Ether

Ive been thinking about how parents make their childrens believe in Santa and that he will bring them presents if they are good boys/girls and go to bed early.

I consider this to be something really evil by those parents who claim to love their childrens so much. In my opinion the Santa's tale is only used to manipulate them and control them. But when they grow up enough (enough to be able to figure it out) they are told that everything they have believed in was a lie and that they bought the gifts.

Why do parents force this to their childrens to tell them at a later date that it is all a lie?

ReasonRules

I've always found it interesting how supposedly mature adult theists can see Santa as just a fairy tale to keep certain people (i.e. their kids) happy, distracted and behaved, but cannot see that their own religion is exactly the same thing for them. From my perspective, Jesus is just Santa Claus for adults. Both are invisible, love you, help you when you are good, punishe (or at least ignore) you when you are bad, and ultimately do the same thing for those who believe in them; keeps them happy, distracted and behaved. The parallel seems so blatantly obvious to me that I am bewildered more theists don't see it.

If I told anyone that I still believed in Santa at my advanced age, they would think I was a nut, and rightly so. Yet I am expected to take adult Christians seriously when they say they have an invisible friend named Jesus. They say the only difference between the men and boys is the size of their toys. I guess it's also the color of the beard of their invisible friends.

So many adults out there... So few grown ups... *sigh*

seebs

Very simple:

I have never once met a person who claimed to have interacted with Santa in any way, who was not either a small child, or consciously lying.

ReasonRules

I'm not sure I understand your meaning. Are you implying you have met people who claim to have personally interacted with Jesus/God/"your-divinity-goes-here"? By interact, I mean something tangible, like a direct, two-way conversation while fully awake and conscious. Preferably with someone else in the room to witness it.

miscreant

I don't think that most parents employ the Santa tale to manipulate and control. After all, it's the parents who end up being manipulated more (how many parents are out there who feel like crap if 'Santa' doesn't bring the correct toy for their kids?). My parents were far from religious, but still allowed us to buy into the whole Santa thing, and for one reason. The 'mystery' and kind of magic of it.

And though now I am happy to have developed a rational, critical view of life, I still very much enjoyed the whole Santa fairy tale when I was little. After all, though I do believe I'd want my children to grow up into rational, thinking adults, I also don't want them to grow up too fast and miss some of the magic that is part of the innocence of childhood.

Miscreant

case

This was the way my family was, though "Santa" had to go pretty fast, as my sisters and I never really bought into it. But I think that many theists try to convert others and pass on their beliefs for much to same reason: they want others to experience the "magic" of Jesus and God, not because they are consciously trying to placate someone. Unconsciously, well, that's way too much psychology for me.

MadMordigan

Why do parents force this to their childrens to tell them at a later date that it is all a lie?

I personally think it is a good object lesson in the cynicism neccessary to be a healthy functioning adult. It teaches kids, in an intimate way, that people will manipulate their trust and lie to them if they think its for their own good.

seebs

Heh. "Are you implying you have met people who claim to have personally interacted with someone over a phone? By interact, I mean something tangible, not involving electronics."

I see your point, and I agree that such would be much better evidence, but the people I know who claim to have exchanged packets with God mostly describe it as an internal thing of some sort. At least a couple of my friends say they have personally seen things which they believe to be miracles, and many of them claim to have received "divine guidance".

Now, obviously, it's quite possible to disregard these as hallucinations, or whatever... but that's a whole different class of disqualification of witnesses than that we have for Santa, where *no one* appears to have "seen" Santa unless that person is lying (and will happily admit this to anyone who is not a child) or visibly incompetent to judge.

I'm not saying I don't see any reason to doubt God; I've seen *lots* of reasons. I just think that it's pretty easy to draw a line such that Santa is clearly fictitious, and God is not clearly fictitious.

I think the Santa thing is a poor example; it's got a nice emotional kick to it, but it turns out that there are substantial differences.

Others include:

* The description of Santa makes testable predictions about the physical world, and most of those predictions (a place at the north pole with a bunch of elves, people moving down chimneys, etcetera) have ever been found true - indeed, at this point, most of them are generally accepted to be false, because they are physical things, for which evidence *would be expected*.

* While Santa's existance would explain presents on Christmas, it would leave unexplained the mysterious tendency of parents to buy presents exactly similar to those eventually left by "Santa", and the question of where those presents go. In short, we have a *MUCH* better explanation for that one.

Still, the single greatest reason I don't believe in Santa remains that all the people making the claim are fully aware that they are making it up, and no one has offered any reason to believe which they themselves would accept, except for a few small children with dishonest parents.

BTW, I'm not a big fan of the Santa thing. After all, if your parents lied to you about that, why not about other stuff? Obviously, for a lot of atheists, this is the point - what if the God thing is a lie? However, I'm more concerned about other unlikely-sounding things parents tell their kids, such as "you should brush your teeth" or "unprotected sex can make you sick, or even possibly kill you".

Martin Gibbs

I met some fundy Christians who outright told their kids that Santa is not real...They're part-way to where they should be.

Now if they could just tell them about all that Jesus/God stuff....

I did have a conversation with them. Explaining how this all-knowing guy is an impossibility. They agreed, but couldn't stretch the logic to fit with God...

Bree

Our church said that parents could tell their kids about Santa - but warned them that at age 8 we would all be told in church that Santa did not exist and that our parents were willfully lying to us.

At the time I was told that Santa did not exist, I did not see the reasoning behind the church's intervention. Now that I am older (and can read the church's propaganda on this issue) I realise that the church wanted us kids to believe in the ultimate soverignability of the church and it's elders. Our parents were "willfully" lying to us - and only the church could tell us the real truth.

Basicallly they wanted to see our parents as liars.