{"id":27666,"date":"2014-12-22T07:04:58","date_gmt":"2014-12-22T12:04:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/exploringourmatrix\/?p=27666"},"modified":"2014-12-22T07:04:58","modified_gmt":"2014-12-22T12:04:58","slug":"the-truth-about-santa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2014\/12\/the-truth-about-santa.html","title":{"rendered":"The Truth about Santa"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"The<\/p>\n

I saw this cartoon, and it seemed to me to\u00a0offer parallels to the discoveries that are sometimes made in my own fields of religion and Biblical studies.<\/p>\n

Sometimes people go through a time of questioning which, because they have not yet jettisoned their immature black-or-white absolutist thinking, involves going from believing everything to believing nothing.<\/p>\n

But often, what we discover after a maturer and more critical inquiry is that there is something to whatever it was we once believed \u2013 but the story isn\u2019t entirely pleasant.<\/p>\n

One may find that some sort of deity cannot be done away with, but\u00a0any confidence that that deity has attributes such as benevolence may be challenged.<\/p>\n

One may find that there was indeed\u00a0a historical Jesus or Muhammad, but their character was not always as exemplary as you had been told, nor were their views always ones that you can embrace.<\/p>\n

In both cases, one may be sure that one has\u00a0discovered \u201cthe truth.\u201d But which, if either, is the real truth, and which discovery is the harder one to cope with?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I saw this cartoon, and it seemed to me to\u00a0offer parallels to the discoveries that are sometimes made in my own fields of religion and Biblical studies. Sometimes people go through a time of questioning which, because they have not yet jettisoned their immature black-or-white absolutist thinking, involves going from believing everything to believing nothing. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":27667,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[139],"tags":[10765,12960],"class_list":["post-27666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fundamentalism-religion","tag-santa","tag-truth"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Truth about Santa<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I saw this cartoon, and it seemed to me to\u00a0offer parallels to the discoveries that are sometimes made in my own fields of religion and Biblical studies.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2014\/12\/the-truth-about-santa.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Truth about Santa\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I saw this cartoon, and it seemed to me to\u00a0offer parallels to the discoveries that are sometimes made in my own fields of religion and Biblical studies.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2014\/12\/the-truth-about-santa.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Religion Prof: The Blog of James F. 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