Can an Atheist say 'I am grateful'?

When I write my blog entries, Ramona straight away translates them to German. After that, Ajit in Bhopal takes my words and translates them into Hindi. He does a very good job and over time, we became friends as well. When he sends me the translated text, I upload it online. In one of the last days’ translations, I saw the translation of the word ‘grateful’. While reading the sentence around it, I had a few thoughts on the meaning of this word.

The sentence in question started with ‘I realized how grateful I was…’ The translation of ‘grateful’ into Hindi is a word that also refers to luck and fate. It made me wonder whether the words ‘grateful’ and ‘lucky’ were really in any way related to religion and to god.

I can say I am lucky but depending on the way I express it, religious people could interpret it as though I would thank god for my luck or the universe or another higher power gave me a good fate. In Hindi, this is how I could very easily translate the word ‘luck’ and give it a religious content. It would then always mean that I am not just lucky but that someone gave me what I am getting.

In German, the word for luck can have two meanings: luck and happiness. I like that – you are lucky, so you are happy! According to sentence structure you can normally figure out what the other one means but the word alone can mean both.

When I say I am lucky, I just mean it in the sense that I could flip a coin and it could land on either side. You are lucky if it lands on the side that you bet on – but there is nobody else’s hand in this. Nobody made it land on heads or tails. No pre-written destiny made this happen. It just was a fifty-fifty chance. Nothing more.

For me, it is a fact: when I say grateful, I don’t think of being thankful to god. Not to the universe or anything. I may be grateful to another person, if he or she is related to what I am grateful about. But not to any non-existing person or figure invented by religion.

You may wonder and ask ‘To whom are you grateful?’ but the answer is that I simply have this feeling without relating it to anybody in particular.

I am thankful for so many things! There was a time when I specifically thanked God. A time when I thanked the universe. Today, I am just thankful. That’s it.