Why I believe in Santa Clause
Note from the author: Please don’t read this without reading my previous two articles “Why religion should be opposed” and “Response to why religion should be opposed”.
You recently posted an article called ‘Does Santa exist?’ What a dumb question!! What a dumb article. I did not enjoy your disrespectful tone. Anyone who doesn’t believe that Santa exists is either psychologically imbalanced or simply refusing to hear the soft loving voice of Santa in their hearts.
I don’t just believe he exists, I KNOW he exists! Here’s why:
- My parents introduced me to Santa at a young age. If he’s good enough for them he’s good enough for me.
- Two Billion other people believe in Santa. They can’t ALL be wrong!
- There are thousands of books written about him. That’s tangible proof!
- Everyone knows that Santa rewards those who have been good (it is written), and one year I wasn’t so good and I didn’t get such an expensive present that year – so how do you explain that? Huh?!
- Santa has physically been to my house. I know that because I put cookies out for him one night and the next morning they were gone. Santa ate them. He loves cookies. Cookies can’t just disappear on their own can they?
- If there was no Santa, there would be no Christmas. Someone had to have started Christmas.
- I think you’ve been hurt. You’ve obviously had a bad experience around the Christmas table, but you need to understand that your family might let you down, but Santa will never let you down. Just write to him again this year and you’ll see, he’ll hear you and answer your letters.
- You have no right to question his existence. You shouldn’t even be posting such stupid, misleading stuff!!! I am so angry!!!!! Who do you think you are!!!
- I might not have all the answers, but let me ask you something personally… are you happy?!
- What would the world be without Santa or Christmas? I’ll tell you what December would look like… full of sadness and violence and immorality. Is that what you want?
- Santa knows when you are sleeping and knows when you’re awake… so you’d better watch out… because Santa Clause is coming back… to town. Will you be ready when he comes?
- You can’t prove that Santa DOESN’T exist! Have you ever personally BEEN to the north pole?
- You say you can’t see him, but just look around, he’s everywhere! You can see him in the snow-covered pine trees, you can hear his voice in the carols by candlelight, you can taste his essence in Christmas pudding.
- Just because the shops have commercialized Christmas and forgotten what it’s all about doesn’t mean that you have to throw the baby out with the bath water. Santa is not his followers.
If all these things don’t convince you that Santa exists then you’re clearly just being stubborn and contrary. Just be warned, your unbelief will have consequences!!
Deon, I suppose I cannot argue with your train of thought.
I also understand your reasons for posting the article.
Consider this argument.
There is no empirical, chemical or scientific proof that Love exists.
Let’s define love for a clearer understanding, oxford dictionary has the following as it’s description.
‘ LOVE – an intense feeling of deep affection. 2 a deep romantic or sexual attachment to someone. 3 a great interest and pleasure in something. 4 a person or thing that one loves’
Love is described as a feeling or sexual attachment.
There is scientific and chemical proof that our brain centres behave differently and we feel ‘love’ for certain people in our lives as well as animals and material things.
Because we ‘feel it’ does not mean it is proof that it exists… we feel it nontheless.
There are no capsules we can take to induce the feeling of ‘love’.
Oxytocin, vasopressin, testosterone, estrogen are hormones that can be related to ‘love-related feelings’ but there are always combinations of these which leads us to the conclusion that love is many faceted and varies according to person leaving us with a general term, hardly proof.
And yet we say that we love our partners, our children, friends.
Many people in history have died to protect ‘loved ones’, ‘loved possessions’ ‘beloved ideals’.
By the same argument Happiness too is aGood luck; good fortune; prosperity.
Let’s dfine happiness as well:
1. An agreeable feeling or condition of the soul arising from good fortune or propitious happening of any kind; the possession of those circumstances or that state of being which is attended with enjoyment; the state of being happy; contentment; joyful satisfaction; felicity; blessedness.
3. Fortuitous elegance; unstudied grace
Hapiness is related to combinations of chemicals as well that are combined in different forms that we refer to in a general manner just like love.
We say that we are ‘happy’, we sing ‘happy birthday’ at some point you too have said that you feel ‘happy’ or ’sad’.
Yet science has proven that happiness exists, it can be measured, controlled, induced and even anticipated. Just give your daughter another puppy and see how she reacts.
Conclusion:
In the above argument I have shown that happiness exists and that we cannot say the same for love using the same methods even though we are dealing with two similar emotions.
The conclusion I can draw from this is that we have not evolved enough to prove or disprove the existence of ‘God’. There are many ‘forces’ that we ‘feel’ in life and attribute to God, but cannot prove ‘yet’ as we have not evolved enough to do so. (maybe another debate topic) We have also disproved many situations and circumstances that have been attributed to “god’ successfully because of these leaps in science and logic.
In the final conclusion, my justification for sitting on the fence continues, until empirical and scientific methods as well as logic evolve enough to shift me.
Deon, see if you can drag Basil down with you when you come visit – I would love to hear the campfire converation between you two!!!
Hmmm, Bas. Sorry bro, but you’re comparing apples to chainsaws, or more precisely, apples to dreams about apples. You might have watched the movie ‘Contact’ for this argument, which breaks a couple of rules of logic. The argument being presented here is something like, “People feel what they call love although they can’t ’see’ it and we also can’t see God although some believe he exists in reality, therefore because we all agree that love exists – God could also exist.”
