[Vampyr]

Eh, neither one of you are really answering my question.

I'm an atheist, and I'm also a very thankful person. I'm thankful for my family, for my friends, for my relative wealth, for my fiance, for my cat. I'm a very fortunate person, relative to others.

The point is that I'm not thankful to anyone in particular - I'm just in general thankful to have what I have, and to have been as fortunate as I have been. I'm kind to others and I donate to charity, so in that sense I'm using some of what I have to help others. All while being an atheist and not bringing a god into the equation.

I'm asking specifically, why do you thank god for what you have. Why do you think he expended his power to help you, but not use it to feed someone who is starving?

In a similar thought, most religious people say that praying to god helps to heal their loved ones who are sick. If that's true, why is god only capable of healing things that modern medicine is already capable of? For example, I've never seen or heard of anyone having their limbs regrow. However, if some experimental procedure were to be developed that had say, a 10% chance of regrowing someone's limbs, I'm sure religious people would start praying, and when it worked they would thank god.

Also, I see sporting events all the time where a player will have a great game and his or her team will win. At the end, they usually thank god.

How do they justify believing that god helped them win a football game, but he isn't saving starving people?

These kinds of religious people confuse me way more than deist like Professor S. While I think his belief in something where this no proof is quite strange, I think he views god more as a force of nature than a benevolent father figure.