Inappropriate Gratitude

Being thankful to someone for something is only appropriate when that person is directly responsible for the occurrence or nonoccurrence of that event. I am thankful to my parents for bringing me into existence and for raising me through my eventful adolescence. The notion that we humans should be thankful to God for everything is highly problematic.   Should we thank God for allowing wars and sundry natural disasters to occur? Theologians understand God to be simultaneously omnipotent, omniscient and omni-benevolent. Atheists, far from being thankful to God for everything, think that the existence of the world’s natural evils, chaos and suffering, prove the non-existence of such a deity with precisely those attributes. Moral evils in the world can be attributed to human agency. The natural evils in the world are, at the very least, permitted by God, if He exists, and thanking God for their existence strikes this writer as absurd.