Do I really not believe in God? Do you?

Apparently our gratitude reflex, like our help reflex, has the sensation of gratitude preceding the search for a target of that sensation, and thus fails to avoid activating when the search is destined to come out negative.

In other words, we feel: "YAY! THANK YOU! ...to who? ...to X who helped me!"

not

"YAY! Did anyone help me with this? X did... THANK YOU, X!"

similarly, it's:

"OH NO! HELP! ...to who? X can help me... help, X!"

instead of

"OH NO! ...can anyone help me? X can... HELP, X!"

Intense experiences will mess with you. I've had a similar thing happen, but unfortunately it went the other way. I found myself praying to "the probably nonexistent simulator 'god'" to make it unhappen. It wasn't that I secretly alieved it'd help, or had a "religious part" or anything like that. It's just that the reality was too damn horrible to accept, so my brain was desperately searching for solutions to make it all okay and going way down the search results. I never actually alieved it - It still felt completely hopeless. It's just that when the stakes are really high, you don't give up so easy.

Similarly, I don't think it's any religious part that's been in hiding in your head. It's just that you were anticipating a big loss, so when things turn out okay, you really appreciate it. It turned out okay when it "could have" turned out not okay, and you're thankful that it did.

It's expected and normal. Shrugging off a serious close call wouldn't be taking it seriously enough, and just saying "I should be more careful" before moving on won't make you more careful, so don't try to suppress it. Instead embrace the emotions that come up and sort things out until they're satisfied. Look in depth into the question of "could I have done something to prevent that?". When you've traveled far enough down the search tree that you feel satisfied and you've done what you need to do to be confident that you have actually taken what needs to be learned and applied it, then you won't feel conflicted anymore. I almost never come out of it without lessons learned, even when life hands me an impossible situation.

Asking the question "to whom am I thankful", more than feeling thankfulness, is the superstitious behavior here. If we allow thankfulness to have no object, the conflict is resolved.

You may be thankful to the other driver. You may be thankful to yourself or the relevant parts of your body that helped avoid a worse outcome. You may be thankful to your past self, or your alternative universe self. You may be thanking the laws of physics. Maybe we can just drop the to preposition and be done with that.

As to why you are feeling thankful, I find Antisuji and DaFranker explanations plausible.

As to what should be done about it, I can't identify negative consequences to being thankful. Do you suspect it trains you to for risk or clumsiness?

Human intelligence (probably) evolved in a social arms race. We tend to favor explanations that involve agents (with wills, intentions, etc), which can be appealed to, manipulated, or placated. When something happens through (effectively) mindless processes, we look for a will to attribute it to. It's natural, and comforting. It just probably isn't true.

Just another cognitive bias. Move along. Nothing to see here.

A while back I had this language-difference (not to say "argument") with a lover. I said that I felt grateful for the chance to meet and be close to her. She asked: given that I'm an atheist — grateful to whom? My thought was that gratefulness didn't really have to be attached to a particular giver; I could be grateful for something rather than grateful to someone. But it might be that "appreciation" or simply "gladness" would be more unambiguous descriptions.

Somewhat relevant: Thank Goodness! by Daniel Dennett.

Gratitude doesn't need an object towards whom you are grateful. Keeping a gratitude journal is an activity that's recommended by positive psychology. Giving religious people a monopoly on feeling grateful seems a bad strategy if you want to lead a happy life.

Which part of a normally non-religious person wakes up and asserts itself in a crisis situation out of their control?

This post from RationalPoker seems apropos.

Reality dealt you precisely the best possible hand: a) your illusions (e.g. your perception of feeling safe and "in control" in the midst of traffic) have been dispelled, but b) you have gotten away without any damage.

You received a gift - the feeling of gratitude isn't precisely insane, but you should assume you made a mistake, and analyze the situation in terms of "where did I mess up" rather than "guardian angel was watching over wonderful me".

I've experienced roughly the same thing. I think of it like this: when I experience an unexpectedly good outcome, I immediately feel a feeling of gratitude. Normally when this happens it is due to another person's actions (I'm given a gift or a promotion, or I'm pulled out of the way of a speeding bus, say), and as social creatures we pay attention to that and strongly associate the resultant feeling of gratitude with that person.

But it's not the person that (directly) causes the feeling, it's the circumstances. So when the feeling is caused by a good outcome that was not directly or intentionally caused by a person's actions, our brain by habit or instinct seeks out a backup candidate: God, luck, etc.

