In a review of Robert Solomon’s last book ( True To Our Feelings ), Ronnie de Sousa reflects on gratitude, one of Solomon’s themes.  He finds gratitude to any God rather horrifying: “For my part, having long passed the age at which most human beings who have ever lived are dead, I feel gratitude every day for being alive. But if I thought some God was to be thanked for that, as opposed to brute luck, I’d worry about the gross unfairness of it. Why should God privilege me, while condemning millions of innocent people to early and often horrible deaths?

“Religious gratitude seems to me deeply deplorable, in a way epitomized by the survivor of a plane crash who, while being interviewed by a TV crew, exclaimed ‘Now I really know that God exists — because he saved me!’ In the event, about half of the other passengers had died. That lucky man seemed untroubled by the question: Why should I be spared when so many are not? He must suppose that he merits the special attention of the Creator of the Universe — a sentiment that in the guise of humility evinces heights of arrogance beyond Satanic pride. Or else he must assume that God’s grace is indeed, as some theologies seem to proclaim, entirely arbitrary. To which the proper response is not gratitude but embarrassment and shame.”

De Sousa is, I think, right to spot the link between gratitude and election.  Which raises the question of how theologies that avoid or deny election deal with de Sousa’s objection.  Can they avoid making gratitude deplorable?  And it also raises the question o whether theologies of election have a way to avoid the “embarrassment and shame” that de Sousa thinks is the proper response to God’s special treatment.