post-secular – Fourcultures

The Atheist Bus Campaign story just keeps rolling along.

The latest is that after more than 400 complaints, the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority is considering an investigation.

Meanwhile in Australia no such problems have been encountered, since the advertising industry is already censoring itself by refusing to work with anti-God ads.

It seems the ASA may be putting itself in the unenviable position of ruling on whether the claim that ‘There’s probably no God’ is misleading. To help the process along I can definitively advise that there is in fact a God in England and he has been located in Oxford, York, Manchester, London and Chester (see image), as well as at a number of places in Northumbria. This is obviously bad news for atheists, but it may be equally bad news for Christians, Jews and Muslims. The God in question is none other than Mithras, the subject of a popular ancient Roman mystery cult. In fact, evidence of his existence is to be found all over western Europe.

Paganism was banned in 341, but London’s Mithraic temple is due to be re-established by developers in 2009.

There is a serious point to this: by denying a certain type of god, contemporary Atheists risk lending that god some backhanded credibility.

Inexplicably, one of the more popular search terms connected with this blog is ‘santa science’. Given the current season, perhaps this should be cleared up once and for all (look away now if you are under the age of 18):

There is no scientific evidence for the existence of Santa. However, this is not taught in schools, and teachers who do cast doubt in children’s minds are suitably punished (i.e. removed).

It may be true that every year the white bearded one is detected in North American airspace delivering presents by sleigh and given a welcome by fighter interceptor planes, but Youtube footage is unconvincing. Richard Dawkins, for one, has never received presents from Santa. He maintains this has nothing to do with his inability to be a good boy for a whole year, and it is difficult to argue that it might.

Here’s a nice piece of research on the issue of what children learn and unlearn about Santa.

Ironically, those who see something strange in society’s insistence on Santa’s literal truth are in the company of extreme Christian groups such as Jehovah’s Witnesses. These people hold that if children grow up disillusioned about what their parents told them regarding Santa, they’ll be less inclined to accept what they’re told about God. It’s hard to know whether this is correct because there is remarkably little scientific research on the effects of Santa-belief, although ‘current research in developmental psychology suggests that even very young children competently draw boundaries between reality and its alternatives’ (Rosengren and Hickling, in Rosengren, Johnson and Harris, 2000: 76)

Perhaps it’s all a bit of harmless fun…