Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe mccormickin It's Saturday. Time to go into the vault for a classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. I think we're doing two episodes today. Are these gonna air back to back? That's right? This is uh. We've taken the Christmas stocking and we've just double stuffed it here because last year we did a two parter titled is Santa a God? And the only way you could figet how to make it work scheduling wise to feature it as a vault episode and get it all out before Christmas was to just give you both episodes as one today. This was one of my favorites we did last year. I remember having a lot of fun with this. Yeah, this, this was this is what. This is one of my favorite holiday episodes. I think we've ever done it. Originally published twelve nineteen, twenty nineteen and twelve twenty nineteen. Let's let's head down that chimney. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heart Radio's House to Work. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today Santa Claus is coming to town. That's right. This is an episode about Santa Claus. It's also an episode about gods and our ideas about God's our god concepts and what that that all means. And we are going to get into the question of whether Santa is a god or not. I do want to just have a couple of quick reminders here as we dive into this one. First of all, yes, this episode it has to do with Santa, but if you are attempted to listen to it outside of the holiday season, no worries, because there's gonna be a lot of talk that does not directly apply to Santa Claus. Sure, this is an episode about the cognitive science of religion. And secondly, we will be discussing the magic of Santa Claus in this episode, so just keep that in mind, parents, if you're listening with your children. Sure, alright, So most of us would not say that anti clause as a god, right, I mean we we don't necessarily or maybe we're not always able to define God in a dictionary definition kind of way. But you have an intuitive sense of how this word is used, and for some reason, Santa Claus doesn't usually fit into that definition, right, that intuitive definition. Right, even if you are, let's say, a child who is a Santa fundamentalist who believes in, you know, very literally in Santa Claus, even then I don't think they would necessarily confuse the the idea of Santa Claus with the idea of say, the Judeo Christian deity. Sure, but on the same hand, and then the same hand is as we're going to discuss in this episode, there are a lot of similarity. So first of all, I want to just talk a little bit about Santa Claus, this magical being, the factors so heavily into Western holiday traditions as well as traditions around the world that have been influenced by the notion of the Great Jolly Old Elf. The exact mythology is going to vary, of course, but but here are just some of the often highlighted aspects of the mythos in me. Okay, first of all, Santa is at the very least extremely long lived, if not undying, immortal or eternal. I mean, he's been doing this thing for a long time, that's right. Secondly, uh, Santa is I guess you would say pan sofock or all knowing. He knows when you were sleeping, he knows when you're awake. He knows if you've been bad or good. I'm not sure he's supposed to know your inner thoughts, but he is privy to an awful lot. I think a lot of conceptions of Santa would even give him like inner psychic access. Yeah, I mean if if Santa can, well, Santa can at least see what you're doing when other people aren't around to see what you're doing. He sees what you're doing in private, right, Yes, that that seems like that's verging on I mean, it's got to be like supernatural. They're oh, yeah, absolutely, It's not like he's just getting reports about your behavior, right. He definitely has supernatural abilities. It just he comes down to whether he can see inside your brain or not, if he can see your thoughts at all, if he can anticipate your actions based on that information. Also, he receives mail from all over the world, often through magical means, or at least magical variations of the postal system. Uh, and you know that that includes things like letters can find him no matter where you mail them. You can mail them at the zoo, you can mail them at home, you can mail them through the chimney, things like that. You know, another thing that's very common about God's is they tend to live in inaccessible places, if not in a like extra dimensional, completely fundamentally inaccessible place, even when they live on Earth, they tend to be at the top of a mountain or at the bottom of the ocean or something like. Yeah. I think that the mountaintop God as as an excellent example, because in the modern sense, what is the top of the world mountain? It is the North Pole, of course, which is which is where Santa Claus is said to reside, and it is an insanely hostile environment um fighting off polar bears, and he seems to reside there without any outside support aside from the milk and cookies that he collects every year and of course the big ones. Santa can travel around the entire world and visit every home in a single evening every year. I remember thinking about this as a child and thinking like, well, I don't know, that sounds really difficult, but it's probably not impossible, right. It seemed within the stretching of plausibility to me, right, Like, the magic makes sense at first, and then you start thinking about the magic and you're like, wow, this is some potent magic. And then along the way, you know, you you introduce some science fiction concepts, and you introduce some some elaborate visions of the nature of time, and then okay, you can create some versions of it that makes a little bit more sense perhaps, but at the very least, Santa has amazing abilities to travel in ways that immortal human cannot, of course, and there's there's much more than that that we might add, based not only on beliefs, but on films as well that features Santa Claus. So he has been spotted in the presence of in human beast men, as we discussed in our Crampus episode. Okay, sometimes appears in the Guys of Tim Allen and Goldbirds. That's true. Uh, also Whole Cogan and Whole Coogan play of Santa Claus. Oh, I don't remember that Goldberg. Definitely in the movie Santa Sleigh, which is you know, you can probably guess what it's about. Also, Santa can communicate with magical deer that also fly and enable him to fly he can control robots, as he has the power over all toys and machines that might be argued to be toys. This, of course from Santa Claus versus the Martians uh and imports in that Santa Claus is also drawn into an interplanetary dispute. Santa associates with known wizards such as Merlin. Uh. If he's watched the old Mexican Santa Claus film, we of course see him hanging out with murder and then dealing with demons, engaging in direct conflict with at least demons who serve the Christian Devil, if not the Christian Devil himself. Oh no, yeah, he's straight up fights demons in the movie, Oh that Devil. It's like it's like Gandal versus the Bell Rock. It's Santa versus whatever that demon's name is. Yeah, I mean he gets into some serious theological territory in that film. He also may or may not play the saxophone when visiting Asian countries, which isn't as remarkable, I guess, but it's a It's an additional wrinkle in the myth of Santa. Now, we're obviously not the first people to raise these parallels between the Santa clause that brings magical delight to children and all over the place and uh, and you know, basically gods that are found throughout history all over the world. In fact, I would say it's almost like a cliche joke at this point to kind of uh a point out that Santa Claus and God are in some sense interchangeable to too many children. Yeah, My favorite example of this goes back to the year two thousand and one of our shared favorite shows, The Simpsons. There's the episode where Bart goes in to his bedroom and he kneels by his bed, and then he begins to pray, and he says, quote, dear Santa, if you bring me lots of good stuff, I promised not to do anything bad between now and when I wake up. Amen. It's the best kind of Simpsons joke because there's a joke in what he says between now and when I wake up. But actually, the even funnier part is the very concept of him saying it that he's praying to Santa in the first place. Yeah. And one of the things I always loved about it is is that it takes me a second to catch it, you know, because it's not instantly clear that it's something out of the ordinary. I think I vaguely remember almost doing this at one point as a child, even uh, sort of at least subconsciously getting the idea confused. You know, praying to Santa is only a few degrees to the left of sending a letter to an entity that can observe your every move, And it's not that different from the idea of praying to this divine entity that you're told about, say it's Sunday school. Yeah, And so for the rest of the episode today, we're going to be focusing on a paper that actually asks the question of, well, in the terms of cognitive science of religion, does Santa Claus actually qualify as a god or not? Does he match the other things that would be called a god within this uh, this sort of like scientific academic framework. In particular, we're going to be looking at an article by experimental psychologist Justin Barrett published in the Journal of Cognition and Culture back in two thousand and eight, and and Barrett is an interesting character here. He wrote a book titled why would Anyone Believe in God? And he himself is a Christian, but he also sees God as a byproduct of our mental architecture, and he sees this in a way where these two concepts have room to coexist. Yeah, he seems like an interesting figure to me. Like, having read a bit about him, I think he's in the spirit of those who would believe of that, Like the existence of God is not in conflict with naturalistic explanations for religion. Yeah. Like, for instance, when he was asked about about this potential conflict in in a two thousand seven New York Times article titled Darwin's God, Uh, he said the following quote. Christian theology teaches that people were crafted by God to be in a loving relationship with him and other people. Why wouldn't God then design us in such a way as to find belief in divinity? Quite natural? Suppose science produces a convincing account for why I think my wife loves me? Should I then stop believing that she does? Which I thought was a nice answer to that question. Yeah, that's interesting, like that you can you can put together all kinds of uh, coherent scientific explanations for what the feeling of love is, Why this is an emotion that's generated by the primate brain, What kind of relationship. It has to you know, the evolutionary pressures that created our bodies and our brains. But at the same time, it doesn't make the love of not real. And so applying that to religion, you could say, okay, well, here's a list of reasons we think that, like evolution, natural selection could have shaped our brains to be geared toward religion. Uh, unless you have totally mechanistic, natural type explanations for where religion comes from. And yet you could still, under this theory potentially believe your religion to be true, or multiple religions to be true. Yeah. Absolutely, And I think that that that goes along with the way we tend to approach religious concepts on this show. I think that that we can certainly explain where they come from. They can we can discuss, uh, you know, how they evolve over time and the different influences wound up in them. But at the same time we can respect that yes, this, this story, this myth, this idea, this concept can still be very weighty and very important, uh to the individuals that value it. Well. Yeah, and and that also though, gets into another layer of complexity, which is what it actually means to quote believe in a religion like you believe in a religion, does not necessarily mean that you accept say it's story of the creation of the world as literally true, or that it suggests or that it that it's propositions about metaphysics are literally physically real. Yeah. Absolutely, And and just to to drive home a fact here again parental warning, Santa Claus is not real in the sense that that Santa Claus does not physically exist in the world. He's not actually doing these these uh, these great deeds that we attribute to him. But on the other hand, he is an obviously an important cultural idea. And for my own part, like you know, I try and drive home the importance of mythology and belief alongside the importance of you know, of a fundamental reality I guess, and scientific reality when talking about these things with with my own son. Uh, you know that currently he's really invested in the idea of Santa But I am hopefully laying the groundwork that in Santa falls from the lofty realm of of presumed magical reality. He's not going to plumb it into the hellish depths of lies and inaccuracies. He will instead fall into this realm of mythological um and this this realm of magical concepts that are valued by human culture. If that makes sense, Well, yeah, Santa Claus is not physically real, but the magic of Santa Claus is absolutely real. Like it's one of the most powerful mind states that I can recall from my entire life is the anticipation magic of the Christmas season when I was young. