What legal obligations does the post office have when it comes to letters addressed to someone like God or Santa Claus or something of the like? Can they just get rid of them or is it a case of return to sender or what?
Thanks!
Dunno about God, but in Canada, we have an entire system set up for letters to Santa. Around Christmastime there’s a whole “Write to Santa - he’ll write back!” campaign. As I understand it they are typically answered by volunteers, retired posties, and the like. There’s even a postal code for Santa: H0H 0H0.
I have a friend that works in the post office law enforcement dept, I’ll ask her tonight.
Okay so generally we’ve got the Santa Claus bases covered. What about God? Or something equally undeliverable?
Technically, I suppose the Post Office could just mark them “Return to Sender - Insufficient Address” and send them back. After all, does God have a Zip Code assigned?
But returning them would cost the Post Office (and us as customers) more money. Probably they have something in their regulations allowing letters such as that to be discarded.
Alice Walker had the right idea of how to address letters to God. She mailed the whole bunch to her publisher. 
To paraphrase Captain Kirk, “Why does God need a Zip Code?”
Surely there’s a method of communicating directly with God (if you believe in that sort of thing): prayer. If you’re foolish enough to pass up this free, direct connection in favour of the expense and vagaries of the postal system, you deserve to have your mail destroyed!
The Spanish Post Office delivers letters adressed to God, Santa, the Baby Jesus and various related entities to Caritas (which uses them as a way to find people who need help but are too proud to ask). A friend who works at the post office told me they’re trying to figure out what will they do if one goes adressed to Allah: Caritas is perfectly happy to help Muslims, but what if the family involved found it offensive?
Huh? I don’t get it. What “philanthropic purpose” could a bunch of letters demanding ponies and bicycles from an imaginary man in fancy dress possibly have?
The philanthropy refers to the people answering the letters, not the kids sending them.
As a postal worker, I can tell you the Australian procedure (and as Australia is a member of the Universal Postal Union, it won’t be much different from most other countries’ procedures):
A letter to God would be rejected by the sorting machines, and then sent to human sorters who would place it in the Dead Letter Office aperture. The guys at the DLO will look for a visible return address, and then will stamp it “RETURN TO SENDER - INSUFFICIENT ADDRESS”. If there is no return address, they will open the article to search for one (normal postal workers teehee are not authorised to ever open mail, but the DLO lads have special permission to do so if necessary). If a return address is found by scanning the contents, then the opened letter will be returned in a post office official envelope, along with a note of explanation. If no return address is found, the letter will be eventually incinerated. Any valuables contained by the article in this instance will be auctioned. I’m unsure about cash - I think it goes straight to the government.
A letter to Santa would once have undergone an identical procedure. Officially, that is. Unofficially, I don’t think they wanted to subject kids to that, so they were probably quietly incinerated too (the letters that is, not the kids). Of course, some of us toy with the idea of marking the things “RETURN TO SENDER - DECEASED” 
These days, Australia Post has a system similar to the Canadian one matt describes. Instead of volunteers or charity doing it, there’s a clerk somewhere whose job is to stuff a non-commital feel-good standard reply into an envelope, and return it to the kid. One year I wrote a letter to Santa supposedly from my boss, so he would get one of these.
WEAK POSTAL JOKE:
At a letter sorting plant one day, a sorter gets a postcard addressed to God. It is from a little old lady, and she writes:
*Lord,
I know it is wrong to pray for money, but it is winter, and I am behind in my rent and heating bills. Please have mercy on me and send me $500 so that I can pay them.
Edna*
This melts the postal workers’ hearts, and they decide to pass the hat around to collect money for this lady. They can only raise $300, but that’s better than nothing, so they put it in an envelope and send it to the lady, with a note signed ‘God’.
The following week, another postcard comes through the system:
*Lord,
Thank you so very much for the $500. Unfortunately, those thieving fuckers at the post office stole $200 of it.
Edna*
I getcha. Yes, I am that stupid.
Y4H W4H?
Seriously, though… this is kind of tangentially related, but I’m told that there are assorted Jewish groups in Israel who will take messages to God received by fax, e-mail, etc., and deliver them to the Western Wall.
Hmm… I’ll bet those Australian postmen who ‘scan’ the contents of those letters have read some pretty messed up stuff.
This is plan that could only have been designed by the Devil himself!!! Bwaahaahaahaaaaaaa!!!
Yessirree. I’ve done it myself with postcards.
In case you’re wondering whether postal workers read postcards (it’s one of the questions I get asked most), the answer is, ‘generally, no.’ We are not allowed to read them, but human nature being what it is, I doubt there would be a sorter on the planet who hasn’t been tempted, and in any event, sometimes the address is hard to cipher out, and you have to stare at the thing a bit. However, the main reason we don’t read the cards is that the contents are usually so very, very boring. People use the same pat lines over and over, to the point where we used to play “Postcard Bingo” and get points for lines such as ''the flight over was soooooo long [extra one point for each additional ‘o’]", or “have done all the touristy things”. Nonetheless, there have been some doozies. There was one (which I suspect was intended to be read by third parties, that was a gay man ditched by his lover for another man. That was the most venomous thing I have ever read. It was like watching a car crash, and years later I still worry about the guy who would have received it. He would have been completely devastated. I had to take my hat off to the author - it was very cleverly written, but it was lethal. There have been a few things like that I’ve seen. But at least that guy seemed sane; most of the entertainment is at the hands of crazies. We had one guy who called himself THE PORT JACKSON KNIGHT (Port Jackson is Sydney Harbour), and he hated Isaac Asimov with a vengeance. Asimov was evil, and had controlled the illuminati or some bloody thing. This guy would scrawl all in caps over the outside of dozens of envelopes, and drop them in a street posting box. He was always good for a laugh.
Generally though, it’s hard to shock a mail sorter. Assume that whatever it is, we’ve seen worse.