People say you need a God to be grateful for the blessings that just come into your life.
Translation: You need a crutch to be grateful to. That is not gratitude. Gratitude just happens and cannot be thought or manipulated into existence. It is about me celebrating the other for me. It is not about God. You can be grateful for somebody trying to hurt you when it backfires and benefits you hugely so it is not even about the intention of the other person. God is equated with good intentions. Too often people condone the terrible things that happen by saying he means well. Gratitude is atheistic for it does not care what a God intends. It just is glad to have received.
God should be a role model if anything. Gratitude to God as a role model does not make any sense for God has nothing to be grateful for so he cannot be an example for us.
Nothing can add to God's happiness therefore there is no gratitude in God. Gratitude comes from knowing things can hurt you as well as harm you and God cannot be hurt. It is a wonder that anybody can feel gratitude to God at all and it is not from him for he does not know what gratitude is like.
If you use a crutch because others are doing so, then grow up and be your own person.
You may be pretending to use the God crutch to fit in. Maybe you don't even realise how sceptical and faithless you are?
Bad attitudes will creep in if you disrespect others so much that you respect them using a crutch. If you have the mental and emotional capacity to create a crutch, maybe a complicated one, why can't you use that ability to run the race without one? You are patronising them and letting them trap themselves.
Gratitude is not worship. Worship is accepting your whole dependence on God and admitting that and embracing it and that will involve thanks but also repentance and sacrifice and awe. Gratitude even towards luck or the divine happens outside of worship most of the time. And when it does happen within worship it is only part of it. And does it happen in worship at all for who really does throw all on God? Those who say they love God over everything else don't seem very convincing. Worship could be nearly always if not actually always only an act, a role play.
The moral? Don't link gratitude and God for there is no real link.
The paradox
Good and random are not mutually exclusive.
The paradox of gratitude is that if a person does good to you and this person exists by pure chance and is good by pure chance and has chosen you to be good to you by chance that enhances the sense of gratitude. It is as if the role of chance makes you able to appreciate the person maximally.
It is a paradox for you think that good has to come from an agent in order to be good. But if chance creates the agent then chance is more important than the agent. So you only think you think.
The little things we get in life can arouse more gratitude in us than something major. That anomaly shows that gratitude is a human thing and you don't need a God to believe in to be able to feel it.
It is more important to be grateful for little things than big things. It is because the wonderful little things will always happen and they happen often. Your joy in them builds up when you keep noticing them and make the effort not to take them for granted. It would be a waste to be grateful for nothing but the big things.
Gratitude should be an outlook on your life not a response. We should not wait until somebody does something nice for us before we feel grateful. See each moment as special even if it cannot be seen as a gift at all.
Sense of entitlement
You are told, "If you lack a sense of gratitude then you feel that all others do for you and all you get in life is owed to you. You have a high opinion of your value. It is about you which means you devalue everybody else. Religion says it makes you devalue God for you are virtually calling him stupid if he loves others as much as you. Or if you give him no thanks."
But feeling you are owed the best in life and realising it does not mean you get it, means you can be entitled and still grateful!
Churlishness only happens when you pretend you have done good that you have not done. It is churlish to pretend that God admires your good deeds when they don't exist. You think you deserve better than everybody else. If there is a choice between you winning the one billion dollars and Johnny down the road then it should be you.
You may think you are owed nothing but good for your goodness is inherently so exceptional. No matter what you do you are wonderful just because you are you. You are just good in the way a diamond is. That is being inherently precious. What if you think you are good in the sense that your good deeds are exceptional? That is okay if that is your honest self-appraisal.
It is possible to think life owes you nothing but wonderful things and think it is the same for others. Though Christianity’s “Love your neighbour as yourself” is not saying to think like that, that is how it is interpreted. That is what Christians want to mean by it and mean by it. That is still involving a sense of entitlement.
God does not have any needs. So he can indulge you and it is nothing to him. For that reason the doctrine that such a God exists in some form even if he is not love is enough on its own to give you a sense of entitlement WITHOUT the ideas of deserving good things etc being involved. What if you are willing to embrace suffering for God? You feel entitled to support and so the sense of entitlement is still there.
The notion that God has strange unknown and obtuse ways can mean that the good things in your life that you see as coming from him can be seen as your entitlement for some reason that you cannot fathom. The risk here is that instead of seeing if you are really good you end up arrogantly thinking, "I must be so much better than I realise when those huge blessings are coming".
You can have an over the top sense of entitlement not for yourself but for those who are part of you like your children. So you can seem good and caring and still lack gratitude for all that is done for your children is done for you surmise that it is owed to them when in fact it is not.
Gratitude is consistent with having a universe of luck and chance. It makes no sense in the light of belief in God.
Gratitude is about you
Gratitude comes from your ability to honour yourself alone for making you what you are.
Gratitude is the feeling of joy when somebody expresses love to you in some way. It could be that they tell you they love you. It could be that they simply do something nice for you.
Gratitude tells the other person, "I am glad you helped me or did this for me." It praises the other person. The other person feels praised merely by seeing your grateful response.
Gratitude links you to other people and them to you.
Gratitude is the most important emotion of all. It is so good for mental and physical health. Love as in the emotion is impossible unless gratitude appears first.
FINALLY
Gratitude is not inherently religious. Do not be slandered by those who wish to say you are an ingrate if you are not a person of faith. You don't need a God to be grateful to. And no God would want to be turned into a prop for you to direct gratitude towards. You only need a prop if you are not naturally grateful in the first place. Being entitled to help does not mean you cannot also be grateful for it if it is given. You don't need a God to tell you that you are entitled. You decide that yourself and you don't care if he knows better.
If you don't need a good God to be grateful to that is a strong indication that there is no God. A relationship style God who should get your thanks is a very basic thing. Without that, what is the point?
If people are pretending to believe in God and to pray for they don't want to be thought of as ingrates that would explain a lot of the religiosity about.