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And I also remember sort of going through the the struggle of then realizing, Okay, Santa Claus is not objectively real, but then gradually then growing to to realize that, okay, the idea of Santa Claulaus can still be very important and can still be very real in that sense, in the way the same way that you know, one grows to learn that that fictional characters and uh and uh and other stories can be extremely important to us in a way that where there is sometimes even more important than the flesh and blood individuals and in very real events in the world. But anyway, I want to get back to Barrett's work again. He's working in the realm of cognitive science of religion, exploring, in his words quote why religious thoughts and actions only occupy a small area in the vast landscape of possible belief systems. And that's actually, I think a fascinating question, right, Like, religious beliefs could in theory be anything. Anything could be a religious belief. Example, my friend Julian believes that a breakfast crunch Rap Supreme that he got from Taco bell In is the creator of the universe and only by its zesty salvation can he be saved from annihilation. Why is it obvious this is a joke? Seriously, Like, how come as soon as I said that, you knew that I was kidding. You don't need to go like look that up on Google and see if there really is a sincere crunch Rap Supreme cult. You just immediately know that people don't believe that sort of thing as a sincere religion. And yet people believe in all kinds of strange things, things that would of course seem strange to those who don't share their religious beliefs. So why is it that religious beliefs can and do involve all kinds of strange things and narratives and propositions, and yet there's actually a pretty constrained set of things even within that fantastical landscape that would truly seem acceptable as a god or a religious narrative, like for some reason thumbs up to the immortal, all powerful person who reads your thoughts as God, but thumbs down to the fast food item as creator God. Right, So, like religious beliefs are are not usually constrained by things like the normal functioning of physics or biology, but they are clearly constrained by something. If they weren't constrained by something, it wouldn't be obvious that the crunch rap Supreme God was a joke. Yeah, yeah, I think it is. It is fascinating that, yes, okay, world religion involves so many wonderful concepts and so many things that when you first introduced to them, they seem strange and new and and and and and you know, perplexing at times, and and we celebrate that on on this show. And yet at the same time you know that there's not a tremendous amount of difference between you know, the details of this religion and the next religion. Well, yeah, there is this funny tension where in one sense there's incredible diversity and difference, but on the other hand, that's all constrained within some kind of lane that we sort of have a sense for you. You might not be able to define exactly what all the parameters are, though Barrett's going to try to do that in a minute. But you've got a sense that, like, for some reason, the crunch rap doesn't work. That's just not a thing people would believe in as God. You just know it automatically. So what do people's actual beliefs in God's seem to have in common? Barrett argues that the cognitive science of religion has actually been pretty successful in identifying the most common features of human religious beliefs, including what kinds of concepts people most often find intuitive as God's uh, And I guess we'll get into those in just a minute, but first we should talk about some of his like basic criteria for for what even constitutes the category. Right. So the first one, and this is a big one, is that multiple individuals must share a given idea for it to be a genuine culture or religious concept. And this is this is kind of a no brainer, but it's important to note he gives it this example. If one person believes their lamp can grant wishes and control the weather, that's not a God. That's just one person has a crazy idea about their lamp, but if a bunch of people share this idea about a given lamp, it might just be a God concept. Sure, uh, And I agree that religion has a very strong and possibly necessary social opponent. And yeah, I do think there are some interesting counter examples that we might want to think about, like hermetic mystics who live in isolation. They cut themselves off from the world to develop private, personal, almost secretive relationships with and understandings of God or of the gods. And yet I think Barrett is still correct because we don't usually grant these idiosyncratic, private mystical practices the status of a religion unless they're supported by a wider structure of belief shared by larger numbers of people. Like the mystical traditions often tend to be a kind of monastic offshoot or branch of larger religions with regular social adherents, right right, like, So, Yes, while we may celebrate the the ideas of say someone like a William Blake you know who you know, certainly had his his own sort of spin on what on what God was and what the you know, the cosmology of of of the universe happened to be, but we're are probably not going to buy into every detail of it. We're willing to sort of stand a foot back and say, like, Okay, he has his own take on this, but I'm I'm still keeping to the canon. You know, this is the extended universe star Wars, and I'm more of a you know, the Star Wars films. Right, And we accept Blake's idiosyncratic ideas as religious because I think they grow out of a larger existing religion. You know, they're they're like, they're this kind of extended universe, the expanded universe of Christianity. I guess one can also say that it helps in these cases if other people do not start flocking to your, your extended universe concept of religion, because then you stand the risk of being a heresy and or creating a new, different religion. Right. Yeah, And that's another thought entirely. It seems to me also that only widely distributed beliefs are likely to have stable contents, because one member of the religion tends to mediate any potential like deviation from the orthodoxy by another member of the religion. But private religious beliefs they seem to be radically unstable. You know, they're liable to change constantly. It's like asking how many editors have access to a given UH wiki page, you know, and if it's if it's a Wikipedia page and it's one that is UH that gets a lot of traffic and has a lot of eyes on it, you know, by and large you can assume that the information there is probably going to be on the level or if it's or if anything crazy is at it, it's going to be taken out pretty quickly. You know, the the the inquisition is going to move in on those heretics. Now, if it is an off brand wiki and it has like two editors or one editor, uh, then it's up for graps, right, right, Yeah, maybe one day somebody gets a wild hair they're like, I'm gonna go in make some major changes. Those changes they probably stick, right, nobody comes in to change it back. I mean, there's there's no controlling influence, right, and then if it does change, you know, when it does change over time, I think the idea of a you know again, a high profile wiki, Wikipedia page or a a widely accepted god like, the changes are gonna occur gradually and they're going to emerge from the culture at large. Yes, yeah, having more adherents makes an orthodoxy more generally stable, though of course they do still change over time. It's just, uh, there's just less potential for sudden radical change, I think, right, unless certain individuals have a tremendous amount of power over it. And then in that case, you know, you have like the ancient adyption model where suddenly a ruler decides, actually it's just the sun disc and that's what we're doing now exactly. But that was one guy and it didn't stick, right, Yeah, So yeah, I think ultimately I agree with Barrett that if we're going with normal usage what people usually mean when they talk about a religious belief, it needs to be a distributed belief. It's held by a decent number of people. I'm not sure exactly what the number is, but like private beliefs of a single person or a handful of people, I probably don't count as religions yet. All right. Number two, Religious concepts and God concepts can spread due to quote features of human minds that transcend cultural environmental variations unquote. And I'm assuming that's something like the fear of death and the desire to avoid pain might be such features. As an example, Yeah, you're you're correct about that. I mean what he means is just that it's obvious that influences on religion can be cultural or social. Right, they can come from, you know, just contingent facts about history and what else is going on in the culture and politics and all that. But there can be these What he's arguing is that there are these internal factors as well. And this is what the cognitive science of religion is about. It's about brains, right, There are some religious beliefs that will be better adapted to survive in the environment of the human primate brain than other beliefs will be regardless of cultural factors. Like, some beliefs just fit like a puzzle piece with our instincts, emotional tendencies, cognitive capacities, and others don't fit quite so well. I was trying to think of a few simple obvious examples. Here's a clerkey in kind of one. You probably wouldn't find a popular religious belief where you had to remember a name for God that was eighteen million sillvers long, right, because the cognitive constraints of memory put limits on what types of God beliefs there are. You wouldn't expect a concept of God to be successful if it just couldn't be remembered. Here's another one. Due to UH natural features of of emotion and motivation and human brains, you wouldn't expect to find beliefs in a God that you are required to love and obey and who rewards you for your love and obedience with eternal torture in the hell of coconut crabs. You know that this just goes counter natural instincts about motivation, your your brain doesn't work that way. Yeah, it has to be offering you something that that that fits the mold for your your your biological life in the mind, that governs your behavior in that biological life. Yeah so, yeah, so I think that that's a pretty standard thing of cognitive science of religion. There of course going to be extremely powerful cultural factors determining what kind of religious beliefs proliferate, but there are also some probably biological neuroscientific factors that contribute as well. And speaking of biology, the third UH requirement that Barrett lays out is that some features of the human mind are products of human biology as it interacts with the natural world. Apart from cultural environmental variations. So maybe the pain example from above fits here, but there may be better examples. Oh sure, yeah, I think the pain thing works great. I mean, this is just saying like our brains are shaped by our revolution. Of course they are, uh, and they're filled with contents from culture, but they still have some innate kind of tendencies that are just like part of your body. That's just how brains usually work. One of them is that we're motivated to seek pleasure and avoid pain. You know. It's like it's really hard to get around that standard way that brains work. Alright. So a big concept in God's of course, is that a god doesn't just need to exist within a you know, within the minds of a particular set of people. That God needs to be able to travel and needs to be accepted by new people, uh, you know, across space and time. Yeah, needs mimetic survival advantages. It needs to be able to spread and take root in new environments. So we're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, we're going to get into uh Barrett's ideas regarding the five features that a god must have to successfully travel. And this, according to the cognitive science of religion, and then we'll eventually get into questions regarding Santa Claus himself than alright, we're back, alright, we're discussing how this paper about whether or not Santa Claus actually counts as a god as as usually defined by the criteria of the cognitive science of religion. And this psychologist, Justin Barretta has in this article he is out five normal criteria that god's really have to