Atheists Promote Belief in Santa?

Last updated on: December 27, 2014 at 1:37 pm by Fr. Dwight Longenecker

Atheists Promote Belief in Santa? 2014-12-27T13:37:40-05:00 Fr. Dwight Longenecker

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Last year there was some wisecracking atheist Christmas billboard which also featured Santa. This year’s edition is now out.

It is pictured here, and features a kid writing to Santa saying that he doesn’t want to go to church because he’s too old for fairy tales.

This is a hoot.

The kid’s too old for fairy tales so he writes a letter to Santa.

What next, “Dear Tooth Fairy, I don’t want to go to church because I don’t believe in fairies.”?

I don’t mind the billboard, and I don’t mind atheists. I am just embarrassed that they can’t do any better than that. Their attempts at being populist are just, plain dumb.

This reveals the underlying problem with atheism. It is elitist. It’s really for them college innerleckshuls. The poor nerdy sophomore atheists then try to make their faux religion popular by putting it out on billboards with what they think is a smart and sassy slogan, and the only people they impress are the other latte swilling sophomores. What a laugh.

This also, in a roundabout way, reveals the genius of Catholicism. It is a real religion for everyone. I’m in the heart of Missouri farm country this week conducting a parish mission and it is fantastic to attend daily Mass at the local church and see that it is full of about 100 school children, retired folks, young moms with babies–all of them perfectly normal, down to earth ordinary people. Some smart, some not so smart. Some rich. Some poor. Some young. Some old.

They come to pray and worship and go about their daily business in a humble and simple way–not trying to cram their religion down anyone’s throat and certainly not bothering to invest in a sappy billboard to promote atheism.

So much for God. What about fairy tales?

Again, is it possible that the smart atheists can be so uneducated as not to understand literary forms any better than to rubbish fairy tales? They must be totally unaware of the serious way in which fairy tales are treated by people like Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, J.R.R. Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton, C.S.Lewis, Bruno Bettleheim and others. To they really think fairy tales are just silly stories about animals that talk and wizards who do magic tricks?

Once again, they are cut off from the huge proportion of ordinary people who innocently enjoy fairy tales, fantasy films and literature, superhero comics and films, Disney flicks and science fiction. Popular culture is burgeoning with new kinds of fantasy and fairytales, new kinds of storytelling in powerful and meaningful ways. Ordinary folks not only like fairy tales, they understand implicitly how to read them, watch them and enjoy them and learn from them.

Trashing God AND trashing fairy tales?

Good going atheists. That has probably won over lots of people.

Geesh.

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