Happy Thanksgiving to All

Today I want to express the gratitude I experience all year long.

I’m grateful for being alive now in this era, rather than in the barbaric past, or what looks like the coming worldwide religious wars, and/or global disasters in the future. I’m also thankful I have been healthy enough to live longer than most human beings have ever lived, and that I have had more wealth than most people on the planet can dream about, and that I’ve never gone a day without the essentials of life. I’m also grateful for my family and personal friends who, like me, have never known the violence we see in many parts of the world today. I’m also grateful to have broken out of the cave of superstition, and knowing I’m one of the lucky few who see the universe and our world as it is, without pretending there is a mind-reading barbaric deity telling us what to do, such that we have the privilege of figuring it out for ourselves, and doing a much better job of it. Yes, I am thankful that the forces of nature just happened to give me and others these wonderful gifts. I’m thankful I’ll have the privilege of dying, since that is the price I must pay for being alive, and knowing that upon dying I’ll return to the same state I was in before being born, rather than suffering eternally because I could not believe in a deity that lacked sufficient evidence.

It's not just me who is thankful. Yes, the godless can ‘give thanks’ — and here is how we do it

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