Thread: IS There A Santa Claus??????

Parents lie and tell their kid there is a Santa, then wonder when they grow up they do not believe their is a god, and so these kids grow up to become ardent skeptics, who will not believe anything even when the evidence says it exists. "Train up a child in the way that he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it." Proverbs 22:6.

Originally Posted by JohnF

Parents lie and tell their kid there is a Santa

A .... No lie has been told
B .... You gonna tell me that you don't enjoy a good (non religious) fictional story
C .... Even god is about sharing and caring

Originally Posted by JohnF

Parents lie and tell their kid there is a Santa, then wonder when they grow up they do not believe their is a god, and so these kids grow up to become ardent skeptics, who will not believe anything even when the evidence says it exists. "Train up a child in the way that he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it." Proverbs 22:6.

Are you serious?? No offence...but what a load of twallop...where is the evidence/ statistics to back up your claim? I grew up with Santa as did my siblings. I believe in God....my brother is a pastor and my sister works in the church.

I think drawing a correlation between Santa and growing up skeptical is drawing a llllooooooooonnnnnggggggg bow indeed ,

Regards

Stevo

And since when was Spot the dog real? We tell children stories to help them to learn about life, how to live with others and how they should conduct themselves as part of our society. Santa is just one of those stories and certainly bought a lot of joy to my children as they were growing up. It wasn't traumatic when they decided that he wasn't real, it just became a different way to enjoy Christmas.

I have always tried to educate my children to ask questions and not to just outright believe what they are told, even by me. If this makes them sceptics then good. I myself find it difficult to cross the line into belief of something that I personally cannot see the basis of but that doesn't effect the joy a child has in learning the world around them. That joy and wonder at finding something new is a thing that we adults can learn from.

Tim.

isn't the bible full of stories to teach other about the ways of life

Originally Posted by Blknight.aus

Consider the following:

1) No known species of reindeer can fly. But there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.

2) There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.

3) Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical).

This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house.

Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.

This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man- made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second - a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight.

On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that 'flying reindeer' (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine.

We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.

5) 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each.

In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second.

Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.> In conclusion - If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.

Beat me by *that much*

http://www.aulro.com/afvb/general-ch...tml#post365568


Martyn

We haven't had kids yet, but there is no way we will be trying to get them to believe in mythical people/creatures (apart from the FSM of course ).

We were taught the truth, but told not to ruin it for the other kids.

Originally Posted by JohnF

Parents lie and tell their kid there is a Santa, then wonder when they grow up they do not believe their is a god, and so these kids grow up to become ardent skeptics, who will not believe anything even when the evidence says it exists. "Train up a child in the way that he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it." Proverbs 22:6.

As recently as the middle of the last century the idea of Santa was very prevalent yet belief in god was very strong. More recently with the advent of children receiving information much younger there is less belief in Santa and yet there is also less belief in god.

Perhaps teaching children to have faith in Santa actually helps them have faith in other non-physical beings as well.