Express. Permanent cold up in the mountains has meant that the finds have decayed very little. Why was I so sure he didn’t exist? However, one thing science can’t do is tell us what stand to take on science as an approach to reality and the rest of our lives. Father Chritmas giving the all clear to some plans in the elf factory. A fragment of Father Christmas’s pelvis was tracked down to a church in Illinois after arriving there via France and Italy from his grave in Turkey. Let’s be blunt and call this the liar story. Another solution to the puzzle was that something in Tammi’s mind is divided or dissociated. Glauser said of the lunchbox: “It is simply something very special and unique if you can hold something in your hands which 4,000 years ago someone else had in their hands.”. One story tells of how the goodly bishop anonymously helped an old man with the dowry for his three daughters by tossing bags of gold through their open window which landed in stockings hanging up to dry by the hearth (sound familiar?). That is, she could make fun of Santa Claus all year long until Christmas season and then talk during the Christmas season as if she does believe in the jolly old saint. You can also choose to be emailed when someone replies to your comment. If you happen not to believe in Santa Claus, maybe because some wise-ass kid like my son told you that he doesn’t exist, pick something you believe in but isn’t universally acknowledged as real. When the children grew up and stopped believing in Santa Claus, they decided it would be a good idea to trick their children into believing. Merry Christmas all. Is the liar or the crazy explanation correct? Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? It lets us get at the issue that there is something a bit funny about believing in Santa Claus without appealing to murky notions of correspondence between the content of internal beliefs and external reality. I told this story to my wife, who is a psychologist raised in Communist Romania, and she said something along the lines of “Western parents lie to their children about this stupidity, and then the children grow up and find out their parents lied to them. The person himself exists in everyone who believe in the good the idea of … To see how this is so, all you have to do is take any of those explanations above – Marxist, psychoanalytical, neurobiological, or meme – and apply it to itself. Your life will end someday, and so will everything else – given that, what is the point of doing anything at all? I remember waiting for him to come. You might think it’s obvious that if Tammi says that she believes in Santa, she is crazy or lying, and back up your argument by the correct points that crazy people don’t know they are crazy, and liars usually lie about whether they are lying. Of course Father Christmas exists, and he can visit arbitrarily as many children has he pleases in as short a time as is convenient, barring mid-air reindeer pile- ups. By linking this historical figure to the legend of St Nicholas scientists hope to be able to finally confirmed he was real. As a consequence, she is uncomfortable with having her son lose faith in Santa Claus because some system in her brain believes, too. Father Christmas is a belief in something wonderful. ‘Does Santa Exist?’, by Eric Kaplan (£12.99, Little Brown) is out now, Santa Claus and Krampus (devil) on an Austrian Christmas card from around 1910 (Imagno/Austrian Archives), Barrack Obama dances alongside Father Christmas at the lighting of the US National Christmas tree, Father Christmas tastes the 12 ice-creams of Christmas at the opening of Harrods Christmas World department (Getty Images). ‘Father Christmas was real, his name was St Nicholas and he was a carpenter in a village that wasn’t the richest of villages…One year near the festive season, he decided he was going to make wooden toys to leave on the door steps of houses he knew children lived in and wouldn’t get much else for Christmas. For her transgression, the poor teacher got the sack – and not the one containing Santa's toys – which is unfair considering that she was only telling the truth. So, what caused Saint Nicholas to drift nearly three weeks down the calendar? Please see our Privacy Notice for details of your data protection rights. order back issues and use the historic Daily Express Please be respectful when making a comment and adhere to our Community Guidelines. I’m a kid, so I believe in everything.”. Some historians believe this is no coincidence and was intended as a way of giving a Christian identity to an ancient festival that refused to die away – much like Christmas as a substitute for popular pagan mid-winter festivals. The part of Tammi that believes in Santa might not even be a part that has access to her mouth. The next step in proving Santa Claus was real is an attempt to match DNA with other bone fragments found in southern Italy. Meme theory – liar because crazy. Independent Premium Comments can be posted by members of our membership scheme, Independent Premium. As she drifts off to sleep, she hears a voice in her head, one that sounds like her own. I’ve observed evidence that the liar story is true. As Bishop of Myra, his devoutness led him to use his significant inheritance to help the poor while leading a life of austerity himself. Ari did not believe in Santa Claus. No wonder American children are screwed up.” I remained puzzled by Tammi’s behaviour. Home of the Daily and Sunday Express. In return, they were rewarded with a gift. People have evolved modules in their brains that perceive humans as existing because it was evolutionarily important to know if somebody was in your cave with you. Psychoanalysis – crazy. I want to investigate what the best attitude is to take towards these things, both personally and as a community, and to see if we can come up with something better than screaming at each other (or at the recalcitrant parts of ourselves) “you’re a liar!” and “you’re crazy!”