This sounds like it's just an emotional script, a trained mental routine to feel a certain way and fire a few mental nodes in reaction to certain types of events. IME, there doesn't really need to be any real belief or even an alief in some "God" for someone to have the experience of being thankful towards (MentalNode-34223359 | Pointer error, no data at requested location), as a simple result of the way one's brain has currently configured itself.

In many cases, I've felt something similar where to the best of my knowledge my brain is simply firing the exact same patterns as when I'm thankful to someone in particular (a real other human being) for a specific action (e.g. reminding me of something important), but without actually finding a referent for the (ThankfulTo()) function, simply as a matter of this being by default what my brain considered the appropriate follow-up pattern to my experiences.

I'm perfectly fine with these empty pointers/referents, which may be partially thanks to learning about Lojban and its grammar, but most people feel differently with them and this and similar mental experiences will often be tagged "spiritual" - from the inside, it feels like they're actually thanking something, so there must be something to thank, and therefore this is evidence of a supernatural higher power ("God"). I've seen many (more than I care to count) instances of people having experiences I would pattern-match to this brain behavior claiming them as evidence for God or other spiritual entities. This was, in fact, one of the reasons I used to classify myself as "spiritual but not religious", and believed in some kind of cosmic mental universe that could think about itself and which we lived inside of.

It could just be gratitude towards your resultant situation. Conceiving or fearing outcomes inferior to the actual occurrence inspires gratitude for not being a victim of numerous worse possible conditions.

Similarly, one might feel anger at an impossible situation - anger that arises from comparisons to better possible conditions.

When feeling relief, it presents as relief, not thanks.

When feeling hope, it presents as hope, not a request.

If I'm lonely, I might make up an imaginary friend, but I treat it as an imaginary friend.

I really don't alieve in god usually. When I have a close call, my response is usually laughter and relief rather than gratitude. I thought I was I danger, but I wasn't...I don't know. There is something hilariously funny about that dissonance between expectation and reality. I'm not a big risk taker or thrill seeker either, so it's not only the adrenaline.

I think the closest I've gotten to alieving in god is when I was sad and a friend told me to try praying. I tried it, and sort of felt a little better for a few minutes...but it wasn't the same as the feeling of wonder I get when I contemplate the relationship between myself and the rest of the universe. I guess for me, in order to get that "religous" high, I've got to believe and alieve the concept of worship simultaneously. And that kind if thought requires eliminating anthropomorphic tendencies, not creating them.

The other time I was close to alieving in anthropomorphic things is while laying In the grass in the sun. I felt gratitude towards the ground I lay on...i felt like i was hugging a person. and the sunlight and wind, I felt like they were acting for my benefit..even though I knew they weren't people.

When something bad is about to happen, I generally visualize it happening. I can't imaging the emotional roller coaster of praying for something to be okay and then it turns out not okay. Although...I guess I do hope sometimes, kind of like how you roll dice in a special way or blow on them or something, as if by paying close attention you could will them into having a certain outcome. That's sort if the same thing as "please let everything be okay" if you boil it to the basic, nonverbal sentiment. But pleading to a person feels very different from blowing on dice, subjectively.

I found this very interesting because I often have the exact inverse experience. I am a theist, but when I have a close call like that my first reaction usually is "I got lucky." It's when my conscious mind kicks in that I start thinking ""Lucky" doesn't have to mean just "lucky," and God has worked in more mysterious ways before." (Which, yes, is precisely what you'd predict a theist would say if you asked one.) And then I start feeling gratitude.

I know people here would say that this must mean I don't actually believe in God and only believe I do, but if you judge real beliefs by first reactions then shminux has a point.

What a brave topic. This makes me think. I realized, to my surprise, that I don't experience gratitude at good events happening and I can't recall a time when I ever have, even though I was formerly Christian. I wondered what "aliefs" I might have though, and I remembered one that has popped up to my surprise a few times semi-recently that because I am a good person I was magically rescued. (This is making me laugh so hard, at myself!). I also haven't done any praying or "please-please" for a long time.

So now I am wondering what the difference is between you and I that might give you insight into how to stop your gratitude alief and please-please alief.

I think the key, for me, has been the sheer number of things that went wrong outside of my control. I've been ridiculously unlucky.

I can guess from prior experience that right now, you're writing the bad luck off as something I caused myself. What if you didn't do that? If you haven't had enough bad luck yourself to see that nothing is controlling your life, then look at someone else's life and marvel at the luck they've had.

