Thanksgiving and the Non-Evolution of Gratitude

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Getting ready to write this post about gratitude and Thanksgiving Day, I slopped coffee on the carpet while walking to the computer. In this frame of mind, I am grateful to have a place to live in where I am spilling coffee, and even the stuff itself.

This is my second painful Thanksgiving after my wife died after about twenty-four years together, but there are people who care about me and want to share their holiday with me. Also, some folks have very little but still have a gratitude attitude and do what they can to celebrate.

Give thanks, Unsplash / Adam Winger
It is indeed unfortunate that there are people who use our inner sense of gratitude for manipulation. That is, someone can do a favor and use it for leverage to demand one in return. (It's quite different when the give and take is known from the get-go, that's like business or politics.) Some people wonder where this inner sense of gratitude came from.

Many biblical creationists know that we are created to have gratitude, and give thanks to our Creator for what he has provided for us. That includes material things, a sense of wonder, true science knowledge — and especially salvation through Jesus Christ. That's right, I said it! I am not ashamed of the gospel (Rom. 1:16, Rev. 14:6-7). Some misotheists are so antagonistic toward God, they concoct nonsense that gratitude is a part of fish-to-fool evolution!
It’s Thanksgiving Day in America, and once again, the secular (aka non-theistic, atheistic) experts in the media have turned gratitude inside out.

George Washington understood that thanksgiving has an object: a direction toward a Person. His 1789 proclamation stated that gratitude should be directed toward “that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country….”

To read the rest, see "No, Thanksgiving Did Not Evolve."