have to be successful and be thought of as God's. Alright, this first one is gonna sound familiar, and that is that god's must be counterintuitive, or more specifically, they have to be minimally counterintuitive. And if this sounds familiar, it's because we did a whole episode on it totally. It originally aired in August. It was called The Gods Must Be Counterintuitive and we talked about myths and folk tales, including religious characters and narratives with an eye toward the question of what makes one successful and another unsuccessful in secular narratives like why does everybody know the story of Cinderella but there is no Walt Disney's The Donkey Cabbage. Uh. We talked about the Donkey cabbages in this episode, it's a fairy tale that it just doesn't seem to work as well as Cinderella because it's just crammed with counterintuitive stuff. On the other hand, you could think of tons of mundane, boring stories that don't proliferate as well as Cinderella. But in a in a religious context, or especially in ancient religious context, why does one religion spread far and wide and another one just never take off? Again? We should acknowledge there are going to be hugely important other you know, non brain based factors influencing this, like political and social contingencies. You know, the religion of a powerful, successful empire tends to spread, right, So there's no sense ignoring those factors. Those are obviously very important, But are their factors just in the human animal in the brain as well. And cognitive science of religion tends to think, yeah, there are probably a few factors in our brains about our brains that make some religions more successful than others. And in this episode from we discussed a line of research positing that a major factor in the success of a narrative or a religion, at least in the pre modern context, was mnemonic resilience. That means how easily a story is remembered, how easily a story survives in the memory. Uh. Most religion, for most of history, of course, has been spread not by holy texts or anything, but by word of mouth. Right, You've got to spread a religion by telling people about it, because most people in history have been illiterate. And so what kinds of things are easier to remember when when you're trying to spread them around the world. Well, psychologists had already found evidence that people remember lists of items better when that list contains one or two strange items that don't seem to fit with the other items on the list. Isn't that interesting? Yeah? Yeah, Like, if you're at a grocery store and you're you're spying on what the person in front of you is buying, you're gonna remember it if there's something that is completely out of keeping with the rest out it that that doesn't assembol in your head into a like a an easily define herble meal. Yeah, yeah, I think that's true. Like, it would seem to suggest, by this principle that if you're looking at what somebody has in their cart, you'd remember every item they have in their cart better if it's like mostly normal groceries with a couple of really weird things in there. Like if someone were buying pie crust, whip cream, frozen strawberries, you think, oh, they make a strawberry pie, and then you'd forget about it. But if they're buying whip cream, pie crust, um, and then something else like whole fish, whole fish exactly, you would be like, oh, my god, they're making a fish pie with whip cream on top and a Graham cracker crust. That is crazy, And then you would be telling everyone you knew about it. Yeah. So, at least as far as lists go, lists of things, it seems that it's easier to remember something that's like mostly normal with a couple of weird elements than it is to remember something that's totally bonkers or totally mundane um. And so one of the papers we looked at in this episode also applied this principle to the intuitive nous of elements in a story like a like a folk tale or a religious narrative. This was by norn Zion, Atran, Faulkner, and Shaler in Cognitive science in two thousands six, called memory and mystery the cultural selection of minimally counter intuitive narratives. And so basically the short story is, this paper found some evidence to support the hypothesis that the kinds of stories people remember best are minimally counterintuitive narratives. Not stories that are straightforward and mundane, not stories that are crammed with weird, outlandish stuff, but stories in the middle, sort of toward one end, like stories that are mostly straightforward with a small number of strange or fantastical counterintuitive elements. So, for instance, a humanoid elephant is a great concept, an old man who lives in the sky is a great concept. In these concepts travel reasonably well. Yes, uh. And just as a tie into this older episode, I remember one thing we talked about in there. We talked about a number of papers that Justin Barrett was a co author of. You know, he does a lot in the cognitive science of religion, including one that I still remember. I thought it was very interesting. It was about anthropomorphization in the psychology of religion. And this paper was published in the journal Cognitive Psychology in nine and essentially it was by Barrett and Kyle, and it found that people quote spontaneously anthropomorphize God in their reasoning, even if doing so contradicts their stated theological beliefs. So like when they don't remember to avoid doing so, if you're not, they're reminding them what they're previously stated theological beliefs are. People tend to start thinking of God as like a normal human agent with just like big supernatural powers but basically with a human brain. Yeah, Like, I can definitely relate to this because I I tend to think when I when I, you know, think about concepts of of a monotheistic deity, I think of, uh, you know, something more surreal or psychedelic. I think of you know, like some sort of like triangular nonphysical entity, or I think of you know, something that is uh, you know, something where where the you know, the God is singular, but also all these other gods. You know, I throw a lot of steps at it, but like like the ground of being, you know, that kind of thing and stuff like that. But if I'm not thinking too hard about it, if I'm saying just like listening to somebody at church talk or I'm reflecting on some you know, just on the nature of God, I'll fall back into the sky Daddy, Um where it's like an old bearded man in the sky reaching out his finger to touch the living that sort of thing. Yeah, and then I'll have to be like, well we no, no, no, that's not what I've been filling my head with. It's a you know, space trianglester. Yeah. And so Barrett and Kyle find that this tendency is very common. They say, you know, even if you think of God is like the ground of being or the force or even you know, to get into a specific religion, like in in specific monotheisms, you might find people with very carefully calibrated theologians type points of view, you know, where they they actually have meticulously formed beliefs about like what God can and can't know, and what how the mind of God works and all that kind of stuff. But like if you just kind of get them thinking without reminding them that that what their stated beliefs are, they just sort of start thinking about God like a person with a human brain. Yeah, and this can also be like super irritating if you're you're trying to cultivate an idea of the Almighty as being say gender neutral or even being feminine as opposed to masculine. And then when you're not thinking about it, you fall right back into to it being a you know, traditional masculine, uh, you know, patriarchal being. Oh yeah, I mean, I guess there's that tendency to probably pushing on like specific personality attributes and stuff, and not just like the anthropomorphization, though they do say the authors here say that constantly reminding people about their own state of theological beliefs can help attenuate the anthropomorphization impulse, right, you know, if you you're like, hey, remember what you said, you said you believe God was like this, Like that'll that'll obviously will help some cut down on it. But they suggest here that this may indicate a strong tendency to anthropomorphize all agents, no matter what kind of being they are. Dogs become humans, computers become humans, the world's spirit becomes a human. Everything that appears to have any kind of independent action or is believed to have any kind of independent action basically just becomes a human. Well that's that's the theory of mind, right, Like it's there so we can understand primarily what our fellow humans are doing, but then it can act you, and it can actually be very helpful and trying to figure out what non human animals are are wanting to do. I was reading a little bit about this in terms of veterinary science, and you know, like there's the older tradition of saying like, don't or those beyond veterinary science and science in general, just the study of animals, and say, like, there's the idea of like, you know, don't think of it as as a person, don't have the anthropomorphize it at all, don't you know, don't think about its feelings. And then there's someone say, well, actually, you know, we should, we should use theory of mind to do a s a certain degree, to a safe degree, uh, to figure out what is going on in the minds of of of an animal. But then if you're anthropomorphizing everything, if you are, in the words of creative writing a teacher I once had, if you anthropomorphize like a mad god, uh, that's where we get into problems or and also that's where we end up creating some of the more uh, you know, inspired concepts and human culture as well. Yeah, totally, uh, I guess. So to bring it back, yes, as Barrett says, according to the cognitive science of religion, it seems true that God's must be in some way counterintuitive, ideally minimally counterintuitive, you know, having some unusual aspects, like maybe say, being invisible and all powerful, but then oft to be all powerful. There are also minor gods that still qualify as God's right, but invisible and having some kind of non normal powers or attributes. Right, I mean, basically I like to play the game of like, just keep adding counterintuitive aspects to a particular deity and decide at which point it's silly and no longer intimidating, Like a like a a strange tall man comes out of the shadows and gives me commandments. Okay, that's great, All right, let's add that he has the head of a dog. Okay, even better. Hybrids are a huge part of religious concept. Now he's got crab clause any has crab claws? Right? And then okay, it's one's a crab claw and one is a hand puppet. Uh. And so for like, every time you add something else to it becomes a little bit more ridiculous and a little harder to to to take um and that that seems to be part of the whole minimally counterintuitive. Yes, but they've got to at least be counterintuitive, because if you say, like, this is my buddy Jeff, he's god. He doesn't have anything unusual about him, like there are no he doesn't have any powers. He's not invisible, he can't fly, he's not omniscient, omnipotent, nothing like that. He's just Jeff. That's not that. Nobody thinks that's a god. Now, Jeff would probably at least pass the next one. This is number two on Barrett's list. God's must be intentional agents. Barrett uses the example of two minimally counterintuitive concepts, an invisible potato versus a talking potato. Okay, both minimally counterintuitive, but one works better as a god than another. Yeah, only the latter is viable candidate for godhood because it implies agency. A god must have agency and work as an intentional agent. Now, this concept does make me think about ideas of say, slumbering gods, dead gods, and mindless gods, at least in fiction such as you know, Lovecrafts as is off comes to mind. Oh you you got me on as a is off recently, but I looked it up. It's as a thought, as a thought. Sorry to correct that that would make Yeah, it would have the Egyptian thought aspect to it. Yeah. Yeah, well as as a thought or as is off. He doesn't care because he has mind he's mindless. He doesn't even know his own name. He's just swirling chaos in the middle of the universe, gnawing on himself while uh, you know, blind monsters play flutes. But like this would be an example of First of all, it's a god that nobody actually worships. It is a fictional deity, but is at least it is at least the concept of a deity that is mindless. Yes, now, I think this is another reason that like the crunch Rap Supreme could not be a viable god, right because it's essentially as a thought of the mindless, of being at the center of keV chaotic universe exactly. It's an inanimate object that symbolizes primordial chaos, can't talk, has no intentions at going to do much. All right, We're gonna jump in here and take a quick break, but we'll be right back and we're back, all right. So let's move on to the third