Another fine atheist Thanksgiving prayer:
We thank our ancestors for dodging the meteors and the volcanos, the eukaryotes and the prokarytes, the dinosaurs and the ice ages, the locusts, the plague, religion, wars, taxes and the draft, to bring us to this table and this turkey, who is not as good at dodging as we are. Neener neener neener.
At tonight's Thanksgiving, Erin remarked on how this was her first real Thanksgiving dinner away from her family, and that it was an odd feeling to just sit down and eat without any prayer beforehand. (Yes, she's a solid atheist in no danger whatsoever, thank you for asking.)
And as she said this, it reminded me of how wrong it is to give gratitude to God for blessings that actually come from our fellow human beings putting in a great deal of work.
So I at once put my hands together and said,
"Dear Global Economy, we thank thee for thy economies of scale, thy professional specialization, and thy international networks of trade under Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage, without which we would all starve to death while trying to assemble the ingredients for such a dinner as this. Amen."