My parents—fundamentalist christians—didn’t participate in the santa myth, they told us when we first came across santa that it was something lots of people pretended about. The main reason they didn’t lie to us about santa—and they explicitly told us this—was that they didn’t want us to be disapointed about santa and subsequently decide god was like santa and didn’t exist either. Perhaps, that should have been a big hint about the other invisble man, but I was like 5 or 6 at the time and homeschooled.
(Looking back and reading between the lines, I think at least one of my parents was extremely upset when they found out santa wasn’t real and vowed never to do such a thing to their own kids.)
I was probably in my 20′s by the time I realized that there are people who actually thought santa was real at some point in their life. I had preivously thought that people who claimed to have believed in santa were just continuing the game. Anyway, the joke’s on me. Turns out god isn’t real. Ha, ha.
I think it’s valuable to have an experience of finding out that you’re wrong about the world on a very basic level. I don’t know that I could actually straight up lie to any hypothetical kids in order to cause such an experience, though.
My parents—fundamentalist christians—didn’t participate in the santa myth, they told us when we first came across santa that it was something lots of people pretended about. The main reason they didn’t lie to us about santa—and they explicitly told us this—was that they didn’t want us to be disapointed about santa and subsequently decide god was like santa and didn’t exist either. Perhaps, that should have been a big hint about the other invisble man, but I was like 5 or 6 at the time and homeschooled.
(Looking back and reading between the lines, I think at least one of my parents was extremely upset when they found out santa wasn’t real and vowed never to do such a thing to their own kids.)
I was probably in my 20′s by the time I realized that there are people who actually thought santa was real at some point in their life. I had preivously thought that people who claimed to have believed in santa were just continuing the game. Anyway, the joke’s on me. Turns out god isn’t real. Ha, ha.
I think it’s valuable to have an experience of finding out that you’re wrong about the world on a very basic level. I don’t know that I could actually straight up lie to any hypothetical kids in order to cause such an experience, though.