requirement. God's must possess strategic information. So, in other words, the gods or god must have some ideas, some advice, or some secret knowledge that can improve your life here on earth. Perhaps it's a set of laws, a revelation that there are no laws, or knowledge about the coming end times. Or the god must have privilege knowledge he knows what you've done, or the nature of your inner thoughts, or what will happen to you in the future. Yes, now, I think it's very important to note that this does not mean the same thing as like omniscience, which would be an omniscience all knowing. This would be a form of strategic information, to be like the ultimate form of strategic and information. But the omniscience is a property only some gods possess. Right, The strategic information idea here just requires that a god knows something valuable or relevant. For example, the version of God depicted in the Garden of Eden's story does not appear to be all knowing. Like he walks in the garden, he has limited perspective, it is possible to at least temporarily hide from him, and yet he clearly has access to important information that Adam and Eve do not have. Right though, I also always wondered if he was just kind of like a you know, sky daddy but playing dumb, but sort of trying to see what his creations are gonna say. You know, like when you walk in, you're like, all right, who smeared their food on this window? You know who smeared the food on the window. But you're you're asking the question because you want to have a civilized discussion about it, and and and and and you know, and in doing so, uh, you know, prevent more food smeared from happening. Sure, well, I think that's a valid interpretation too. I think the other one is more straightforward, but it could be the one. Um. So, Barrett points out that it's important that this information is relevant to humans in particular. Right, yeah, quote, suppose a certain minimally counterintuitive agent only knows about Himalayan micro invertebrates, such a being is unlikely to gain traction as a noteworthy entity and rise to the status of god. You know. And that's specifically because this entity does not have any information that is useful in any way relevant to humans like they and and they don't have to be helpful. Right. Gods can be mean, Gods can be bad. Beings with strategic information could be helpful allies or dangerous enemies, as say, some of the Greek gods often are like Poseidon. You know, he wants to wreck your ship and get revenge on you. He's still God, all right. Next we have number four. This is a big one. God's must be able to act in the human world in detectable ways. Barrett says, quote an all seeing, all knowing statue that does nothing but season knows is not worth transmitting. Gods have to do stuff and be known by that stuff, or at least to have done something. Otherwise, it's just not a concept that's going to travel sure or to be likely to potentially do something in the future. Yeah. A god that has no interaction whatsoever with the world usually isn't going to form a religion. People aren't have beliefs about that, correct, Like, for instance, think about UFO religions, right, they tend to involve ideas of say, well, okay, the the aliens came in an ancient time, or the Aliens are speaking to us now, or the aliens will come and save our our you know, dying culture. But if your your UFO religion says the aliens are out there, they've never come. Uh, they've never communicated with us and they never will come, but we worship them as a god. That doesn't make any sense. Why am I? What am I getting out of this relationship? Yeah? Now again, this is one where I would say that none of these rules are things where you can think of no possible exceptions, because, like I can think about I guess, like in the Gnostic religions, there are some types of God that are like very very removed. You could still say that their actions have some like downstream effects or like very important downstream effects on the world. But there are like some types of gods or godlike type concepts that are at least a very distant remove from the goings on of the world. But often in those cases they are like sort of layers below them who do interact more directly. Right, or in some cases they're more esoteric variations of a God that is worshiped more popularly in a slightly different form Alright, let's move on to five. Gods must be capable of motivating behaviors that reinforce belief, yes, behaviors such as ritual and prayer, and they need to be reinforcing behaviors. For for instance, Bear. It makes the example that the ritual can't promise to produce eight foot children because there will be no eight foot children around them to reinforce this um now rituals that this happiness, um contentment, even financial gain. These at least you can make and argue that, look, here's the proof of the ritual working, right, Yeah, I mean, and it doesn't have to be clear proof. I mean, as long as there could be some kind of ambiguous way of interpreting that the rituals are having an effect. Uh, then I think that's still okay. But yeah, he's saying that, like the ritual can't guarantee results that it won't actually deliver. Right if you say, if you tie at to my new religion, you will live forever, Like that's that's gonna bite you in the butt eventually, and then your religion is gonna fall apart. But it is funny how far out on the limb you can kind of get with this, Like as long as there's some kind of ambiguity where you're not really sure, maybe you don't see it not working for other people or something like there you know they're the prosperity gospel is incredibly popular, But I think that there's enough ambiguity that you don't necessarily know what's going on with everybody else who's trying it. There's enough wiggle room to say, like, you're not quite doing it right. Right. It inspires a certain level of dishonesty among the people that are practicing it. And then at the center of it, you generally have an individual that's perpetrating a con job like it is about the appearance of wealth. And then of course they're they're you know, in most of these cases, they are, they're they're leaching money right there, they are financially benefiting from the scenario. And then you it's not like you have to carry this out forever. You know, it's a con games have a beginning in an end usually right, Yeah, But then of course there are again, even if you're only understanding religion in a totally naturalistic way, there are all kinds of benefits that religious rituals can deliver. They can deliver like maybe you know, strong tightly bonded communities with people who help each other. They can deliver a sense of happiness and contentment. All all kinds of like psychological and social benefits could be perfectly naturalistic outcomes of religious beliefs and practices. Right, So even you know, say, you know, Prosperity Gospel Church, uh, which is is you know, vilified to a large extent and for in many cases for a good reason, you could still have that kind of a church community that would have a lot of benefits to the members of that community. Likewise, you could have, uh, you know, something positive and beneficial sort of emerge out of a more restrictive totalitarian belief system. Like maybe there's some concept within that religion that resonates and works, and then the the individuals practicing it run off and you know, start something new with that that concept that actually works for them. Arguably. An example of this i've I've heard is, you know, in Scientology there are members of Scientology or former members of Scientology who have claimed that, you know, they don't care for the organization or some of the culture there perhaps, but they like the rituals, they like some of the the technological um ideas, and some of the practices that are utilized. They see value them and an attempt to spend them off into something separate from them. The central Church of Scientology. Oh yeah, yeah, I mean, especially the lower levels of Scientology are are almost in some ways indistinguishable from like a self help program that's basically designed to like give you confidence and motivation to take steps to achieve your goals and that kind of thing. And you know, with stuff like that, you can certainly see how just having a program that's supportive and telling you to move confidently towards the things you want could be perceived as very helpful, could actually be very helpful in producing motivation for that kind of behavior, even if it also implies things about you know, like bombs from space and aliens and you and ghosts and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean, as long as all that stuff minimally counterintuitive, I mean, because that's does seem maximally counterintuitive. But I don't know, I don't know. I sometimes, at least I I see people criticize. You see this the thing with with any religion. Someone is liable in one religion, they're liable to criticize the other by saying that's crazy, that's wonky, How can you believe in that? And uh without actually looking at the details of their own belief system. And yeah, I mean that's just that's just part of it. But yeah, that's what you've come to accept as normal. And this is the thing actually about that's come up in in the theory about being counterintuitive. You know religions needing counterintuitive elements? Is that, Uh like, as you get used to a religion, the elements that used to be counterintuitive become less counter they become into and then you need the next spin on it, right, you need the mash up. Yeah, all right, everybody, we're gonna have to go ahead and break right here. This one went long. Yeah, this one went a bit a little bit long. So we're gonna have to bust into two episodes. Uh, certainly there's gonna be more Santa in the second half than in the first half. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That'll send you where you need to go. You can find us anywhere you get your podcasts and wherever that happens to be. Just make sure you rate, review, and subscribe. That really helps us out huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest topic for the future, just to say hi. You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio is the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two of our discussion of whether or not Santa Claus is technically a god, at least according to the most common criteria used by cognitive science of religion. Now, we had to break this discussion in two because it went so long, and now we're treating you to the second half of our conversation about gods, our brains, and Santa Claus. We hope you enjoy as we jump right back in. Okay, so we've been talking about these criteria that Justin Barrett raises that you will find common to pretty much all beliefs in gods among you know, religions you find in the world that gods tend to be counterintuitive in some way, you often minimally counterintuitive, that they tend to be intentional agents, that they have strategic information, that they in some way act in the world, and that they're capable of motivating behaviors that reinforce belief. Oh and that's one other thing we should have emphasized. I guess we did in this that the most important thing about the behaviors that the god's motivate, the rituals or whatever, is that the the motivated action most important to this system is that it reinforces the original belief itself. Yeah, because that's how it continues. It's it has to sustain itself through that. Yes, So I was just thinking to myself, Okay, these these five criteria, what happens if we apply them to certain fictional entities that either claim to be God or are believed to be a god of some sort within the fiction. Take Goes or the Gazarian for instance, one of the best. So it's it's a minimally counterintuitive concept. You know, it has agency, Sure it does a lot of stuff, but does it offer strategic information? I don't know if it offers it. I think it probably has it. Yeah. I also about the only good example I had this is that, Okay. I mean, certainly it has strategic information because it can see your thoughts and see what mental pictures you are filling your brain with, so I think that would count. It also has information that the world will be destroyed by itself, so that's that's that's worth having. I guess, like, is Godzilla a god? I mean, does god Zilla possess strategic information or well, I don't know. I think Godzilla is just a big monster, right, the goes or the Gozarian uh comes from another dimension. It's like a god that makes Godzilla's makes marshmallow Godzilla exactly. It takes the form of Godzilla, right, um, okay, the big one with the Gozer, though, does it offer motivating behaviors that reinforce belief? Maybe? I mean, it seems only concerned with the opening of the doors that will allow it to destroy the world as it destroyed other worlds. I don't know. I think the case is maybe a little weak, but