{"id":14322,"date":"2014-12-04T10:12:59","date_gmt":"2014-12-04T15:12:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/standingonmyhead\/?p=14322"},"modified":"2014-12-27T13:37:40","modified_gmt":"2014-12-27T18:37:40","slug":"atheists-promote-belief-in-santa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/standingonmyhead\/2014\/12\/atheists-promote-belief-in-santa.html","title":{"rendered":"Atheists Promote Belief in Santa?"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><p>Last year there was some wisecracking atheist Christmas billboard which also featured Santa. This year\u2019s edition is now out.<\/p>\n<p>It is pictured here, and features a kid writing to Santa saying that he doesn\u2019t want to go to church because he\u2019s too old for fairy tales.<\/p>\n<p>This is a hoot.<\/p>\n<p>The kid\u2019s too old for fairy tales so he writes a letter to Santa.<\/p>\n<p>What next, \u201cDear Tooth Fairy, I don\u2019t want to go to church because I don\u2019t believe in fairies.\u201d?<\/p>\n<p>I don\u2019t mind the billboard, and I don\u2019t mind atheists. I am just embarrassed that they can\u2019t do any better than that. Their attempts at being populist are just, plain dumb.<\/p>\n<p>This reveals the underlying problem with atheism. It is elitist. It\u2019s really for them college innerleckshuls. The poor nerdy sophomore atheists then try to make their faux religion popular by putting it out on billboards with what they think is a smart and sassy slogan, and the only people they impress are the other latte swilling sophomores. What a laugh.<\/p>\n<p>This also, in a roundabout way, reveals the genius of Catholicism. It is a real religion for everyone. I\u2019m in the heart of Missouri farm country this week conducting a parish mission and it is fantastic to attend daily Mass at the local church and see that it is full of about 100 school children, retired folks, young moms with babies\u2013all of them perfectly normal, down to earth ordinary people. Some smart, some not so smart. Some rich. Some poor. Some young. Some old.<\/p>\n<p>They come to pray and worship and go about their daily business in a humble and simple way\u2013not trying to cram their religion down anyone\u2019s throat and certainly not bothering to invest in a sappy billboard to promote atheism.<\/p>\n<p>So much for God. What about fairy tales?<\/p>\n<p>Again, is it possible that the smart atheists can be so uneducated as not to understand literary forms any better than to rubbish fairy tales? They must be totally unaware of the serious way in which fairy tales are treated by people like Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, J.R.R. Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton, C.S.Lewis, Bruno Bettleheim and others. To they really think fairy tales are just silly stories about animals that talk and wizards who do magic tricks?<\/p>\n<p>Once again, they are cut off from the huge proportion of ordinary people who innocently enjoy fairy tales, fantasy films and literature, superhero comics and films, Disney flicks and science fiction. Popular culture is burgeoning with new kinds of fantasy and fairytales, new kinds of storytelling in powerful and meaningful ways. Ordinary folks not only like fairy tales, they understand implicitly how to read them, watch them and enjoy them and learn from them.<\/p>\n<p>Trashing God AND trashing fairy tales?<\/p>\n<p>Good going atheists. That has probably won over lots of people.<\/p>\n<p>Geesh.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last year there was some wisecracking atheist Christmas billboard which also featured Santa. This year\u2019s edition is now out. It is pictured here, and features a kid writing to Santa saying that he doesn\u2019t want to go to church because he\u2019s too old for fairy tales. This is a hoot. The kid\u2019s too old for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":557,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Atheists Promote Belief in Santa?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Last year there was some wisecracking atheist Christmas billboard which also featured Santa. This year&#039;s edition is now out. It is pictured here, and\" \/>\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\/standingonmyhead\/2014\/12\/atheists-promote-belief-in-santa.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Atheists Promote Belief in Santa?\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Last year there was some wisecracking atheist Christmas billboard which also featured Santa. This year&#039;s edition is now out. It is pictured here, and\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/standingonmyhead\/2014\/12\/atheists-promote-belief-in-santa.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Fr. 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