Just an interesting video that I found on youtube that contrasts and compares how people believe/disbelieve in both Santa and Christianity.
There's a whole bunch of other "atheist experience" videos there that are well worth checking out as well. The guys hosting the show are all really smart and eloquent.
EDIT: This isn't a "Christianity is just as false as Santa thread" sorry if I didn't make that clear. I'm more interested in exploring how people justify their beliefs and how they go about losing faith in them.
EDIT#2:
Well I think it's fair enough to call this my most epically failed attempt at a decent thread. I'll try to revive it though and gain back a little of my respect in the eyes of my fellow gamespotters.
Now first of all I made one incredibly stupid mistake when I created this thread, I put "Santa vs Christianity" instead of "Santa vs God". Christianity is specifically referring to the belief that Jesus sacrificed himself for our sins etc whereas God just refers to the God hypothesis in general as it may apply to any religious faith. There's a big difference between the two and I'm honestly sorry for failing to differentiate them.
Secondly I failed to give a decent line of argument. I just left you all with the title which admittedly implied that Christianity was just as poorly supported and juvenile as a belief in Santa. That's not at all what I meant and I'm sorry for not making that clear or simply not coming up with a less inflammatory title.
Here is the argument that I was interested in and the discussion that I wanted to provoke. Both Santa Claus and God are, to a certain extent, aetiological beliefs i.e. they are beliefs which explain the causes of observable phenomena in our world. For example the myth of Zeus gives an aetiological explanation of why thunder occurs, the myth of Persephone and Hades explains the seasons and so on and so forth. In the case of this topic, Santa explains how presents appear underneath christmas trees while God explains how we were created (and a great deal of other things besides that).
The question is, what happens to both of these beliefs when we encounter evidence that contradicts them? For the belief in Santa we can easily find out, through staying up over night on Christmas eve, that a jolly fat man in a red suit does not, in fact, come down our chimnies and throw presents under our trees. We can also easily find out how presents do in fact come to be under our trees when we realise that friends and family are putting them there. The answer seems obvious in the case of Santa that we should no longer believe.
But what about God and the things that he claims to do? We observe that there are no miracles happening today (I mean the water to wine / walking on water stuff) and we have an explanation for how we came to be (evolution and abiogenesis) that is well evidenced. What I want to examine here is this question; why does a child who has been told that Santa Claus delivers presents almost always reject this explanation upon finding evidence to the contrary while a religious person who has been told that God created mankind almost always sticks with this explanation despite evidence to the contrary?
Perhaps the evidence against the God hypothesis isn't quite as compelling as finding presents in your parents closet or perhaps the God hypothesis is stuck to so readily because it provides a stable social framework / moral value set?
Anyways that's what I intended for this thread and that's what I should have prepared before I posted. My bad guys and sorry if I come off as some sort of evangelical atheist. I really don't mind what you believe in but I just thought that this topic would be an interesting analogy. Hey even Dracargen compared God and aliens in a recent blog and I know that he certainly wasn't deciding the validity of one against the other. Same thing that I attempted here, unsuccessfully it would seem.
Peace everyone lets try to keep religion threads interesting rather than offensive.
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