This post is a little late, but these questions have been
rolling around in my brain for a while.
What exactly does it mean to “give thanks?” Just
to “give thanks.” Period. I keep hearing people say (or sing) that they
are thankful for this, that, or the other, but often they don’t say to whom they are
thankful. So . . . can you be
“generically” thankful? Does “I am
thankful for. . .” - whatever – mean
anything? I mean, can an atheist be
thankful? Obviously an atheist or anyone
else can be thankful to another
person, but can they be thankful for
another person? What does it mean to be
thankful for food, home, friends, family, etc. if no one actually gave them to
you? Are you thankful to yourself? I watched a video from Skepticon where all
these atheists were expressing thankfulness for things, people, concepts,
etc. Only two of them noted that they
were not thankful for anything,
because being thankful for implies
that you are thankful to
someone. One of them said, quite
sensibly, that saying that he was “thankful” would be anthropomorphizing the
universe. So he just commented on what
he “liked.”
And then there are the Christians who express thanks. We say things like, “I am thankful that I
have all of this good food to eat.” But
if we are expressing thanks to God, we had better be careful. If we acknowledge that God is the source of
what we are thankful for, then we are by default acknowledging that all we have
is a gift. And if that is true then the
“blessings” that we have are supposed to be used to bless others. If we are not blessing others, can we truly
say that we are thankful?
If true thanksgiving acknowledges the source of the
blessings for which we are giving thanks, then we should be prepared to put
some muscle behind our thankfulness.
Otherwise our thankfulness can be as empty and meaningless as that of
the atheists.
I think that I am going to need to be more careful in the
future with my words of gratitude; instead of saying, “I am thankful for . . .”
generically, I need to say: “I thank my
friends for. . .,” or “I thank my family for. . .,” or “I thank my church for .
. .,” or “I thank God for . . .” And my
gratitude really should be expressed in giving to others, not simply in
indulging myself.
I have come into contact with a lot of people who do not
have enough food, electricity, water, etc.
I pray that more and more God
will turn my giving thanks into sharing blessings.
Sigh. Just when I think I have made a little progress towards being a Jesus-follower, I realize how far I have to go. I am thankful to my family, my friends, my church, and our God for patience with me!
Obviously I have to comment on this. ;)
ReplyDeleteYou can be generically grateful without being grateful to any particular entity. That is, the actual feeling does exist. I know that for a fact.
The problem here is semantic. We have words for gratitude in a social context, but not in the context of the inanimate universe. Why? Because our emotions and the language thereof evolved in a social context. You gain nothing by thanking a bridge for keeping you out of a river, but by thanking the bridge's builders, you create a connection with another human being. Creating that connection is easier and works better when you actually feel it, so we've evolved to feel grateful when things are going well.
Because such feelings are so important to us, we tend to project them onto the inanimate universe, which in my opinion is one of the reasons why people are religious (and why gods so strongly resemble apes of earthly origin and are not completely alien in behavior or motivation). From an atheistic perspective, when a person receives some sort of benefit not attributable to a deliberate kind act by any living entity, it doesn't matter whether that person is religious or an atheist: if the person is grateful, they are grateful to no one. That is, if God does not exist, then your thankfulness to God is no different from my "generic" thankfulness.
I would be curious to know why it is, in your opinion, that God's blessings are so unevenly distributed. That is, why should anyone receive blessings and then feel obligated to pass them on? Has God not sufficiently blessed others? If not, why not? If others have received exactly the blessings that they deserve, who are you to judge them worthy of more or less than what God has given them? If they haven't, why is God so cruel?
To me it is obvious that people receive the majority of their blessings pretty much on the basis of history and random chance. There are always explanations for why one person was blessed with a good education while another wasn't, or why one person endures lifelong poverty and another doesn't. You were born female in rural Pakistan? Well, that explains why you're getting married at age twelve and why you're not being allowed to finish your education. Your parents are successful American investment bankers? Somehow I'm not shocked that you aren't starving.
And yet I come to the same conclusions you do. I feel warm and fuzzy and happy about having a good life. I feel humble about it because I know I wasn't responsible for most of it. And I feel obligated to help other people have good lives too. How did that happen? Well, I'm a human being, I possess a healthy and typical brain, and I was raised by you.
Thanks for your post. I really was interested in how you would see it!
ReplyDeleteAs for the part about God's "blessings," one reason I put the word in quotes in my post is that I am not sure that material things should really count as blessings if others don't have them as well. I think they are gifts to be used as blessings for others. I don't always do that, but that is my failing, not God's. I don't blame God for other people being hungry, cold, poor, etc., I blame people and what I call sin. (It isn't a sin to be poor, but it is a sin to leave someone in poverty without trying to help.) Jesus was pretty clear about that.