Malek Sidani, Reporter
@mmscourant
When you start to get a little older, it is natural to start questioning things. A lot of stuff doesn’t make sense, especially since we’re children, and our parents love to lie to us. Eventually, every child finds themself questioning Santa. Santa is a key part of a lot of childhoods, bringing joy and wonder once a year to children all over the world in a truly magical way. But his backstory just doesn’t add up. How can he be in all those malls at once? How can he go around the world in just one night? How does he avoid the restricted air spaces? How does Santa decide whether a certain action is objectively naughty or objectively nice? How does he pay all those elves? Does he pay all those elves?
All these questions will get the better of you, as they got the better of me, and you will ask your parents. Is Santa real? My mother did a pretty good job of averting the question, with the old “Don’t believe, Don’t receive”, but eventually she gave up and told me.
When I first found out I was shattered. My world crumbled before my eyes. It was them. It was my parents all along. Looking back on this I can laugh, but recently the holiday spirit has me thinking. Thinking, and, well, feeling bad. Really bad. For all the children and adults still being lied to. To this very day.
Now at first it seems crazy, and it may still seem crazy at the end, but isn’t god just, like, long term Santa Claus? Once a year, Santa decides whether you are a naughty child, or a nice child. He takes the sum of your actions, and either rewards you for your virtue with your heart’s desire, or punishes you for your evil with a sock full of coal.
Doesn’t god do the same thing, but over the course of your life? Good or bad, naughty or nice, heaven or hell, presents or coal, what’s the difference? The difference is that children cannot start to comprehend the complexities of life and death, neither the questioning of the morality that inevitably arises when one attempts to judge an action as having an objectively positive or negative effect. At their core, both god and Santa share one thing in common. They decide whether you are a good or bad person, and then reward those with good behaviour or punish those with bad behaviour.
I was raised in an atheist household, and when I found out the dark truth behind Santa, the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy went down with him. But the messages they taught me didn’t. They remained. The idea of rewarding good behaviour is as old as time itself. In the short run, being a kind and generous person will improve your social life and how people perceive you, and in the long run, hey, you might get into heaven. Almost as old as the idea of rewarding good behaviour is the practice of teaching and engraving morals through religion. No matter how varied, almost every religion has values that are enforced by a promise of a holy reward, and just as common is some sort of punishment if the morals or rules are not upheld.
Nowadays however, not everyone is religious. According to Vox, 10% of the American population does not believe in a god, and this number has exponentially increased. That’s 10% of the population who probably don’t celebrate holidays, and most certainly isn’t going to church every Sunday. Growing up my family did celebrate Christmas and Easter, but the festivities never went past opening stockings or hunting for eggs. And let’s be honest, no one gets coal on Christmas day. I never had a bible study, and my parents never snapped at me because I couldn’t sit still during mass.
So does that mean that I didn’t have morals growing up? Or that, even today, I’m an objectively immoral person? Am I destined for evil, or devoid of a sense of right and wrong, simply because I do not accept the one true gods? Well the thing is, while religion does introduce and incentivize morals, religion isn’t something many children grow up with. Sure they’ll go to church, or even pray before bed, but most children are too preoccupied with chewing plastic or touching their tongues to frozen poles to really understand religion and everything that comes with it. The same way most children can’t conceptualize death, they can’t conceptualize heaven, or hell, or good, or bad. Coal though, coal they understand.
