Had a very similar experience. Santa was the first step in a long path towards agnostic to non-Abrahamic unitarian thinking. The answer to when Abrahamic religions end is I believe in the next 100 years. The signs are everywhere, and it starts with throwing out 2000 years as the marker -- because even if you call it CE it denotes the epoch of Abrahamic conversion of Rome. At first I thought let's come up with a more recent epochal moment -- say the American revolution, but that is not universal enough. So I've decided to go scientific its year 12013, and human history is as long and as grand as we can imagine.
(May 30, 2013 at 1:42 pm)Eric9001 Wrote: I broke from Christianity and became an atheist at a very young age, I believe my reasoning and connections that I made back then explained out could be put to use for this cause. The most important part of becoming an atheist was realizing that Santa Claus is not real in the third grade. After realizing that Santa Claus is fake, I had to realize why kids are being lied to about this reality. I came to believe the goal in lying about the existence of Santa Claus is to improve children's behavior with reward of presents with good behavior, or with penalty of coal with bad behavior. I related presents to heaven and coal to hell, as heaven is the reward for good behavior or believing in God (which is thought of as a good thing), just like the presents, and hell is the punishment for the opposite, just like the coal. Santa Claus is the supposed judge of whether individual children receive presents or coal, and the deliverer of them, while God in Christianity is the supposed judge of whether individual children and adults deserve to go to Heaven or Hell. I thought that if children, on a large scale, could be fooled by the existence of Santa Claus, and forced into keeping that belief and acting in certain ways based on the promise of presents of coal based on their doings, adults can be fooled likewise by the existence of God. If the penalty for not believing in God or doing bad things was not as harsh as eternal suffering and torture, and instead was to receive coal, and the reward for the opposite was less great, and instead just receiving minor gifts, more people would be likely to question the existence of God. But as it is, many adults are not only afraid to not believe in God, they are afraid of even questioning the existence of God, because they feel this process might make them an atheist and then they will suffer eternally after their death. I related the concept of the Christian God to all of the other concepts of God, so I did not try any other religions that I knew about. It took me a while to declare myself atheist. For a while, I was afraid, because I was not aware of the benefits of atheism, and viewed it as a bad thing. In late middleschool I realized how great humanism is as an alternative, though I did not know it was called humanism until very recently (I am 16.). Now I have other reasons to believe there is/are no god/gods, but I cannot deny that relating Santa Claus to God was the biggest step for me.
So, I don't know... maybe make a parody of the song "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" that instead of saying "Santa Claus" says "God"?...
"God is coming to town...
He knows when you are sleeping,
He know when you're awake,
He knows if you've been bad or good,
So be good, for goodness sake."