. Memes are programs of cultural DNA; they replicate if, and only if, they force us to believe them and spread them. Our journalists will try to respond by joining the threads when they can to create a true meeting of independent Premium. The original personification of Christmas was not as a gift-bearer for children. The existing Open Comments threads will continue to exist for those who do not subscribe to Independent Premium. But the man had a less pleasant and more militant side. If you are a strong proponent of the conspiracy story, you may not believe that this is the case – you might think that if she ever does confess to Santa belief, she is just lying. Are you sure you want to mark this comment as inappropriate? She has the Tammi who once believed in Santa but now buys toys from the store, and she has the Tammi who still does believe in Santa. If you’re like most people, I would guess that you don’t have a single firm answer to the question “What is the point of your life?” and that you oscillate among several, so whatever your answer is functions as your own personal Santa Claus. Last modified on Wed 24 Dec 2008 17.54 GMT. And not because if I went to the North Pole, I wouldn’t see him and his elves – just a lot of snow and ice and so forth – because there are any number of explanations that would square with that. Once upon a time (in the 3rd century), in a land far, far away (Byzantine Anatolia, to be precise), there lived a man called Nicholas (270-345) who was so saintly that the church canonised him within a century of his death – hence, "Santa Claus". People’s minds create irrational beliefs to defend against all the psychic pressure they’re under, what with death and wanting to sleep with their mothers and so on. You can find our Community Guidelines in full here. newspaper archive. I’m interested in the things that we are not sure we believe, half believe, believe sometimes but not always, maybe hope we believe but don’t as much as we want to, maybe wish to stop believing but are not sure who we would be if we did. The news follows the discovery of a 4,000-year-old lunch box found in the Alps which experts say is a “special” Bronze Age find. When we think that Santa exists, it’s because that chunk of nerve tissue is firing when we don’t need it to, just as hay fever comes when our sneeze reflex is triggered by some antigen that’s not really sneeze-worthy. I told this story to my daughter, who’s 11 years-old, and she said: “I believe in Santa Claus.” I also asked her if she believed in the Easter bunny and she said: “Yes. You can even switch the explanations. Dr Georges Kazan said: “It’s the first step. An American friend says that, by the age of five, two glaring clues led him to deduce the non-existence of Santa: that it was physically impossible for him to visit every house in the world at midnight, and his workshop seemed to churn out branded toys he saw in the shops. Researchers Tom Higham and Georges Kazan carried out radio-carbon dating at the Oxford Relics Cluster. Thus, Marxists believe in Marxism only because it’s in their class interests to do so; psychoanalysts believe in psychoanalysis only as a defence against anxiety; neuroscientists believe in neuroscience only because their brains have evolved to see causation; and meme theorists believe in memes only because the meme complex called meme theory has hijacked their brains and made them replicate it. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. This idea arrived in Victorian times from the United States, in whose melting pot, Saint Nicholas, brought by Dutch immigrants to New Amsterdam (now New York), was merged with the Anglo-Saxon Father Christmas. I could think of two possible solutions: For some reason back in the past, children were taught to believe in Santa Claus – probably because their parents thought it was a good way to scare them into being good. “If we get a date in tandem with the historical date, that tells us that we haven’t been able to disprove that it could have been from that individual.”. Marxism – liar. The remnants of an unknown traveller's food container were found by excavation technician Regula Gubler and archaeologist Kathrin Glauser atop the 2,676-metre (8,780-foot) high Loetschen Pass in the Bernese Alps in Switzerland. So, according to this theory, it’s possible that a part of Tammi’s mind does believe in Santa Claus. So it can’t be the case that just because something has a supposedly scientific explanation, we should stop believing in it, or we would stop believing in scientific explanations. Yes, part of me thinks he didn’t come and never will, but why should I listen to that part?” Tammi has a couple of different Tammis inside her. Since it invokes voices in the head, let us call this, uncharitably, the crazy explanation. The fragments of leather are thought to have come from a kind of rucksack. In this extract from his new book, Big Bang Theory writer Eric Kaplan explores why the Father Christmas story is passed down the generations, Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile. Science doesn’t tell us what we should think about science. Due to the sheer scale of this comment community, we are not able to give each post the same level of attention, but we have preserved this area in the interests of open debate. I work in Hollywood, which pumps a lot of images and stories out into the consciousness of the globe. Versions of both of them are found throughout rationalist critiques of religion and scientific accounts of human behaviour in general. In fact, unlike the annual tabloid rumours of local councils prohibiting Christmas, Oliver Cromwell actually did ban the observance of the feast in 1644.
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