and how about the ancient incas and aztecs and their deplorable rituals of child sacrifice? how horrible the image of the high priest at the top of those ziggurats, flames burning, and children lined up waiting to be hurled down the steps or thrown into the fire. is it any different than our entire society investing billions of dollars and billions of hours and the utmost creativity to keep children lined up at the malls come the holidays to pay homage and beseech his highness, santa, for the trinkets and gifts that they've been taught to ask for? even still, with all this yammering, who really cares? it's no big deal, right? it's only "symbolic", the whole thing. but an image comes to mind. an image about how we americans look at foreign cultures and their "symbolic" celebrations. how we quickly find them odd and primitive. ("let he who is without sin cast the first stone"). within the context of russell's work the above is only a curious side-note. in the context of this thesis, however, the implication is severe. of the few sociologists and child psychologists who've bothered to look at the function of santa-belief in children, almost all have identified an innate mental/spiritual faculty in humans that is most operative in the early stages of development. they allege that it is this "faculty" that allows for the belief in "god". in essence, what they've discovered is that with the presentation of santa as "real", santa fulfills the human need to "know god". when one gets older, however, and finds out santa is a lie, that faculty have already been effectively neutralized and the next step of attempting to fill that void becomes the mechanism that fuels the great american consuming drive. in short, santa claus is the major deity of western consumer religion.
Germany