That's a belief, too: that people are in control. We get to have an influence, but no way to dictate what happens. Normalcy bias and optimism bias protect our sense of security. Without something to give us a sense of security, life is very stressful. I have a source of security in having lost a great deal of attachment (I'm not a religious Buddhist, but I have borrowed quite a bit from Buddhist philosophy). So, I have managed to, for the most part, deal with the fact that not nothing is in control, including myself.

Not god, not you, not me. Nothing.

That is a hard thing to accept, but that is what you are asking to accept if you want to get rid of normalcy bias, optimism bias, and your alief that there's some magic causing good things and preventing bad ones.

I had either the luck or the terrible misfortune, depending on how you want to look at it, to have the fact that I am not in control of my life shoved in my face hard. Not just once, but repeatedly. Not just repeatedly but like ad nauseum beating a dead horse to death three or four extra times repeatedly.

I woke up from a lot of silly dreams and lost a great deal of attachment.

I have found that often what I need when getting rid of something is to figure out what need it filled and replace it with something better and that it isn't until I replace it that I am able to get rid of it. As I see it, the main thing you're likely to need in order to let go of this one is some way to deal with the fact that the universe does not give a rat's behind about you.

Now I'm thinking about my rescued-good-person alief. That pops up after something bad happens, not when I am considering a bad thing that might happen in the future. It seems like it's purpose is to explain how I survived - this does seem kind of magical since my bad luck has been so ridiculous. I think I will mindhack this now. meditates

Note: I do use the phrasing "thank goodness!" sometimes but it is as an expression of relief. I will probably try to avoid using that phrasing from now on.

I say "Jesus Christ!" when I'm startled. I say "Thank God" when I'm relieved, and "Oh, God..." when I'm hung over. I say "God damn it!" when I'm frustrated. But all of these feel like idiomatic expressions of emotion to me, not like invocations of divinity. And I'm not too worried about this; signaling atheism isn't much of a priority for me, and there's linguistic precedent for it, by Jove.

If you're seriously worried about expressing yourself this way, I might suggest implementing a God jar, with the proceeds going to the atheist nonprofit of your choice.

This happens to me sometimes, and I sort of bring myself back to normality by reminding myself of the fact that the things my meat-brain chooses to bring to my attention are out of my control (for a short time) when I'm in panic mode. Other facts I recall: I have a reflectively-inconsistent meat brain, I was raised in a Christian home (I'm atheist now), and just about everything relevant that I can remember from Kahneman (correspondence bias etc.) and other psychology texts. Also, the Sequences.

Annoying aliefs are annoying.

A thing to do would be to condense all that gratitude into the word "awesome". Best said with a wide grin.

A tendency to thanks some randomness in life, like Taleb, could help. Maybe you should blame the incapability of perfectly prediction, or the fact that cars kill dozens of people, and yet you insist to drive.

I'm not sure about others, but while I initially felt that way ("Thank .... who?") whenever something like that happened, careful thought-screening and imagining situations (i.e. simulation) helped weed it out. I'd be surprised if I slip something like that these days, unless it's really really nasty.

Is there any real harm to God as an imaginary proxy for goodness? Say you explicitly disbelieve, but consciously embrace the alief that there is a sentient embodiment of goodness responsible for creating you and saving your life from accidents. This has the advantage that you can "thank" the imaginary entity and thus trigger similar social circuitry in your brain to thanking an individual who has done you a personal favor.

It's not literally true or really being claimed to be true, but is it actually harmful to indulge in these kinds of fantasies? Or is denying this impulse the atheistic equivalent of right-wing parents who are afraid to let their kids read Harry Potter (because it is about witchcraft)?

What does it mean if I am grateful to "god" ?

Suppose I believe that "god" is just the workings of the entire universe collectively, not supernatural but natural, not an old mean white guy with emotions and desires, but the sum total of existence and all the things that happen in it, not active personality in the world but passive non-personality, the system on which the entire universe is "emulated."

Then I am grateful to a non-personality, but I suspect people in accidents are grateful to seat belts or airbags or whatever came between them and a hard object moving quickly at them.

And maybe it means I believe in "god," but the "god" I believe in puts me more in common with atheists than with the religious.

Having enough belief in "god" to thank it (or feel like thanking it) doesn't need to suggest the properties of the god(s) of the religious that are so valuable to reject.