conceivable. I just realized I was calling goes Er a Hey, I'm not sure Goesa as a heat. Goes Or might be a she or or neither gender. I'm not sure. Yeah, I think Goes are as gender new Trull, even though it does take the form of a feminine figure in the in the movie, and I think but I think in the original script it was going to be played by pee Wee Herman. Right. Oh wow, I say goes Or transcends our puny concepts of gender. Right. So we talked about as a thought, as a though, as a thought, however you want to say it earlier. I think this one fails because lax agency, and I'm not sure it actually acts in the human world at all. I think it's supposed to be just an entity out there in the void, and it's just supposed to be frightening and terrifying that it's out there at all. Um Cutter Kane from John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Venice, I think he checks off all the boxes. He's a human that becomes a god. But then he's got I mean, by the end of the film, there's no questioning it. I gotta watch that again. It's it's it's pretty solid. One of my favorites. Okay, here's one we have to discuss, and this is when we talked about in greater detail on a past episode of Stuff to Blow your mind. Yeah, the flying Spaghetti Monster. Okay, the past to Ferian concept, which granted, is kind of a it is it is a counter religious argument. It is an idea that it's brought up. It's kind of a contrary uh concept. Right, Well, it's another one of those that's obviously a joke at the moment you hear it, right, you don't have to investigate, like do people seriously believe? I mean, like you just know instantly it's a joke. And again that's a clue that there's like there are some kind of intuitive constraints on what gods are supposed to be, like, right, I mean his the fine Spaghetti Monster. I think the biggest flaw might be that it is not minimally counterintuitive. It is, it has two counter into two counterintuitive. It's like God is a potato, right. But on the other hand, I do think it checks off a number of the boxes. Uh, you know, his he has detectable actions, and they see that they seem to be limited to the creation of the world and also the changing of scientific measurements with his newly appendage changing radiocarbon dating. Uh, it's o for it. Well, I mean, I guess another thing is the question of, like whether people sincerely believe the things you're talking about to meet these criteria or just propose them Obviously ingest because with all these fictional examples, I mean, you're thinking of ideas of where you can create a something that meets all the criteria, and yet obviously it still is not a legit god found in the world because nobody actually believes, right, nobody actually worships Goes or uh. I mean, this flying spaghetti monster is is an interesting case though, because I think it's probably safe to say that nobody actually worships the flying spaghetti Monster. No one truly believes in the flying spaghetti Monster. But at what point does the current um concept of the flying spaghetti monster? At what point does it at least partially transcended? Which which point does it get one neodly appendage over the line into godhood. Well, if you go on with a joke long enough, you'll start to want to find meaning in it. It always happens. Yeah, I mean, I mean, there's something to be said in mean culture with on that account, I believe, I think that's absolutely true. I think it's also true. Watch any irreverent TV show long enough, eventually it gets sentimental. It's true. I mean people want to start finding meaning in the chaos of humor and satire. That's a good point. All right, Well let's bring it back around to Santa Claus at this point. Um, First, I just want to recap a little bit about Santa But you know, I want to go and I don't want to go into a full history of Santa Claus. But it's it's interesting to just remind everyone where the concept came from. A few years ago, I chatted with Aida Adam c. English, chair of the Department of Christian Studies at Campbell University, about the evolution of Santa and Santa Scholar. Yes, he is the author of the book The Saint Who Would Be Santa Claus? The True Life and Trials of Nicholas of Mira. Uh that in this book he pointed out that the modern Santa Claus bears almost no resemblance to the historic origins of a fourth century Christian bishop. Um, and his continued evolution reveals a great deal about modern culture. Uh. This interview used to be hosted at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, but now Stuff to blow your mind. Dot com is um exists only in a very stripped down form. But I'm gonna just read a few uh quotes here from the author. Adam see English wrote to me and said, quote first and most obviously, Santa has been scrubbed of any and all religious identity. I think that is something people notice when they see the European Old World St. Nick's, who are addressed like bishops with a miter, stole, ecclesiastical vestiments, a Crozier staff, and many times wearing a crucifix or cross on the neck. In contrast, Santa has been domesticated, commercialized, and universalized or secularized, depending on your viewpoint. The miter has been softened into a floppy fur trimmed stocking cap, the vestiments have been turned into a red first suit with white trimming, the stole into the big black belt, and the Crozier staff into a large sack of toy. Even his name is under gone change. Santa Claus is an americanization of the Dutch center class, which is just St. Nicholas. His other name, Chris Kringle, is the americanization of the German Austrian UH Chris Kindle or Christ child. Oh Martin Luther attempted to replace Nicholas as the gift giver with the baby Jesus. The Christmas gifts come from the Christ child, well the Kris Kringle, the religious with Chris Kringle, the religious significance important to Luther has again been lost. He continues. Quote the first depiction of Nicholas in America by the New York Historical Society showed him as a stern bishop in the European fashion, but within fifty years he transformed into the magical elf who drives a sleigh pulled by reindeer and trops down chimneys. Um. And then also he drove home that there was never a once upon a time pure religious Santa Claus. Christmas has always been at blend of the sacred and the secular, popular in the solemn mercial and the familial um. Also, he points out that you know a lot of it also dates back to older beliefs. He said that in pre Christian times, the Greeks they celebrated Linnea, Romans had the Saturnalia in late December as well as the Bromalia. Germans hunted and feasted at Yule Tide. The Irish had Urnde. So I mean you have all these different midwinter festivals and they all involve a lot of you know, merriment, feasting, etcetera. Okay, well this introduces some difficulty because if we're talking about evaluating whether Santa Claus meets the cognitive science of religion criteria of a god, what Santa Claus do you go with? Do you go with like, you know, St. Nicholas, or do you go with like some kind of you know, as defined in some traditional work, or do you try to gather in the great you know, tapestry of different Santa Claus stuff out there today, and and and consider it all together and and put together I don't know, an amalgam. Yeah. And this is a problem that that Barrett gets into in the paper because because really, on one hand, you could you could really cherry pick from global and historical Santa Claus ideas and concepts and then choose the descriptions and attributes that best support your case. If you're saying God, are you saying not a God? You could point to evidence to support it. So but but but first of all, Barrett just says, Okay, at first glance, he thinks Santa meets all five criteria. First of all, Santa is minimally counterintuitive. He's a flying, jolly, old, kind hearted man. He's like he's grandfather Christmas. Also, Santa is an intentional agent. Santa. Santa has a mind. Santa wants to do things. He is not an unanimate carbon rod right. Also, he possesses strategic information. He knows if you've been bad or good. He acts in a detectable way. He leaves gifts or even a note in some cases. Uh. And he motivates reinforcing behaviors. Kids lee about milk and cookies for him. That is the sacred offering that is made to the Great Elf himself. Well, I mean, and I guess he would hope that his actions encourage children to be good around Christmas. I mean, that's what it's supposed to be. That's true, that's the whole other aspect of it as well. But ultimately, Barrett, he's not convinced, is he. No? He insisted, Santa ultimately fails at being a god. Okay, Now what is his case here? Okay, So on the counterintuitive point, he gets into this this whole like cherry picking thing that we discussed earlier. He counters that they were not unified enough in our vision of Santa. In some of some belief incarnations or in some media incarnations, we just see him as like a kind old man, while others show him as being this magical being that we've mostly been talking about, right, this idea that he lives forever at the North Pole and flies through the air and doesn't obey the laws of physics and time. Uh. And he says that some films portray him as as being a normal person who just has quote special friends, animals, and resources. Now, Barrett makes a distinction that I'm not sure I fully get. I wonder what you thought about this. Barrett makes a distinction between a counterintuitive being, like a counterintuitive man who has some special qualities, versus just like a regular being who uses magic powers. I'm not sure I really understood what the distinction is there, Like, if you can use magic powers, that seems counterintuitive to me. Yeah, I don't know. The way I was thinking about it when I read it was okay. He's saying that sometimes Santa Claus is Superman, sometimes Santa Claus is Batman. Superman has amazing powers that are other worldly. Batman is just a normal guy, but he has special gadgets and he has special friends. Okay, so like in the Santa Claus movie, the Mexican Christmas movie, Um, Santa Claus doesn't have the innate power to teleport. He has the flower to disappear, that's right, and if he loses the flower to disappear, he can't teleport anymore. He's literally what he's treated by a dog, I think in that, yes, you know, so, Yeah, that's a great exam That film is just a great film in general, and I believe played a key role in we're talking about the the idea that Santa Claus must travel as a concept like that film, if I remember correctly, played a very important role in introducing the concept of modern western Santa Claus to a Mexican audience. But yeah, in that, he seems like just a ridiculous old man. If he is if he loses any of his magical items, Okay, I can see this, and he depends on a lot of cooperation and support to really get the job done. Yes, he's got his friend Merlin, he's got all the children who help him, he's got the machine with the lips. Whatever he's going on there Yeah, he's more of a batman Santa Claus for sure, whereas in Santa Claus Versus the Martians, uh, the other MST three k Riff Santa Claus movie, in that he has powers, he can make toys do his bidding. Yeah, he's Hermes. I mean all right, well, let's move on to the strategic information front, okay, which, again, at the at the surface level, it seems like it's he's got it. He knows if you've been bad or good. Right, Yeah, But Barrett again argues that it comes down to consistency, and it's not consistent enough for Barrett, because does Santa truly know if someone has done or plans to do something morally objectionable? Yeah. Barrett says that knowing whether a person has been bad or good is not actually strategic information. It's the same kind of judgment another person could easily make. Uh. And what would constitute strategic information is, for example, knowing in advance whether somebody is going to be good or bad. Again, I'm not sure if I agree with Barrett here. I think that knowing whether somebody was bad or good, especially if you know what they did in private when nobody else was there to see them. That seems like strategic information to me. Like if you could watch what other people did in private without them knowing, would that not provide you with information that could give you a strategic advantage. Yeah, I don't know. It's it's one of those areas of the Santa Claus concept where it does seem like a boiled down version of what you see in God right, a little more limited version. And I think part of this is kids are generally, children are not attributed with tremendous powers of hiding their wrongdoing. Like generally, whatever they're doing bad, it's super obvious because that's what we're getting onto them for. You know. Okay, the next one, does Santa act in the world in detectable ways? Well, Barrett says that Santa meets this one but weekly, since the gifts come once a year in a limited manner, so it's not you know, he's not bringing you gifts every week