Today many of you will be visiting family for the Thanksgiving holiday. Many families say grace before eating (including mine). And after grace is said, we typically go around the table saying one thing we are thankful for. My religious relatives thank God, and I (an atheist), am thankful for the food itself and my grandmother for preparing it. What I don't understand is how people can rationalize thanking the supposed creator of the universe for allowing food to exist. Even though God is very improbable, let's say for the sake of argument, that there is a god. Why should this god be thanked for allowing his creation to have food? Wouldn't the alternative be torture?
If God is responsible for determining who has food and who doesn't, then isn't that a little twisted to be thanking him? Even in the United States people are starving everyday; is it God that should be blamed for not giving them food? Thanking God for food is like thanking him for not giving you AIDS—which implies God is responsible for giving people AIDS! There is only so much food produced in the world each year, and it is distributed based upon wealth; i.e. thanking God for giving you food is to thank him for not giving it to someone else.
To be clear, there probably is no God, there is as much evidence for God as there is for leprechauns. I am not admitting to any existence of a god, but rather pointing out the strange mentality of believers. Anyways...
Thanking the creator of the Universe for providing something that is needed for survival is ridiculous. Thanking God for food is just as ridiculous as thanking God for oxygen (which some Christians probably do). We don't choose to be born, there is no free-will involved in that process. We wake up, and are stuck here until we die.
If there is a God, then earth is like a concentration camp. Why would we thank the Nazi (yes, I just called God a Nazi) for giving us our rations while he continues to starve/torture others? To thank God for food is not exactly to be thanking him for food, but rather to thank him for allowing you to survive—which to me, seems like a disgusting mindset. Perhaps being an atheist has made me biased, but I do not understand how people can rationalize thanking God for anything, especially food. It is people that are responsible for producing food, and those people do it for the money, so they should not be thanked. In practice no one other than the person who purchased/prepared the food should be thanked, but even they do so for selfish reasons (they're eating it/get browny-points with the family). Thanking should be done towards those that are consciously responsible for helping.
Thanksgiving should be a day where people appreciate what they have, instead of thanking imaginary friends for food. Things are what they are, and the good things should be appreciated on this day. There is a difference between having appreciation and being thankful (even though most people probably don't know what it is). Appreciate today, live in the moment.
There is more than plenty of money and food for everyone in the world. The problem, as you may think, is not so simplistic and pathetic as some people being lucky to have five meals a day while others were just unlucky and had to be stuck hungry throughout their miserable lives. That's like blaming someone else for your world problems, when we, as a collective group, are the ones who are responsible. Every excess ounce of body fat a person does not need can be put somewhere where it is needed. It's the physics the universe runs on: no energy is lost anywhere, anytime, but which is only transferred as another form of energy.
ReplyDeleteI don't know about other religions with all due certainty, but in Islam we view life as test: pass, and you're granted Heaven. Hug your money, refuse to give to others on the grounds that you earned it and therefore they should too (which is rather ignorant, seeing that if they could do anything, wouldn't they have frickin' done it already?). So in any test where you're marked on conduct and social justice, should the teacher distribute 20 cupcakes equally among 10 people who are exact carbon copies of each other, or hand two different people most of the cupcakes and stand back to watch what ensues?
You can continue living the moment exactly until the moment you die. Then you can start suffering, I suppose.