If you accept that there is this all seeing, all knowing God who runs the Universe, and this God decided to send his son/self in human form to be sacrificed and then come back to life a few days later, why is the existence of Santa and the Easter Bunny considered absurd?
God can’t have a sense of humor?
To many non-Christians, all three are equally absurd.
When I die, I expect to find him laaaaauuuughing…[/d-mode]
I don’t have an answer for this question. I’ve wondered the same thing for a long time. My religious parents played up Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny big time. I guess they believed that Jesus’ realness is so self-evident that they didn’t have to worry about confusing us kids with other tales of wonder. And I don’t remember having a crisis of faith after I stopped believing in SC and the EB.
I will say this: As a kid, Easter filled me with a ton of fear. For one thing, I was terrified of the Easter bunny. I’d be afraid to open my eyes upon waking because I just knew I’d catch him hopping around in my bedroom. And of course that thought filled me with terror. So I’d keep my eyes squeezed shut until I heard my parents get up.
But there was another reason why I was scared to open my eyes. Jesus. I had somehow gotten into my head that Jesus sometimes made guest appearances on Easter. And not the nice clean Jesus, but the bloody one with the thorns stuck in his head. I didn’t want to see Jesus any more than I wanted to see Mr. Rabbit, despite both of them being portrayed as good.
Sometimes I wonder if the Easter Bunny/Easter baskets thing was exploited to take the fear out of Easter. Yeah yeah, Jesus is alive, and we’re supposed to be happy and all that jazz. But things coming back to life (see zombies and ghosts) are inherently scary. A giant rabbit is scary to me personally, but I can see how that’s a more comfortable image to latch onto.
There aren’t any Santa or Bunny denominations. Nobody is promoting or proselytizing for them.
Take, as contrast, the Catholic Church’s efforts at creating saints. The saints have a “cheering section” and are vouched for, by a large and well-organized church.
If the Easter Bunny had support like that, he could be taken just as seriously as the serpent in Eden or Balaam’s ass.
Imagine how Jimmy Carter felt this morning. 
Claus, not Clause
Exactly. I remember as a youth, after I figured out SC was bull shit, I made the same conclusions about God. Although the fear of God lingered with me until my teens. But by the age of around 15, I was comfortable admitting there is no God.
Ironically, my son believes in God and we never did the SC thing with him.
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Who says there is not Santa Claus and a Easter Bunny? Those exist spiritually, Children get presents and find hidden eggs. What would motivate adults worldwide to do such a thing unless it is such a thing? Same spirit being that motivates such gifts through other faiths usually around the same time. How does Santa get everything done on that one night? By distributing his spirit to all those with kind hearts, such as Jesus also does.
So “Jesus” is really our parents?:dubious:
Technically speaking, Jesus was not reincarnated; he was resurrected into his original body. (I made the same mistake myself when I was in grade school).
And I suppose Jesus is considered less absurd than the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus because the latter two aren’t considered incarnations of God.
In that the Father (parent) and Son (child) are one (same spirit, different manifestations of that spirit), yes sometimes God uses another person to parent us, other times uses our heart to parent another.
But my referent to Jesus has to do with us sharing His spirit, not that he is the bio-parents/legal guardians who provide the gifts
Because people can believe things that you don’t believe, without also believing other things that you also don’t believe.
The OP’s question struck me as a non-sequitur, at least slightly related to an “Appeal To The Moon.”
Indeed so!
The New York Sun said so in 1897, and if you read it in the Sun you can be sure it is so.
More recently, Cecil Hisself agreed with this.
Because the people who up Santa Claus and Easter Bunny have admitted it.
Tooth Fairy’s real, though.
Because Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny were intentionally made up. The only people that were ever told they were real were children. And because they both are said to do certain things, which are provably done by someone else.
It’s not that it’s impossible for them to exist. I mean, yes, what we know about science shows they don’t exist. But that’s not why people found out they don’t exist. They found out because their parents told them they were the ones doing all those things. Or they saw them do it, or at least evidence that they did it.
If the Jesus story had come explicitly from people making up stories, then those who follow him would consider him fake, too. But the Gospels describe him as a historical figure.