or every month even to to to really you know, make sure the detection is uh is is obvious, you know. Yeah, And I would say the production of the gifts, as with many of the things that are prayed for petition for in religions, with things that are definitely recognized as God's. It's similarly ambiguous in terms of the mechanism. You know, you like go to sleep and then the presents are there in the morning. There's a lot of kind of wiggle room to think about what's going on there, right, and then sometimes Santa, I mean, as we've discussed previously on the show, Santa tends to come if he if it is, if he has if it has discussed the Santa might come, he tends to come. Generally, threats of Santa might not come this year because you've been bad. Generally those threats are not acted upon. But on the other hand, Santa doesn't always bring everything you wanted, and sometimes Santa doesn't bring those gifts that are ridiculous or dangerous. Right. So, yeah, there's a lot of room to I don't know where. It's up to the user kind of to infer the amount of detectable behavior that they wish, right, and then let's get around to motivating reinforcing behavior to Santa Claus do this well. We chatted about this a bit in our Carampus episode. Actually does Santa really work? Does the idea actually make kids behave? And Barrett contends that it does not. He says Santa is gonna come either way. And again it's also only going to impact Christmas. This is just what we were talking about. Like, does does the idea that Santa might not bring you any gifts at Christmas? Does that have any impact at all on a child's behavior in March? Yeah? I don't know, because because in March, when you're eight, like Christmas is a thousand years away. Yeah. And just think also about like how long a month is to a child compared to how long a month is to an adult. Yeah. I guess that's what you mean by a thousand years away. I mean every year to to a five year old feels like an eternity. Um. But yeah, there was another thing I was thinking about here, which is the most important behavior for a god, belief to reinforce in order to have me medic resilience, in order to survive and spread, it's got to be belief in the God itself. We mentioned this earlier. Does Santa's motivating power in turn motivate belief in Santa or even if it works, is it just to motivate like being well behaved? Yeah, that's a very good point. Does it actually motivate belief in Santa. Do kids. I mean you'll see I guess you see a little of that, you know, uh, kind of like like in you know, an inquisition for a normal religion, but applied to the Santa world, like you've got to believe or you'll get in trouble. Well, I think the the area in the Santa concept as as I experienced it growing up, and in the current rights and rituals that we maintain that the real area of of like proof, right is the is the carrot that has been bitten by the reindeer and the half consumed plate of cookies and milk like that that, more than the presence, is like the fingerprint of God. Explain that, Checkmate, atheists, checkmate Richard Dawkins. Anyway, Barrett also points out that a big problem facing Santa is to go back to some of the origins we've mentioned earlier, is that St. Nicholas is dead. No he's not. No. No. The connection to the long dead St is clear, and myths don't really explain it. He is not the resurrected St. Nicholas. We're never told that's the case. He's not the ghost of St. Nicholas. He's not Nicholas the White returned after fighting the ball Rock. He's just he just also happens to be the mortal man who definitely died in the year three forty three CE. This is something I'm gonna come back to in just a minute. But yeah, there there are not very strong coherent Santa apologetics that are designed to work on adults. Right. There's there's no like if they explained, well, yes, Santa Claus was once St. Nicholas and after his death in three three CE, etcetera, etcetera. No, it's just like Barrett says, it's like you're into Santa and then you look him up and you're like, oh, St. Nicholas, Oh, and he's dead. And he says that that takes the punch out of it. All Right, we're gonna jump in here and take a quick break, but we'll be right back, and we're back now. In discussing all of this, Barrett also provides a human risk chart that compiles his thoughts and his his interpretations of these five categories, not only on Santa as a possible god, but also Mickey Mouse, the Tooth Fairy, and George Bush. I think this would have been George W. Bush. Right, Yeah, I believe so. But for instance, we areya went through Santa Claus. But on Mickey Mouse he gave Mickey yes for counterintuitive, Yes, yes for intentional agent. Sure, but then a no on having strategic information and no on acting in the real world and a no unmotivating reinforcing behavior. Oh yeah, I'm with all that. On the tooth fairy. Tooth fairy gets yes. Is across the board except for possessing strategic information, which, yeah, does the tooth fairy really know anything you don't? I mean, maybe knows a little bit more about your dental hygiene than other entities, doesn't really seem actionable. Yeah, And then finally, George Bush, George Bush gets yes, is across the board except for counterintuitive. So he's an intentional agent. He at least at the time, possessed strategic information. He acted in the real world, and he motivated reinforcing behaviors, but he was not counterinto it. Hey, does he motivate reinforcing behaviors? I guess so, yeah, I got yeah, I think so. But you know, he it was just a human, right, I mean, yeah, it's true. Any actually existing human walking around on the earth motivates reinforcing behaviors, because if you act as if these people don't exist, it will cause problems for you. I should also point out that if you if you want to actually look up this paper and the full title, which we did not share earlier for reasons that we become obvious, is why Santa Claus is not a god again, Journal of Cognition and Culture two thousand and eight. If you look it up. He also has a wonderful Venn diagram of how all five of these concepts interact, and the like the one save zone where you have candidates for successful gods according to these these ideas. Now, I would say to be critical of these uh criteria I've been discussing. I think you could argue that Santa meets all five criteria at least in some cases of belief, and maybe not in other cases of belief. And yet still there is no active cult of Santa whatsoever among adults. And this suggests to me that while I think these five criteria are all very good starting places for evaluating god type agents in people's beliefs, there have got to be some other criteria here that are not really accounted for I think one major factor playing against belief in Santa Claus as a god is that there is, first of all, a right of passage in which children become aware of the underlying Christmas gift mechanism. And there are not any significant numbers of adults insisting to other adults that Santa Claus is real and is a god. Like you've got to have a foothold of people starting off insisting that it's real in all cases, and not just say, in the presence of children, but like to other adults, and they would have to be, you know, trying to make a case, you know, and once you had that, actually I could see it being surprising how easy something like god belief would pick up, because there's nothing as convincing as other people's confidence. It's like embarrassing how susceptible we are to just sensing confidence in other people and thinking, oh, maybe there's something to that. So do you think that there could come a day where we would say, oh, yeah, when we when we were kids and when we were you know, younger adults, uh, Santa was just an idea that we we told kids about and only kids believed in it. But now we have all these adults all over the news media, and they're just fiercely defending belief in Santa Claus. And I'm afraid to say anything. I don't think you would get that because I don't see that there's a major motivation to start a movement like that. And I think that the people who tried to start a movement like that, they would not have a major motivation, and they would look foolish at least initially until they, you know, got people believing them. So I just don't see that as likely to happen now. I think you could probably propose things that are equally ridiculous, but you can imagine more of a motivation for them to come about that. Maybe you could. I mean, they sound crazy to us now, but if enough people were confidently proclaiming them, Say, take a major political figure and start saying that they're a god. And that sounds ridiculous to us right now, but you just get a number of people loudly, proudly proclaiming that, I think you could get some buy in. Oh yeah, I mean you, if you listen to the right people, you you hear that about contemporary political figures. To a certain extent, I don't think I've heard anyone say that the individual in question is a deity. But I have heard people say, well, if you look at, you know, the way such and such as written in the Old Testament, then clearly that makes room for me to, you know, to to look over this particular individual shortcomings, etcetera. And uh, yeah, I mean it's it's not too much of an extrapolation to get to the point where you can imagine someone saying, no, this this politician is a god. Well, and the division between a figure of major religious significance and a god themselves is not always as clear as we might want it to be or think it is. There's another thing that I think is getting in the way of Santa Claus becoming a legitimate god belief among adults. And this may be a weirdly specific nit to pick, but I think it hurts to suggest that there is a physical location on Earth where he resides, and combining that with like modern geo imaging and maps like, it would be really hard to contend that Santa Claus is a literal, physical being who lives in a toy workshop at the North Pole. Most god beliefs that have survived into the modern technological era have either always been or have had to retreat into uh intangibility. For instance, it would it would be hard to insist today that there are Greek gods that literally inhabit a palace at the top of Mount Olympus, like you can see pictures of what it looks like up there, um that they would have to become invisible or start to occupy some non physical demand chin or something like that right now. As always, when you're talking about you know, real phenomenon culture, there are exceptions. An exception I can think of his Mount Kailash, for instance, in in Hinduism, some believe this to be the you know, it's a physical mountain, it's a real mountain. You go there, people make pilgrimages there and they walk around it. Some people believe it to be the home of Lord Shiva and the goddess Parvati. But you're not allowed to climb up on the mountain to see for yourself. And I think this belief would probably also tolerate some non physical interpretations. And yet as I think you could potentially imagine imagine a world, if you will, in which St. Nicholas is never fully and divested from his religious origins, and and and instead of it being, instead of Santa Claus being this thing that is sometimes brought up about the secular war on Christmas, you know, and taking Christ out of Christmas. What if St. Nicholas on the whole across you know, Western civilization remains this um, this religious figure who also comes at Christmas and brings toys and lives at the North Pole. And then you have all Santa believing nations agree to not explore the the Arctic because that is where Santa lives, and then forging treaties with non Santa believing nations that where they agree, yes, we won't explore the Arctic because we realize that's sacred to you. Then perhaps you could keep you could keep the the the residents of Santa an article of faith or not. It might not actually work, but it's possible. I think. I think you'd still have the major problem of like the the generational transfer of the knowledge of the Christmas gift mechanism. Yeah, like the fact that at some point you meet the man behind the curtain and its mom and dad. I think that has an incredibly powerful demotivating effect unbelief, Like you're really going for the throat with that one, Joe, I didn't I didn't go that far and talking about the magic of Santa. It's weird though, because I feel I feel I'm sorry, did I do bad? Well, it's weird for me because I feel more I feel less pressure about disc saying uh like religious concepts uh. You know we've been saying that. Okay, you know we have this concept of God, but there's no actual deity that resides in the heaven. Like, I feel better about saying that than to come out and say that Santa Claus is your parents. We already said, oh, come on, I don't know. I'm not saying it makes sense. I'm just saying, um, that's how it feels. I'm like, oh, that's that's a step too far to say, not only there is no