If you’re the sort of atheist who reads lots of atheist literature, you’ve probably read a post like this one before. Still, I believe this post should be at least slightly less cliched than most Thanksgiving reflections, and I hope people find some of the specifics amusing and informative.

So: the standard thing on Thanksgiving day is to give thanks to God for all the wonderful things in our lives. I don’t believe God exists, and in fact think that if your frame of reference is perfection, the current world is a distinct instance of underachievement. At a less philosophical level, though, the problem with thanking God for the good things in the world is that it cheats real people out of recognition for doing a pretty good job with our non-God created world.

I should start out these thank yous with a shout out to Tom Jefferson, Tom Paine, and the rest of the crew who made sure it would be legal for me to say that if God created the world, it was an under achievement on God’s part.

But an equally large shout out goes to the creators of the American economic system, who, without caring so much about my welfare, gave me easy access to food and heated buildings and laptops and all other sorts of materialistic goodness. Realize that American capitalists have created an economic system so strong that even George W. Bush couldn’t _completely_ screw it up. (A conversation I had awhile back with a friend. “How could things possibly be worse?” “I could be starving.” That’s not something to be taken lightly.) And yes, these guys still deserve credit even if Will Wilkinson may be right that Singapore is a better system, economically.

Thanks to my parents, for passing on large amounts of that American wealth to me, and making sure I studied hard in my early school years whether I wanted to or not.

Thanks to by girlfriend, Becca, for being a great stress reliever, among other things.

Thanks to my previous girlfriend, Izzy, for completely cutting me off after dumping me, something that helped me get over you and allowed me to meet Becca.

Thanks to my friend Joe, for scraps of fitness lore and introducing me to the world of goth night clubs.

Thanks to the UW Madison Forensics Team, for being generally cool people.

Thanks to Chris Baty, for creating NaNoWriMo. To the readers who don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll explain when I reach 50k.

Thanks to writers of various self-help books, plus Steven Pinker, for changing how I think about life.

Thanks to Jeff, for liking the book manuscript I had halfway forgotten about.

And thanks, I suppose, to the people at WordPress and Al Gore for making this blog possible.