Santa Claus and God

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Santa Claus and God

Very different.

Santa is fat and lives in the North Pole with elves and makes toys in exchange for cookies. He was also imprisoned for a few hundred years for going psychotic and shooting up everything, as can be seen in the Yankovician folklore.

God is not fat, because spirits can't eat, and because gluttony is a sin. He does not make toys in exchange for food as far as I can tell. He does not live with elves, but rather lives with weird looking angels. He also never went to prison, however, he has killed a large number of creatures just to show how freaking awesome he is.

So, as you can see, they are very different creatures.

AG.... You just won an Internet, that was brilliant!

There are a few similarities. Both have a list of who has been naughty and who has been nice. Santa will give presents to those who are nice on a single day, whereas Yahweh will effectively give presents for eternity - this likely due to the superior funding of the latter. While Santa will only give coal to those who are naughty, Yahweh will instead burn them alive for all eternity (although it should be noted that in his earlier years Santa was known to devour those who were naughty). However, the main difference between the two is that while Santa is happily married, Yahweh, while once married to the goddess Asherah, if his attitude towards her in the Bible is anything to go by, is almost certainly divorced, although that doesn't seem to stop him from telling his human followers that divorce is a sin.

well, Santa is a truth for children and God is a truth for adults as well as for children.

Although the issue of Santa is more problematic than with God, because there are few things it would be hard to explain to kids about Santa, as why does he give gifts to wealthy families mostly, and the more wealthy the more expensive gifts and what about poor children.

The Easter Bunny.

Both are seen as male figures

Interesting...in religious terms I could see them both being different.

But a good example of god being santa clause-like is when children such as my niece believes he's a good man...something my sister told her after her brother died. My sister isn't the religious type but both of us think that at her age, it's best to cheer her up with the joys that her brother's in a better place now. This has devasted her greatly as well as the rest of us.

Interesting when the concept of god is brought up, the judeo-christian philosophy is linked to it and so the hell, fire, and brimstone. None of us have ever mentioned hell to her or much of the bible. When people do, I tell her it's a concept made up by men who used hell as a scare tactic so people would be good.

Not easy to explain to a 5 year old. I'm still not unsure how she'd react if I told her god didn't exist and her brother died going nowhere. Ugh....reminds me of when I was a child. A world filled with meaning and magic. Both my parents weren't religious people so the subject of hell and sins were never brought up.

Last edited by MissConstrue on 06 Jul 2009, 11:57 am, edited 1 time in total.

Let's see ... were you being ironic? Are we supposed to replace all occurrences of the word "truth" in that sentence with "myth" ??

I don't think a direct comparison is possible. God is based off a fictional character; whereas santa claus is based off a real person.

I've always thought that the comparison between God and that jolly-old-elf Santa Claus to be a little off the wall and unconvincing. I personally stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was about four or five-years old. I later became an atheist and then a Christian.

I have met many good people who later in their adult life had decided to turn to religion, to agnosticism, or to atheism for their own personal belief system; but as far as I know, I've never met any adult who has decided to believe in Santa Claus.

Although that's true, the morality of both is the same. Play by the rules and you'll be rewarded. Violate the rules and you'll be punished. They are social fictions to police society.

I don't think I was.


With "belief" actually.

I have heard that the Calvinist belief that people are rich because God approves of their way of life more or less is a theological justification for having wealth and poor and unfortunate people deserve their lot because God decreed their condition. Thereby capitalism's divide of worldly bounty is justified and rich people need not worry about the lot of the deprived.

Actually Santa pre-dates the whole Saint Nicholas thing. The original Santa was based off the quite fictitious Germanic goddess Holda, who did pretty much the same stuff as Santa (except she'd visit all people, not just children, and if they were bad, instead of leaving coal she'd kill them). When the Christians came along, they did their usual thing when confonted with a belief too popular to challenge directly and tried re-making it in their own image, by attaching the first Christian saint they could find with a resemblance to the original protagonist to the myth.