Love and happiness, as your dictionary definitions suggests are both feelings and can only exist in the context of a chemical response in the brain. We interact with people, or hear some good news, or see a beautiful thing, and a few things ‘move’ in the complexity of our brain – we call these ‘movements’ many names but don’t pretend they exist as a noun – a thing that can be seen and touched and make decisions etc.
I will gladly accept the comparison of ‘the existence of emotions as chemical reactions in the brain’, with, ‘God as nothing more than a chemical reaction in the brain’, but you certainly can’t say that if happiness exists as a ‘feeling’ that God should therefore exist as a being.
This argument can prove that faith ‘exists’ (in a way), but not that God exists (in the way that religion defines it).
Ha!
Tag team… divide and conquer.
Estelle, thanks for the invite, I would gladly discuss these issues over a campfire with Deon and whomever decides to chip in, im afraid credit to Deon is required and he will probably ‘verbally’ beat me into submission. It is a beating that I would look forward to.
I believe that I have stated my case and Denis too has had his word. Now that we know where each of us stand why not debate the topic as if we were the ‘devil’s ‘ advocates. Challenge the questions ourselves and see if we cannot come up with some new ideas.
I believe that ’sitting’ on the fence as per say will not in effect allow us to experience what the ‘other’ side ‘feels’ like or how that grass grows let alone seems green.
In an attempt to challeng Deons ‘Atheist view’ I will put forward this argument:
Scientists have proved that atoms, especially the particles within them, ‘pop’ in and out of existence all of the time to be replaced by other particles and atoms which in turn do the very same thing.
This can be compared to the characters in a story.
When you are reading about Romeo and Juliet, the part where Romeo whispers ‘What soft, what light through yonder window breaks… ‘ and you stop reading right there at that moment and close the book, where has Romeo gone? He was there in your mind, on your lips, in the air as you spoke those words and has now vanished. Do it now and you will see what I mean.
So the question I ask and will try to propose an answer for is where did he go?
Well he went back to the place from where he came. In other words he went back to the book which is now closed, back to the depths of you mind where you formed an image of him and back into the particles of air you used to create the sounds, back to the source.
Now we know the source from where Romeo came: Shakespear, from his writings, the people who continue to share his words and the plays that continue to be read, but we do not know the source from where atoms and particles come from.
Lets assume by this example that particles and atoms do just the same thing. They go back to the place from where they came.
Now we all know that energy cannot be created or destroyed, is everywhere and nowhere at the same time and is merely transformed into one form or another we can assume that there is a ’source’ where all energy came from and goes back to constantly.
It is proven that we are composed of particles and atoms and if they ‘pop’ in and out of existence constantly being replaced by other particles and atoms we can assume that we are all ‘connected’ by the this ‘popping’ in and out of existence. A possible example to explain further, if all the people in cars on a particular highway are listening to the same radio station and travelling along a particular stretch in the road they are all connected firstly by the radio waves passing in and out of the cars and secondly by the information (energy) that they are all absorbing as they are moving.
Now that we have established ‘the assumption’ that energy goes back to the source from where it came from and having proved in theory that we are all connected, we can assume that we not only ’share’ particles and atoms with the ’source’ but that we are connected to it through each and every particle in the universe and most importantly, through each other.
In conclusion this source or ‘God’, ‘Jehovah’, ‘Krishna’ ‘Buddah’, ‘The great Spirit’, ‘The force’, ‘IHWH’ ‘Bhagwan’ ‘Yahweh’ and so many other names that exist is what connects us, all energy, particles and matter and furthermore is what we come from and go to constantly all the time.
When an idea is adopted on so many fronts in varying time frames universally through the last five thousand years of our existence, it can be assumed that the consistent thread being a ‘central’ source of all life is true and also re-inforced not by study, but by the practise of ‘living’ and ‘being’ and ‘loving’. (another debate)
The problem with religion is that in justifying this thread of belief of a central source by traditions and rituals and forcing it’s members into a particular manner of worship and practise defined by ‘enlightened’ ones the central source is no longer studied, questioned, rigorously tested and in ‘effect’ practised either scientifically nor holistically (for those who don’t know it means Emphasizing the importance of the whole and the interdependence of its parts as opposed to science which breaks everything down into small bite sized chunks), and so the ‘original’ idea, belief, being, ‘the central source’ or ’source of energy and life’ is lost and forgotten, replaced by priests, idols, books and stories.
This is why to answer your first article, we do not need religion.
We do however need to answer the questions above in a very neutral, scientific as well as intuitive and holistic manner.
To assume that we are all part of a machine, to be dissected, studied, tagged and explained individually as science has done over the last two thousand years when we now know that it is impossible to measure even the simplest particle in the universe because it does not scientifically exist long enough to do so and exists according to a set of laws that are completely different to the ones that we took two thousand years to establish means that in future, Science and ‘belief’must work together to solve these riddles and questions.
After all quantum mechanics and quantum theory was developed as a method to understand the behavious of atoms and particles because science alone can no longer do so.
Finally a response to the question from the Basil camp… there surely is a God! Bas, I’ll do an article on quantum physics soon. Thanks for the response.