Xrikcus

Procurator: Interesting that you laugh at my request for you to prove that Santa does not exist. Are you therefore saying you cannot? I freely admit that I can't prove that Santa does not exist, but at least I don't claim it's easy to do so.


Past miracles cannot. Future miracles can if they can be repeated, or at least such strong evidence can be provided for them that noone would deny them. No miracles that I can think of can be disproved though, you can only suggest that alternative explanations are also viable.

Sven

Then why believe they happened? (BTW, some people think they can be proven, so this doesn't go without saying)

Of course I can not. But I don't have to. Without evidence for miracles outside the gospels, which were specifically written to promote an agenda, why should one believe that they actually happened?

It's the same with Santa: You have no evidence that he exists. Thus you don't believe that he exists. Quite simple. BTW, how do you disprove his existence?

Amaleq13

Forgive the unsolicited advice but I think it would be wise to change this statement significantly in the future. Drop the Talmud and Lucian and simply state that these sources refer to "Christ" with the preemptive admission that Josephus has been worked over by Christian editors. That is really all they will support. As has already been pointed out, none of these constitutes firsthand information so their "historical value" is quite limited except for Christian beliefs.

Tacitus

Identifies "Christus" as the founder of the "pernicious superstition" and states he was executed by order of Pilate (the only "episode" mentioned). Some scholars conclude he has consulted Roman records for this information while others conclude he is simply repeating claims made by Christians. The bottom line is that he does not provide his source so we do not know.

Pliny

He talks about interrogating and executing Christians because they refused to worship a statue of Trajan which was apparently taken as evidence of sedition. Otherwise, Pliny seems to consider them relatively blameless and actually describes their activities in a generally positive manner. Interestingly, he claims to have freed several who, after admitting they were Christians, denied their faith. Some claimed to have done so 25 years earlier. Also interesting is Trajan's response that they were not to be actively sought out but only punished if someone denounced them (but only if the denouncer identifies himself!) and they were found guilty. Kind of a passive persecution, if you will. Pliny describes Christians meeting on a fixed day to sing a hymn to "Christ", whom they apparently considered a god, and sharing a meal. He describes no "episodes" from the life of Jesus.

Lucian

You've got to be kidding. He wrote a parody in the late 2nd century that depicted Christians as gullible buffoons.

Josephus

As I mentioned, even Christian scholars admit what exists in our texts today was not written by Josephus but is the result of Christian editors. While many feel free to pretend that they can identify what was "originally" written, their speculation lacks any objective support and there really isn't any good reason to assume there was anything about Jesus there at all.

Babylonian Talmud

This "source" makes Lucian appear timely. It is MANY centuries too late to be relied upon. Are you sure you want to include a source that claims Jesus was the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier and identifies Jesus, depending on which passage you read, as existing a century before or a century after the "correct" time?

The three earliest are Josephus, Tacitus, and Pliny. Joe's reliability has been ruined by Christian editors, Tacitus fails to identify the source of his knowledge that Pilate executed "Christus", and Pliny only talks about Christian beliefs. This is why I suggest you drop the claim about "episodes" and the suggestion that they have some "historical value" with regard to the life of Jesus.

If you want to check out what I've said, I highly recommend Peter Kirby's website as an excellent starting point.

Agnostic Theist

Hold that thought,

There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist (except maybe in Japan) religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the population reference bureau). At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming there is at least one good child in each.

Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second.

This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000 th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stocking, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get on to the next house.

Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks.

This means Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second--3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.

The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized LEGO set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousands tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the "flying" reindeer can pull 10 times
the normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or even nine of them---Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).

600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft reentering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would adsorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip.

Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,000 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.

Another proof: The fireplace at the bottom of my chinmey has a sheet of pirex (sic) glass fitted over it. Since we do not use the fireplace it is fixed in place, ergo for Santa to get through he'd have to break the glass. Given the amount of room (and the fact that the glass has never broken) one mayn deduce that he did not visit me BUT I still got presents.

Another thing to consider - Why would an omniscient, deitic being such as Santa let the Coca Cola corporation use him as a marketing gimmick?

Pyrrho

You are assuming that the normal laws of physics apply to Santa, which no true believer is likely to allow. Santa performs miracles; after all, how do you think he knows who is good and who is bad? Therefore, your arguments are no better than any argument against the miraculous in Christianity. The fact that it is claimed that Jesus has done the impossible is not regarded as a proof of the falsehood of Jesus, and therefore it cannot be used against Santa. Indeed, doing the impossible is what is supposed to prove that Jesus is special. Likewise, Santa doing the impossible proves that he is special.

Also, God allows himself to be ridiculed on this board quite regularly; for example, I'll do it now:

God is a big fat moron who is too incompetent to make a decent world.

See? I have not been struck down by lightning at all. Using Santa for a Coke add is a much nicer thing, and is really good PR for Saint Nick.

Xrikcus

Ah, but we could use the same arguments about God creating the earth. Santa need not serially visit each house, he could be omnipresent, just be represented by a big fat red chap (ok, that's one's from coca-cola I know) when children are awake. Or only visit the few houses where the parents don't give the presents. It's not necessarily a proof any more than proofs about god's nonexistance are

However, at least you gave one I just dispute that it's a better proof than the proofs against God, and therefore that Santa is easier to disprove than God.

inquisitive01

It might depend on one's definition/view of what a "miracle" is. Some might feel that a miracle entails something that happens which contradicts KNOWN scientific laws which, of course, is definitely one definition/view. Others might feel the fact that we develop from an extremely small embryo into a functional being (with arms, legs, feet, eyes, ears, etc., all in the right places and not a jumbled-up mess, btw) is a sort of miracle in itself. In other words, maybe it just depends on how we look at things.

Xrikcus

And developing from am embryo is something that will happen in the future, andwill be testable. So it is a provable future miracle therefore.

I don't mind what you call a miracle, I just dispute that past miracles can be proven. You can't prove that I developed from an embryo, for example, I might have just appeared her for all you know.

BDS

"Why was Jesus so stupid?"

An inherited trait?

Agnostic Theist

Actually it was a joke

BUT, if Santa knows how is good and bad, why is it that I still got presents even when I'd been bad?