Santa and he is me. That's that's exactly in fact that you're exactly making my point, because it's not just that at some point the other kids on the playground start saying, oh, you still will even Santa Santa isn't real. I mean, that would be one thing if that was happening. You could still maintain belief even in a hostile atmosphere. People maintain religious beliefs in a hostile atmosphere among nonbelievers who challenge their beliefs. But the fact that there the mechanism is revealed by the by the people pulling the levers, that the the it is me statement is the most powerful moment there where, Like it can't really survive that moment. But sometimes you don't completely have that moment. I don't know, like some some parents, they don't have like a sit down and say like, all right, here's the here's the truth. So um, I think another important Sorry I didn't mean to do something now, No, no you didn't. I'm just saying that that kind of I felt that it says more about me as a as a parent that's currently maintaining the magic of Santa and trying to figure out like where it goes from here, you know. But I do want to come back to again to Santa and godhood. I think it's worth mentioning. First of all, the Santa has encompassed aspects of old gods already. You have such characters as the Germanic god Voting, the godlike entity of Russia's dead de Morez or old Man Frost. Of course, factors into another MST three k Rift film, Jack Frost, Uh, and I think he's more there's certainly a clear cut case for Jack Frost being a deity, uh, since he is uh, you know, he's he's can Can, he's you know, he's a he's a natural force, and that is personified. But then also we have to get into discussing just like how the how concepts of God and God's are going to vary from culture to culture, because a lot of this has revolved around very I think Western concepts of an all powerful god, you know, or or even like ancient Greek concepts of like really highly powerful anthropomorphic entities. Right. Yeah, um, I mean it's something that Barrett mentions in the paper is that there these criteria are supposed to apply to all kinds of gods. I mean, so they would apply to you know, spirit gods that live in the trees and stuff like that, or household gods, and like, they should apply to all of these categories. But it's clear that at least I think you and I, by our cultural context, are very conditioned when we talk about gods to think about like the monotheistic religions. Right. But but I do wonder if does despite what Barrett says, I wonder if some of the household god concepts do kind of fall through the cracks of this a little bit. I was thinking particularly about about about China here, because in China, uh Santa has really only gained traction there during really gain traction there in the nineteen nineties. So you won't find Santa wearing Confucian robes or anything, but apparently you will see him on doors in places often relegated for the gods. Chinese households with double doors sometimes boast twin images of Santa, a place also reserved for Chinese New Year posters, and the traditional uh minshin or door gods of of of Chinese tradition. And I think this forces us to realize that there's you know, there's again there's God in the monotheistic tradition, and then there are the gods of various non monotheistic religions, and and we hardly just mean the pantheons of Hinduism and ancient Greece. But again, these household deities, such as the Chinese domestic gods like the kitchen or stove god, and then you know their variations of this in Western traditions as well. Interestingly enough, though, it is sometimes held that the kitchen God in Chinese custom returns to the celestial realm shortly before lunar New Year in order to report household activities directly to the all powerful Jade Emperor, whoa so um some strategic information there. So you know, at first it might seem like there's not anything strategic there, but clearly the kitchen God has strategic information that then has an important ramifications for the household effected. Well, one thing I was thinking to complicate this is I used the obvious example that seems laughable to us of the crunch rap supreme God. But I think that they're, in fact are some types of household god type entities that are they are intentional agents and that they can act and they have like thoughts and stuff like that. But they're also inanimate objects, right about that. So there are like household appliances that are gods and like food items that are gods, but they're just imagined to be those inanimate objects with intentional agency. All right, we're gonna jump in here and take a quick break, but we'll be right back. And we're back. So there's another way to think about Santa in relationship to God's in religion, and that's by focusing on the fact that if he is a god, he's a specific kind of God, right, which is a moralizing god, like he knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake. And I think two people who are primarily familiar with only the largest world religions today, you know, you've got Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, all that. It probably just seems like moralizing is an inherent part of what a religion is, right, Yeah, I would think so. I mean, especially with the major monotheistic religions. I mean that is the model, right, the big the big Sky Daddy that is going to be disappointed in you and punish you if you do not behave morally totally. Like, all those religions have concepts or codes that in some way regulate moral conduct. They encourage one type of behavior over another. So you've got the you know, supernatural justice in heaven and hell, divine retribution or resolution in the workings of karma, etcetera. But not all religions are especially moralizing and not all gods are especially concerned with moral behavior. Like if you look at smaller religions practiced all around the world, and especially deeper into history, you start to get the picture that many gods and many religions are basically a moral that that they involve myths and rituals, and that the gods don't really care whether or not you are morally good or bad. They care whether you say, perform the rituals or not. And of course this isn't to say that the people practicing these religions are a moral They of course would have ideas about moral conduct, just like anybody else would. It's just that the you know, in these societies, the regulation of morality does not seem to come from the gods or religion. It comes from other sources in the same way that the amoral god it doesn't care if you've been bad or good. We can easily imagine like the tyrannical king who doesn't care if you are a good person or not. But are you are you paying your tribute to him? Are you obeying the laws that he set out? Not because they're more but because they reinforce his rule? Right, it's not follow the golden rule or something. It's neil before's odd right now. Now, we mentioned earlier how the Jade emperor in Chinese traditions, in Chinese mythology does seem concerned with what's been happening in your house via intel provided by household god. But I think what's interesting concerning that, I don't bring it up to trying, like, you know, cast down this idea, but rather to like add maybe a few wrinkles to it. I think what's interesting is that in Chinese customs put a huge emphasis on ancestors, and I think you see this in other models as well from around the world that stress spirits of the dead is entities that have not completely he faded away and maybe connected to the gods in some way. I guess a true moralizing god in the form we're talking about here is one that has no shall we say, blood relation to the mortals in question. Zeus, for instance, always seems more keen than Father, even in dealing with his own demi god offspring. You know, he's certainly not a moral entity himself. No, I mean, yeah, you look at the Greek gods. They don't seem at all concerned with moral behavior. I mean, you might get little snippets of that here and there. It does not seem to be the main focus of the Greek religion, right, and then many of them too are of course more it's not even it's limiting to try and even think of them as being a moral or a moral because they are more embodiments of drives and aspects of the human condition. Yeah, totally. I mean, they serve they serve a narrative function, right, just the way that like the characters in your novel don't necessary They're not necessarily going to be good people like they're they're doing things to serve a narrative function. I think a lot of gods in history are that way, except you did need to do rituals, right, like Bacchus for example. You know, like Bacchus, I guess you could say Bacchus is a moral but but even that kind of puts a liminal what Bacchus is Like Bacchus is more the embodiment of like just sort of primal instinct and primal drive and desire. Right now, of course, whenever you're talking about like a big complex human phenomenon like religion, there's gonna be all kinds of variation. There's no you know, it's hard to make generalized statements that are always true, but historically it does appear to a lot of scholars of religion that over time there was a pretty major shift in the world from a moral religions to moralizing religions. And again that doesn't mean a moral people. It just means like, you know, gods that aren't concerned with moral behavior only with rituals to gods that have moral codes and stuff. And the era of moralizing god's also seems to be linked with like other traits of the religions that bear them. For example, the trend toward moralizing god seems to be paired with features like omniscition. Like in order for a god to be aware of your moral conduct at all times and punish you even for doing wrong in private, the god needs to be all perceptive, you know, he sees you when you're sleeping and so forth, and so some scholars have actually proposed that the emergence of big moralizing gods and big moralizing religions could have had major effects on sort of society and ecology and and the history of human civilization. Like one hypothesis that's been knocking around for years. I've mainly seen it associated with the book by the Canadian psychologist Dr Era nor in Zion called Big Gods, How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict. Uh. I might not be fully doing it justice, but the basic idea here is that like big, powerful, moralizing gods, made civilization with large settlements and lots of trade and interaction between strangers possible. I think the basic reasoning is that if people only live in small settlements, it's hard for individuals to get away with bad dison honest behavior, because you quickly get a bad reputation if you know everybody around you knows you. There's only one person selling bread, you know, it's it's a small community. But so yeah, so they get punished in social ways, you know, by other people. But in a world with big cities and lots of business and interactions between people who are probably never even going to see each other again, it's a lot easier to be a cheat or a thief for whatever and just keep getting away with it. Thus, the need for a belief in an all seeing judge who holds you accountable, who won't just let you cheat and harm people and then escape into the anonymity made possible by a big society with lots of trade and lots of strangers. Um. Now, as always with this kind of hypothesis, it's important to remember the difference between like telling a plausible story and proving an explanation is correct. I'm all for informed speculation in areas where hard evidence is lacking. That's a lot of fun to do, and we like to we talk about that stuff all the time, but it's also important to remember the difference between that and proof. So it is an interesting hypothesis. But like, is there any way to test its predictions? And I think the answer is sort of. It's the kind of historical explanation that would be difficult to be sure about. But one study I was looking at found an interesting way to test its consistency with the facts, and this was by using a big historical database called sesshot to check to check the timelines basically on average, based on what we know about history, does evidence for big moralizing gods tend to show up in a region of the world directly before big increases in social complexity. Does it look like the emergence of these big moralizing gods is making like big cities and complex trade possible. Uh So, there was a paper published in Nature in twenty nineteen by Harvey white House at all Um and the results were interesting that they did not find in fact the big moralizing god's created booms in social complexity in a region, but they did find a historical association between the emergence or like our first evidence of big moralizing gods and booms and social complexity in the timeline. It's just that the order was reversed. Quote. Our statistical analysis showed that beliefs