
Unless he fired me, no someone required.
It seems like a strange leap to me too - never have I ever thought that atheists were ingrates.
But on the other hand, though I believe in God myself, I’ve also never been one of those people wondering how atheists can control themselves in public without the fear of God to keep them on the straight and narrow, and frankly wonder how people who do think that would act without Jesus and US law to steer them.
I meant it would be weird to take literally except life-saving scenarios.
~Max
The sort of people who think that gratitude or other praiseworthy human attitudes and emotions are foreign to atheists or viewed by them with contempt, would enjoy an op-ed in today’s Wall St. Journal by Michael Guillen. It’s probably paywalled, but Dopers no doubt will appreciate the view by Guillen (a reformed atheist* who now identifies as Christian) that atheists require faith just as much as the religious.
“All worldviews are built on core beliefs that cannot be proved. Axioms from which everything else about a person’s perception of reality is derived. They must be accepted on faith.”
“Even reason itself—the vaunted foundation of atheism—depends on faith. Every logical argument begins with premises that are assumed to be true. Euclid’s geometry, the epitome of logical reasoning, is based on no fewer than 33 axiomatic, unprovable articles of faith.”
“Second, size. Every worldview—that is, every person’s bubble of reality—has a certain diameter. That of atheism is relatively small, because it encompasses only physical reality. It has no room for other realities. Even humanity’s unique spirituality and creativity—all our emotions, including love—are reduced to mere chemistry.”
It’s the usual nausea-worthy stuff - atheists are just as religious as the faith-based (a restating of “your science is just religion, har har har”), but are cold and unfeeling towards fellow humans because of a lack of God-based constructs.
*some people are unduly impressed when a person with views diametrically opposed to their own “sees the light” and comes over to their side. You should wonder, though, why they were so deluded originally and what that says about their thought processes. 