Tomorrow marks the official start to Christmas (it would have been two days from now, but you know, capitalism), meaning that families will be coming together over Great-aunt Mabel’s mashed potato surprise (what’d she drop in it this year?!), eating trimmings, pies, and poultry personifying thankfulness, togetherness, and happiness. Your crazy, racist uncle aside, Thanksgiving truly is a magical time, a coma-inducing bookend to the holidays opposite the annual fraternity party that is New Year’s Eve.
It is with this in mind that I ponder thankfulness, as someone who believes God is about as real as a giant flying mule who recites the dialogue from Half Baked while shooting fireballs from its ass. Having grown up in the Bible Belt — or Jesusland — I have frequently heard cultural rantings about how the holidays are a time of thankfulness for family and for God, the religious component of this propaganda being heavily emphasized.
After all, the Pilgrims fled religious persecution in England and settled in the New World where they had Thanksgiving with the aboriginal peoples before Christianizing those godless savages and killing the dissidents, right?
Right?
Can the godless be thankful at a time of thankfulness? The easy answer: yes.
However, some believe this not to be the case. Theologian R. Albert Mohler, Jr. is one of these people. In a 2009 post on his website, Mohler proposed the following inquiry about atheists celebrating Thanksgiving:
“How do atheists observe Thanksgiving? I can easily understand that an atheist or agnostic would think of fellow human beings and feel led to express thankfulness and gratitude to all those who, both directly and indirectly, have attributed to their lives. But what about blessings that cannot be ascribed to human agency? Those are both more numerous and more significant, ranging from the universe we experience to the gift of life itself.
Can one really be thankful without being being thankful to someone? It makes no sense to express thankfulness to a purely naturalistic system. The late Stephen J. Gould, an atheist and one of the foremost paleontologists and evolutionists of his day, described human life as ‘but a tiny, late-arising twig on life’s enormously arborescent bush.’ Gould was a clear-headed evolutionist who took the theory of evolution to its ultimate conclusion — human life is merely an accident, though a very happy accident for us. Within that worldview, how does thankfulness work?”
Atheists observe Thanksgiving by and large the same way everyone else does. We spend time with family members in various stages of tolerance and stuff ourselves so stupid we too would taste amazing basted in our juices. I’ve spent Thanksgiving with a lot of families over the years and it all ends up the same at the end — food comas, irritation, and stories to tell around the water cooler the following Monday about every ignorant thing your hyper-conservative, ammosexual uncle said about Barack Obama’s Muslim religion, Kenyan birthplace, and plans to form a police state.
There is no real diversity in Thanksgiving from place to place, at least in any way that matters.
Atheists observe Thanksgiving not by being thankful for unsubstantiated metaphysical claims, but by being thankful for each other. Even though Albert Mohler finds that being thankful for family alone is problematic, for it does not account for blessings that cannot be ascribed to human agency, I do not agree.
I guess I’m not thankful for the existence of the universe. I find no reason to be. Why would I? The universe is just there, a large black void that houses planets, stars, galaxies, black holes, comets, and even nebulae made out of alcohol. The universe was not made for me or for anyone else — we just happen to live in it through processes of random biological evolution. Humanity lives in an environment that can easily be compared to the town of Old Stump in A Million Ways to Die in the West, a cosmic shooting gallery that wants to get us drunk before coming up with a creative way to render life extinct.
The only means by which Mohler’s inquiry can hold any legitimate view would be if we were more special than an insignificant species on an insignificant planet in an insignificant part of a galaxy in an insignificant part of an accelerating, expanding universe. The universe doesn’t care whether I’m here or not. The universe does not care about the state of life on this planet.
But what about the state of life? Am I thankful to be alive? Sure. Who isn’t? But when I am thankful for life, it is not because I am thankful to be born. My birth was beyond my control and I did not request it. It’s because I’m thankful that my idiot mistakes from yesteryear weren’t quite bad enough to end my life, that trespassing on “Farmer John’s” land when I was 15 did not end with me stopped by a rifle round, that overdosing at 24 did not result in heart failure, or that any of the other dumbass things I’ve done over the last 20+ years did not end with me maimed or underground.
Albert Mohler believes that being godless presents a problem with holiday thankfulness, for Albert Mohler subscribes to an anthropocentric ideology that enables that conflict to exist. I do not share this view, nor do other godless men and women like me, which allows us to be thankful for what is truly important in life. I and others like me are thankful for our families and our friends. We are thankful for loved ones and the time we have together. We are thankful for memories and laughs and good cheer. We’re even thankful for that crazy uncle who would possibly share Albert Mohler’s view.
Even this article is what Thanksgiving is about. This isn’t advocacy for advocacy’s sake — this is pure, unadulterated humanism. Thanksgiving is for everyone who is thankful for anything or anyone in their lives. Thanksgiving is about families and friends and joyousness, which as we all know, are non-exclusive.
