Possible to have respect for an adult who believes in Santa?

[_Polygamy-Porter]

Is it possible to conduct repeated conversations with an adult who continually professes his/her belief that Santa Clause is real?

Is it possible to be open to such beliefs and be respectful when this adult shows you photos of hoof prints on a snow covered roof, and tells you this proves that Santa Clause has reindeer that can fly AND land on roof tops?

Can you be honestly respectful when he calls you the anti Clause because you demonstrate how it is physically impossible for one man to visit over one billion homes in a single 24 hour period? AND WITH FLYING REINDEER ???

[_Gunnar]

I know what you are getting at, of course. Obviously, such an adult is seriously deluded. Given that, why is it reasonable to accord any more respect to people with religious beliefs that are every bit as irrational as belief in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, as many religious beliefs are?

[_RockSlider]

For your consideration:

The Pause of Mr. Claus

Make sure to listen long enough to spot santa

[_DrW]

Is it possible to conduct repeated conversations with an adult who continually professes his/her belief that Santa Clause is real?

Is it possible to be open to such beliefs and be respectful when this adult shows you photos of hoof prints on a snow covered roof, and tells you this proves that Santa Clause has reindeer that can fly AND land on roof tops?

Can you be honestly respectful when he calls you the anti Clause because you demonstrate how it is physically impossible for one man to visit over one billion homes in a single 24 hour period? AND WITH FLYING REINDEER ???

You pose an excellent question.

One aspect of the answer (IMHO) is that the stage for supernatural being myths have been expanded over the course of human history from the dark anywhere away from the nighttime fire, to Mt. Olympus, to the sky bowl above the Earth, to the entire Universe.

A component of the logic (or lack thereof) that is used to allow continued unfounded belief is exactly that of Bro. Gibson, as described on the Cranial Explosion thread.

One can go to the North Pole, or even to the top of Mt. Olympus and show that there is no trace of Santa Clause or Zeus, respectively. Humans have gone to the moon and shown that no six foot tall beings dressed like Quakers do live, or could live, there either. Given the only kinds of arguments available to apologists, is it any surprise that folks like Bro. Gibson draw their first defensive line at the moon?

Certainly when one considers the entire universe, many can believe that there is room for a supernatural being. However, in the main, religionists, cannot agree on what this supernatural being might look like or what his attributes or characteristics might be. This is because such a being is a pure construct of the human imagination. Everybody has one, and no two are exactly the same.

Given that Mormons will never visit every candidate for Kolob in the universe, using the logic of Bro. Gibson (hereafter the Gibson Gambit), they can still claim that one of the unexplored Kolob candidates may still exist as the dwelling place of the Mormon Elohim.

The fact that this supernatural being would have to break the laws of the nature with nearly every attribute or action ascribed to him - just as would Santa Clause to deliver his toys to billions of homes on Christmas - doesn't seem to matter to these folks. They have FAITH. Such faith is nothing more than the ability to believe in utter nonsense.

Why is this kind of irrational, delusional (and even dangerous) thinking even tolerated, let alone often celebrated, in "advanced" societies?

[_SteelHead]

Ah religion. Were it anything but, the believers would be labeled mentally ill, delusional, but as it is religion, they get a pass.

[_Bazooka]

Santa is slightly more believable than, say Moroni.

For instance, I have incontrovertible proof with my own eyes from when I was a young man, that Santa visited me.
Oh sure, I never actually saw him, but he left more tangible evidence of his existence than the Nephites did....

[_ludwigm]

Santa is slightly more believable than, say Moroni.

For example, NORAD tracks Santa.

Come back Dec. 1, 2014
(To see what NORAD does the rest of the year, visit us at NORAD.mil )

[_Tarski]

Is it possible to conduct repeated conversations with an adult who continually professes his/her belief that Santa Clause is real?

Is it possible to be open to such beliefs and be respectful when this adult shows you photos of hoof prints on a snow covered roof, and tells you this proves that Santa Clause has reindeer that can fly AND land on roof tops?

Can you be honestly respectful when he calls you the anti Clause because you demonstrate how it is physically impossible for one man to visit over one billion homes in a single 24 hour period? AND WITH FLYING REINDEER ???

God=Santa? Too easy PP. Consider a couple things.

1) You were an adult that once believed in God.

2) The eminent biologist and possibly the most effective and tireless opponent of creationism and defender of evolutionary science, Kenneth R. Miller believes in God and he is one among thousands like him. Not respectable at all?

3) It is objectively much easier to "disprove" the existence of Santa Clause should anyone need to go to the trouble than it is to defeat every possible notion of God including semi-platonic notions that amount to giving a certain credence to the intuition that there is something unified and metaphysically weighty underpinning moral, mathematical and physical truth.
Just how despicable is it when someone feels that what we call "Love" (capital L) and the Greeks called agape is an unstoppable force emerging ineluctably in some Hegelian manner through history and converging onto something objective and wonderful like an attractor in dynamical theory.....and that for at least poetic reasons this force or movement deserves personifying language to due justice to the intuition, since anything that assiduously avoids personification leaves people cold toward what is then devalued as yet another mere abstraction. If perchance normal people have a built in faculty that intuits this without being able to articulate it, are they like children who believe in Santa Claus?

