{"id":1187,"date":"2014-11-27T12:11:17","date_gmt":"2014-11-27T17:11:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=1187"},"modified":"2014-11-27T12:11:17","modified_gmt":"2014-11-27T17:11:17","slug":"two-things-to-think-about-this-thanksgiving-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2014\/11\/two-things-to-think-about-this-thanksgiving-day.html","title":{"rendered":"Two Things to Think About This Thanksgiving Day"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>With the exception of the usual suspects on the hard left, most Americans celebrate Thanksgiving Day.\u00a0 Like Independence Day, Thanksgiving is a quintessential <em>American <\/em>holiday.<\/p>\n<p>Thanksgiving Day is a golden opportunity for celebrants to accomplish a couple of things.<\/p>\n<p>First, we should bear in mind that in the absence of a lively religious sensibility, the notion of a national day of thanks couldn\u2019t so much as have been imagined, let alone put into practice.\u00a0 Atheists and agnostics may wish to deny this.\u00a0 Reason, to say nothing of history, refuses to accommodate them: It\u2019s something other than lunacy to thank someone for having <em>given us our lives<\/em> only if we believe that there <em>really is<\/em> <em>someone<\/em> who gave us our lives. <em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Now, the belief in God may be mistaken.\u00a0 The point, though, is that in a nation of atheists, a day reserved for expressing gratitude for our very existence and all that we have would never have even been a thought.<\/p>\n<p>Remembering this, we remember both that ours was a nation founded by Christians, and that this belief in a loving God has given rise to a number of practices\u2014like Thanksgiving\u2014to which we attach much value.<\/p>\n<p>Secondly, Thanksgiving is an occasion to foster a character excellence that, in this age of endless government entitlements and the glamorization of victimhood that they entail, has to be among the rarest of virtues: <em>gratitude.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n<p>Americans, with their almost singular focus on <em>rights, <\/em>are always in danger of forgetting that it is their <em>obligations <\/em>that, first and foremost, make them the moral beings that they are.\u00a0 Human beings, unlike animals, have <em>duties.\u00a0 <\/em>A duty is <em>a debt<\/em> owed to others.<\/p>\n<p>On Thanksgiving, we should call to mind the debt of gratitude that we owe to others, and the eternal debt of gratitude that we owe to the Being who is the Source of all goodness.<\/p>\n<p>Happy Thanksgiving!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With the exception of the usual suspects on the hard left, most Americans celebrate Thanksgiving Day.\u00a0 Like Independence Day, Thanksgiving is a quintessential American holiday. Thanksgiving Day is a golden opportunity for celebrants to accomplish a couple of things. First, we should bear in mind that in the absence of a lively religious sensibility, the&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Two Things to Think About This Thanksgiving Day<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2014\/11\/two-things-to-think-about-this-thanksgiving-day.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Two Things to Think About This Thanksgiving Day\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"With the exception of the usual suspects on the hard left, most Americans celebrate Thanksgiving Day.\u00a0 Like Independence Day, Thanksgiving is a quintessential American holiday. 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