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ChristianKl comments on Do I really not believe in God? Do you? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (58)
Gratitude doesn't need an object towards whom you are grateful. Keeping a gratitude journal is an activity that's recommended by positive psychology. Giving religious people a monopoly on feeling grateful seems a bad strategy if you want to lead a happy life.
Then we differ in our definitions of the term. My understanding is that it necessarily requires a target, real or imaginary.
Monopoly? Not sure what in what I wrote prompted this particular strawman.
From where did you get your understanding? The positive psychology literature I read suggest that gratitude works well without having a target.
There are also plenty of Buddhist monks who have no problem doing gratitude meditation but who never believed in any God because their Buddhism has no concept of Gods.
I think you suggest that not believing in God means that you shouldn't feel gratitude as long as you don't have a person towards whom you can be grateful. Doing gratitude jouranling is much harder when you have to identify a specific actor for everything that you identified to be grateful about.
In that model atheists can still be grateful towards the actions of other people, but if you limit your ability to feel gratitude in such a way I think you will feel less of it. Given that other people are just a bunch of atom, I also don't see a good reason why you should be grateful towards people but not towards other constellation of atoms that provide utility for you.
It looks like the lay person's definition (The quality of being thankful; readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness) is somewhat different from the psych one (Gratitude is an emotion expressing appreciation for what one has). I'm now confused enough as to which one I feel that I shall stop here.
The dictionary you linked says "the quality or feeling of being grateful or thankful:"
Grateful being: warmly or deeply appreciative of kindness or benefits received; thankful
Thankful being: feeling or expressing gratitude; appreciative.
If you got a benefit of still being alive and you appretiate that benefit, you can be grateful. It's not necessary to identify an agent who's responsible for the benefit. The imporatant thing is that there a benefit and you appretiate the benefit.
Derp, no real disagreement on the "gratitude" as far as I can tell.
"feeling of gratitude" (or gratitude!ChristianKl) = something that just happens in the mind, a feeling, target irrelevant
gratitude!schminux = (Cause => Effect | Effect is good) => gratitude towards Cause
Is this perhaps useful in resolving that bit of confusion? I hope I'm not strawmanning anyone.
From how I understand schminux, he suggests that the cause needs to be an agent. Is that true?
If my understanding is correct (based on other comments), this is one of the main things being put into question by the main post and which motivated schminux to start this discussion.
I don't know about him, but for me, yes. It needs to be someone who you could say "thank you" to.