in supernatural punishment tend to appear only when societies make the transition from simple to complex, around the time when the overall population exceeded about a million individuals. So it looks like they found there is an association between you know, big booms and population and social complexity. But it looks like that the religious changes came about after the transformation or you know, the formation of big complex societies. I think that's interesting. Well, yeah, it reminds me of our discussions on health the ologies in the past. Yeah. Uh, you know, particularly the ideas of as this this study points out supernatural punishment, and uh I I have frequently uh, you know stated my displeasure with with any health theology model. I think that it is largely a supernatural revenge fantasy and a barbaric one in which we we uh commit individuals or groups of people to some sort of fiery torture and rape in the in the afterlife for things that we see them or we perceive them getting away with in this life. We're not being properly punished for in this life. So I can see that very much lining up with this. It's the idea of there are people out there that are getting away with it. There has to be they cannot do that, They would not be able to do that in the smaller realm, and here in the larger realm of the city, there still must be some sort of of punishment, and therefore it becomes necessary to have this imagine punishment in the afterlife. So the moralizing gods with divine retribution or perhaps not something that makes big civilization possible, but something that happens because of the resentments generated in a big civilization. Yeah, I wonder, I wonder. I think that's an interesting way of looking at Again, one is hesitant to to find nice concise explanation for anything that emerges and all the caveats we already stated, yeah, um, but yeah, I'm wondering, so if they're on the right track that this historically was the trend, Like first you get a whole bunch of people together, all trading with strangers and stuff, and then shortly after that you start to get the moralizing gods who see you when you're sleeping and know when you're awake. Does this have any relevance to Santa? Does it tell us anything about the jelly old Elf? I mean maybe in the sense that Santa is a concept that is bestowed on young minds by adult minds, and so therefore we could be taking the larger model, boiling it down into a simplified form, and giving it to them. So, you know, ultimately, I don't know how much. I don't know. I don't know to what extent there's really a lot of pleasure to be gaining for a child imagining the bad kids not getting anything for Christmas. I don't think. I don't know. Dwelling on that as a kid, maybe that's just you. Some kids do like the idea of other kids getting punished, and you can see the delight in their eyes. You never noticed this when like the bad kid gets there come up and well, I don't know, maybe it depends on the environment which the child is brought up, because I feel like currently with my child, I don't I've never heard him bring up the idea of somebody getting away with bad behavior. You know, like either bad behavior is dealt with by teachers or by another parent. That's there. Uh. You know, certainly we live in the age of of you so called helicopter parents, where there's generally there generally are a number of parents hovering around the playground environment, etcetera. So maybe he just hasn't gotten to the point where there's this realization that, yes, sometimes when you are bad, you absolutely get away with it, at least in this lifetime or at least until Christmas rolls around. That's interesting, But it comes back to I mean, it's it's the flip side of the coin right of the classic theological quandary, why do bad things happen to good people? Why do good things happen to bad people? Why do bad people get away with being bad? Right? Well, if you have the concept of an all powerful, moralizing God, it necessarily invites that question when you start to see flaws in the system don't look like they're working. I mean to come back to again to the idea that Santa does tend to come through even for the bad kids, Like there's gonna come a point where you realize, no, my classmate Um Damien was terrible this year, like he is awful in Santa, gave in everything he desired and then some something is wrong with this system. It's all for you exactly because I guess basically given a complex society, that's going to happen inevitably even or perhaps especially with environments where you have like really tyrannical rule in place. Takes a like a North Korea situation, where you have like informers in UM, like in smaller groups that report back if anybody's speaking, you know, out of line about the regime. Like even of course, within a regime like that, you're going to have people that then abuse the already abusive system and find ways to benefit from it. So there's always going to be somebody in these systems getting away with it no matter what. Uh you know, cultural UM institutions and systems are put in place to prevent it. Yeah, I think that's a good point now, you know, on the subject of of city gods and moral gods, I can't help but turn my mind back to the work of Julian Jaynes, author of the Origin of Consciousness, in the Breakdown of the bi cameral Mind, which we we discussed in a couple of older episodes of Stuff to Blow your mind. I think we more or less recently re ran those and occasionally it pops up. But he spends a fair amount of time pointing to the structure of ancient cities with their houses of the gods at the center, what he refers to as bicameral architecture, each city centering upon steeply rising pyramids topped with god houses, where he says, quote, the king dead is a living god. The king's tomb is the god's house, the beginning of the elaborate god house or temples. And you know that this gets a little bit into the idea of that the ancestors remaining alive, like the dead king, has not died. The the idea of the dead king is the form through which one hemisphere of our brain speaks to the other. Right, Yeah, that was the basis of his all. He's trying to prove his case that like, there was this historical transition where, like you know, where the gods were literally talking to people. But of course it wasn't supernatural entities. It was the non dominant hemisphere of the brain. Right. But it's important to note that like in the purely bicameral scenario here that he was describing, like the God would not be reminding you what the rules are, that God would be telling you what to do. So he would point to the difference between moralizing and non moralizing gods as being key to the breakdown of the bicameral mind. For example, he points out that no one is moral among the god control puppets of the Iliad, good and evil do not exist. But he points out in the Odyssey, the character Clyde Mestra is able to resist a justice because her mind is like that of a god. So he writes, quote, consciousness and morality are a single development, for without God's morality based on a consciousness of the consequences of action, must tell men what to do. So I think the idea here is that there is no Santa Claus in the Iliad, and then he would not be necessary for the children of the bly cameral mind. Certainly in the James verse, Yes, that is the case. It is interesting, this is this is something that is perhaps a difference between uh Santa and various incarnations of the God. Is that God in God's speak to humans in a way that Santa doesn't really speak to us. I mean, I guess Santa does take the form of a like there's a Santa's helper at the mall and he directly speaks to you, and then there is still the letter writing, etcetera. But there's no voice of Santa that comes to your mind. Do pretty much all kids are they told that when they sit on Santa's lap at the mall, this is not the real Santa. This guy works for Santa, I believe. So now now I don't know if that used to be the case. Certainly, if you had like a small it's kind of like Crampus and Santa, right, Like, do you tell them it's really the Crampus is coming down from the mountain and that's really saying nick uh, or or do you let them in on the fact that these are people pretending embodying these things. Well, I wonder if it's kind of like, you know, the priest of a religion, dressing up in garb that indicates the deity itself and being sort of your your intercessor, like the person who intervenes on your behalf for the deity. I have to say, since we began recording the this this pair of episodes on Santa, I have introduced and sort of reintroduced my son to both the Mexican Santa Claus film and Santa Cause versus the Martians. And that also like brought up the question of like, Okay, what is this version of Santa I'm seeing here? This is not the real Santa story because you know, this doesn't line up with what I've been told. This doesn't line up with what I've been told, So already you're having to here's another layer of having to say, well, this is an interpretation of what Santa is and it it made me think back to a film I don't know if you've seen this, titled Santa Claus the I think with Santa Claus the Motion Picture, I'm not sure. With John Lithcwan it, no, I haven't seen it. I think Deadly More may Or may not have played an elf. It's been a long time, but it came out at just the right time in my childhood where I still largely believed in Santa Claus, and here was a movie about Santa that, even at that point was ridiculous, and I wonder, I remember wondering what the real Santa thought of this film, you know, like did he approve like this was blasphemous in a sense? You know, because like I'm I'm thinking, well, the reindeer don't fly because they eat a special candy and then humans John Lithcow wouldn't be able to fly because he ate a special candy cane. Yeah, how did Dr Lizardo become Santa Claus exactly? So I don't know, that doesn't really answer any questions. Is more questions about in the hoops we make our our children jump through when it comes to our our mythical god like beings. Alright, So in the end, Barrett says, Santa Claus not a god? What are you saying, Joe H? Yeah, I think not a god? Though I think it's not necessarily because I uh come down the same side as him on all of his main five criteria. I do think those criteria are interesting and worth talking about. I'd say the main things that make Santa Claus not a god, are like this other stuff we were talking about. For my money, I'd say, Okay, Santa is not a god, but he contains pieces of a god, and I think you could imagine a world in which he one day becomes a god. Sure. I think what it would take was adults insisting continuously, like a significant number of adults insisting it's true, right, and then the cultivation of a like the the editing and the cultivation of a version of Santa clause that works for adults as well. Yeah, And I don't know what would ever cause that. I kind of doubt that would ever happen, But if it did, then I think you I think you could be there. Yeah. All right. So obviously we'd love to hear from everyone about this particular question, because a number of you out there have either you grew up with some sort of Santa concept in your household or and or you have a Constanta concept in your current household, or you have in an outsider's view of all of this, which of course would be very helpful. Even one thing I'm curious about, real quick, how does how when you're growing up, how did your Santa concept interact with your religious beliefs, right, yeah, like especially if maybe if you weren't a Christian but believed in Santa, Like, how does that fit together? I think, you know, I have a feeling that sometimes Santa clause is in a way kind of like cruelly an intentional sacrificed in order to drive home the difference between a religious a concept like Santa and the religious concepts that are upheld in the household. You know, not a war on Christmas, but a war on Santa. Yeah, alright, so let us know. We'd love to hear from everybody. In the meantime, if you want to find other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, uh, well, you can go Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. It will redirect you to um a listing of episodes, and you can find a listing of episodes more or less just like that anywhere you get podcasts. UM. I don't know, we can't keep up with all these websites, but they're out there. You can go, you can subscribe, you can rate, you can review. That will help out the show. Uh, let's see what else? Um. Oh, and if you uh, if you want to, I guess you can follow us on social media. We're on various um civilization destroying platforms out there, but the only one we're really likely to interact with is the stuff to Blow Your Mind discussion module, which we'll find on the of faces Huge Thanks, as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you'd like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.