Now, I am not a theist but maybe I am like a child because I can't quite let go of mathematical Neo-Platonism (mathematical realies are objective beautiful realities--perhaps the tip of a metaphysical iceberg)

But most importantly;

4) (Story of a child and a Mother)
Maria, a wonderfully creative and intelligent woman, had a hard time conceiving a desired child but finally late in life gave birth to a baby girl she named Vivian. They called her "Vivy". It turns out that this child had an unusually sparkling and adorable personality and love of life. She said clever precocious things and even by 4 years old had an uncanny ability to dance and sing in a way that would make everyone laugh and clap with amazement. She asked all sorts of question about trees, mushrooms, germs, sunlight and stars. At 6 she tried to make her own microscope out of the center tube of a toilet paper role and some other bits and pieces. She looked through it at her own little microbes she had drawn on bits of paper she called slides.
She was once haunted and her heart beat in her chest and her cheeks reddened with pressure and with a kind of inconsolable pain and confusion when she accidentally overheard adults talking about a father who had beaten his own 5 year old child to death with a leg broken from off a table. She defeated this pain eventually and returned to herself and played daily in the sunshine digging in the dirt for interesting bugs and pull up weeds to examine what the roots looked like. Unknown to anyone else she would sometimes stop and speak out loud to the little girl whose father had beaten to death and consoled her as best she could.
But she got cancer at age 7 and when she worsened and neared death she asked her mother Maria if she would go to heaven and be with God. Maria who had been agnostic suddenly felt an intense emotion that seemed to make attention to discursive human rationality seem small, petty, and even cosmically absurd. She answered yes to the child and in that moment felt there was no lie.
The child died and the saddened mother defiantly ignored, as it were, the pleas of Richard Dawkins and embraced the idea that somehow and in some way she would see her daughter again in eternity. She bettered herself each day in the memory of her daughter and sometimes looking into the noonday sky spoke out loud to her child whom she felt inhabited the sunlight.

Maria is not worthy of respect now?

[_DrW]

Santa is slightly more believable than, say Moroni.

For instance, I have incontrovertible proof with my own eyes from when I was a young man, that Santa visited me.
Oh sure, I never actually saw him, but he left more tangible evidence of his existence than the Nephites did....

Well, you know what? I did see Santa. He came to our home one snowy Christmas eve, asked me if I had been a good boy, and gave me some presents. I didn't get a chance to see the reindeer, but I did hear the bells on their harnesses as they shuffled about anxious to get on to the next house.

[_huckelberry]

Is it possible to conduct repeated conversations with an adult who continually professes his/her belief that Santa Clause is real?

God=Santa? Too easy PP. Consider a couple things.

1) You were an adult that once believed in God.

2) The eminent biologist and possibly the most effective and tireless opponent of creationism and defender of evolutionary science, Kenneth R. Miller believes in God and he is one among thousands like him. Not respectable at all?

3) It is objectively much easier to "disprove" the existence of Santa Clause should anyone need to go to the trouble than it is to defeat every possible notion of God including semi-platonic notions that amount to giving a certain credence to the intuition that there is something unified and metaphysically weighty underpinning moral, mathematical and physical truth.
Just how despicable is it when someone feels that what we call "Love" (capital L) and the Greeks called agape is an unstoppable force emerging ineluctably in some Hegelian manner through history and converging onto something objective and wonderful like an attractor in dynamical theory.....and that for at least poetic reasons this force or movement deserves personifying language to due justice to the intuition, since anything that assiduously avoids personification leaves people cold toward what is then devalued as yet another mere abstraction. If perchance normal people have a built in faculty that intuits this without being able to articulate it, are they like children who believe in Santa Claus?

Now, I am not a theist but maybe I am like a child because I can't quite let go of mathematical Neo-Platonism (mathematical realies are objective beautiful realities--perhaps the tip of a metaphysical iceberg)

But most importantly;

4) (Story of a child and a Mother)
Maria, a wonderfully creative and intelligent woman, had a hard time conceiving a desired child but finally late in life gave birth to a baby girl she named Vivian. They called her "Vivy". It turns out that this child had an unusually sparkling and adorable personality and love of life. She said clever precocious things and even by 4 years old had an uncanny ability to dance and sing in a way that would make everyone laugh and clap with amazement. She asked all sorts of question about trees, mushrooms, germs, sunlight and stars. At 6 she tried to make her own microscope out of the center tube of a toilet paper role and some other bits and pieces. She looked through it at her own little microbes she had drawn on bits of paper she called slides.
She was once haunted and her heart beat in her chest and her cheeks reddened with pressure and with a kind of inconsolable pain and confusion when she accidentally overheard adults talking about a father who had beaten his own 5 year old child to death with a leg broken from off a table. She defeated this pain eventually and returned to herself and played daily in the sunshine digging in the dirt for interesting bugs and pull up weeds to examine what the roots looked like. Unknown to anyone else she would sometimes stop and speak out loud to the little girl whose father had beaten to death and consoled her as best she could.
But she got cancer at age 7 and when she worsened and neared death she asked her mother Maria if she would go to heaven and be with God. Maria who had been agnostic suddenly felt an intense emotion that seemed to make attention to discursive human rationality seem small, petty, and even cosmically absurd. She answered yes to the child and in that moment felt there was no lie.
The child died and the saddened mother defiantly ignored, as it were, the pleas of Richard Dawkins and embraced the idea that somehow and in some way she would see her daughter again in eternity. She bettered herself each day in the memory of her daughter and sometimes looking into the noonday sky spoke out loud to her child whom she felt inhabited the sunlight.

Maria is not worthy of respect now?

Sometimes a nonbeliever makes a better explanation of faith than believing apologists.Perhaps Tarski is not afraid of the uncertainty in the subject.