After much thought and consideration, I’ve become convinced that it’s not long before Thanksgiving is dropped as a national holiday.

Well, okay, not exactly. Even though many people don’t celebrate Christmas, it’s still considered a national holiday and pretty much everyone gets the day off of work.

But if Thanksgiving isn’t abolished, it will at least be changed in its nature and in how people talk about it. By nature (meaning how it was originally intended and how it still operates), Thanksgiving Day is a day for people to give thanks. Most of the time, it’s not about being thankful for little things like buying lunch or some small gift; it’s being grateful for the “big things,” like family, home, needs being met, that kind of thing.

For people that don’t believe in God, there is a major cognitive dissonance here. Either atheists/agnostics/others are merely “glad” for the things they have, or they’re truly “grateful,” which indicates at least a subconscious admission of belief in God. It’s like after a major hurricane and someone says, “I’m just grateful that we all survived.” Grateful? To whom? Being grateful necessitates a recipient of the gratitude and acknowledges that the recipient gave you something.

I don’t think this is merely a matter of semantics. It’s evidence of how much a belief in God is truly a part of most people’s psyches. And if people are going to vocally deny that, then the very nature of Thanksgiving Day will change, if not be totally done away with. We’ll have to call it Gladness Day or something, since that’s all that people would really be expressing.