[QUOTE="Heisenderp"]
It's called a non-falsifiable hypothesis. Usually they are laughed at for being ridiculous (conspiracy theories), but God gets an exception for some reason.Inconsistancy
I shall call it: The Adulthood Santa Complex.
It's brought on by the same reason that kids initially believe in Santa, but there are several factors that make Santa easier to disprove, one being that he's a person who lives in the here and now and can be seen, even at malls!, and the definition for the Santa hypothesis isn't very ambiguous.
The difference is God can't be proven it, and can't disproven, and in the failed logic of many generations, friends and family believe in them as fact, this establishes the idea, in a child, that it must be true. Even when Santa is disproven, because it was illogical, this isn't, because everyone believes in it anyway. However if this, slightly more ambigious route, had been taken towards Santa, it'd be equally possible for the majority of adults in the world to believe in him. But, it'd require that previous generations believed in him as fact, and that the 'mall santa, and parent santa' were just a form of ritual worship to Santa, the god(or saint) of the North Pole. I'm absolutely certain, that if Santa was slightly more ambiguous, and referred to as a god of something, then he'd be believed in quite widely along side of religions.
This is much like Astrology, because people don't write it off as absurd, and it's ritualistic, there is a much higher chance that people will believe them as true. Even though the Astrological calender is off due to Earth's axial procession, by ~2000 years in a cycle of 26000 years, no one knows or cares. It's just vague enough to fit how you're feeling on an average day ~50% of the time. Amazingly, 26% of Americans apparently believe in Astrology.
The human mind, early on, is designed to not question authority. "Fire is hot, don't touch it" it would be far too dangerous for a child to test this, so evolution has imprinted the requirement to obey parents as a child. However false teachings during this time can perpetuate throughout adulthood, if not seen as absurd by adults. Santa is seen as absurd by adults, so teaching it to kids, who do actually end up believing in it, is fairly benign. And only because Religion isn't seen as absurd by adults, even through the lack of evidence, it perpetuates as 'fact' to the majority of people, even the most absurd bits, like Noah's Ark.
The idea of believing in Santa as an adult, culturaly, is reinforced as laughable
The idea of believing in God as an adult, culturally, is reinforced as fact
Both, however, are equally absurd. It's all the cultures' fault!
Evolution is a trick by the devil to test our faith, raidoactive dating is inaccuarte and fossils were planted by the devil to seperate the true belivers from the ones that fall into the cult of evolution.
[deleted]
If God knowingly created the devil solely for the purpose of deceiving us, to 'test faith' then what a petty and deceptive God that would be, and the type that certainly shouldn't be worshipped as 'kind'. (I detect sarcasm, but just in-case...)
You sir (or lady), made my day! 
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