Faith in Logic: Pray to the great turkey

In response to Pray to the great turkey by shadesofplum:

A colleague informed me today that, as an atheist, he cannotcelebrate Thanksgiving.

I'm a San Franciscan, and a vegetarian, and had thought I'dheard every novel opinion on T-day, so I was taken aback.  Ihad already learned what a C-level executive was (not three tiersdown, below the A- and B-level execs, but rather someone whosetitle begins with Chief, such as a Chief Restructuring Officer),but to learn that one of the big food holidays I have celebratedall of my non-religious life was actually religious?  In thesame day?  It was too much education to hope for.

I advised him that, having grown up in California, this was newsto me, and I needed more information.

He proceeded to provide the following (faith-based)explanation:

1. People are giving thanks.

2. It is only possible to give thanks to one entity, and that isGod.

3. Therefore, Thanksgiving is a religious holiday, and he cannotparticipate in it as an atheist.

As an atheist, you'd think he wouldn't make point2.  Purely from an internal consistency standpoint. As a fellow non-religious person, and as someone who writes outlegal arguments, I had trouble with that.  I pointed out that,as a native of SF, I didn't do step 2, so this all fallsapart.  He insisted that I DO do point 2 unknowingly,that point 2 is the only possibility, and therefore I have beencelebrating a religious holiday which he, apparently on principle,refuses to do.

At that point I remembered why we don't hang out together. Though he might say I've been avoiding him unknowingly allalong.

"It is only possible..." Huh? Forgive me, but I'm likewise confused what SF has to do with countering that truth claim. One need not appeal to situated knowledge to discount this as a universal. Rather, the claim is asserted without justification, logical or rhetorical, and thus can be invalidated on these grounds alone.

Removing the subordinate clause as an irrelevancy, we are left with a claim that "p(t -> e)=0 where e≠1". i.e., thanks, if we take a corollary, can be received by one and only one entity.

Now, this can only hold true if we can demonstrate either a material limitation on thanks as giveable/receivable or a procedural limitation on giving/receiving of thanks.

The former case is easily eliminated. Were thanks a unique material object, say, Excalibur, then one could make a claim that "It is only possible to give Excalibur to one entity", insofar as only one person can receive Excalibur in a meaningful sense, the receipt of Excalibur including with it a bundle of potential uses, including wielding Excalibur, which are precluded by multiple persons having possession of Excalibur simultaneously.

Thanks, however, is not a unique material object, but rather of an affective performative category akin to attention, love or allegiance. This brings us, then, to a question of procedural limitation. We could not say truthfully, for instance, that "it is not possible to give your attention to more than one entity", but we could potentially find truth in the statement that "it is not possible to give your allegiance to more than one entity". For we all have experiences of giving attention to multiple entities, and while such attention, being divided, is arguably less in value or force than attention given solely to a single entity, it is thus only undesirable, but certainly not impossible.

On the other hand, one could make the argument that to give allegiance only partially to several entities is to not give allegiance at all, and thus this would be an impossibility. For our claim #2 to stand, then, the case would need to be made that thanks was more akin to allegiance than to attention. Your C level executive makes no such attempted comparison.

Now, we've been examining an implicitly weak procedural claim here, thus far, and that is of the giving/receiving of thanks being restricted in parallel. i.e., the claim that one cannot simultaneously give thanks to more or less than one entity. A stronger claim would be that thanks can not be serially given. This, again presumes a material uniqueness to thanks, such that once given, it is no longer giveable.

Yet, even if our interlocutor were to demonstrate that thanks were of the same kind as allegiance, and thus not giveable in parallel, they would be hard pressed to then prove that allegiance given to one entity could not be subsequently given to another.

One possible attempt to break this logic would be to claim that thanks, as given to God, and thanks, as given to a person, are not words carrying the same meaning, invoking the terminology of medieval philosophy to assert that the term "thanks" being neither univocal nor analogous, but rather equivocal. This line of reasoning, however, begs the question, as it requires that we assume thanks is being given to God in order to prove that thanks can only be given to God.