Will nobody think of the children?

[andrewducker]

[Poll #1658780]

context

Another data point

Comments

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

In your data point, Newton's laws of physics are a lie-to-children. Based on that you need a third option in your poll of "absolutely necessary as a basis for learning" :)

[andrewducker]

Yeah, that's a different version of Lies-to-children, which isn't the same as telling them that Santa Claus exists. One of them is an imperfect model with general applicability for many situations, and one of them, well, isn't.

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

If "Santa Claus exists and brings you your presents" was a simplification of "metaphorically Santa Claus is the anthropomorphised spirit of Christmas and is an ideal presented in human form, which is the social force that causes presents to appear under the tree on the 25th of December" then it wouldn't be unreasonable.

Which is obviously what EVERYONE means by it ;)

[atreic.livejournal.com]

I <3 this comment :-)

[innerbrat]

There's lying to children, and there're Lies To Children.

Honestly though, its all stories. Believing in Santa Claus (or not) is as important as believing in Dora the Explorer or Tinky Winky. It's a fun game to get into the story, and when kids begin to sort out the difference between fiction and reality, then they'll get it.

Mind you, I was that kid who, when discovering that some adults actually believed in God, was kind of taken back.

[andrewducker]

I remember telling my mother that if I had to choose a God to believe in I was going to choose Thor, as the Norse Gods were great. I was going to a CofE school at the time, but clearly I was more impressed with Roger Lancelyn Green...

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

CofE has a god now?

I like the bit in Jeremy Paxman's book The English where some CofE personage isn't 100% certain if belief in God is actually necessary for a CofE member.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

Honestly though, its all stories.[...] when kids begin to sort out the difference between fiction and reality, then they'll get it.

This. I don't think it's really meaningful to talk about "lying" to someone whose conceptual toolkit doesn't yet include a fact/fiction distinction - and the Santa story usually gets told to children much earlier in their development than that. If they hear it for the first time significantly after that concept has turned up in their mental inventory, they spot it for a tall tale straight away, which is why the Easter Bunny never visited my childhood family, but Santa did. Before that, there are only stories told with good intent and stories told with ill intent.

A few years after my eldest son stopped "believing" in Santa Claus, when his younger siblings were getting close to that point themselves, I asked him if he thought I'd been wrong to go along with the Santa tradition or felt that I'd lied to them. He looked quite surprised and said that as far back as he could remember, he'd always thought of it as a gigantic "let's pretend" game anyway; when he told me that he didn't believe in Santa any more, he basically meant "I've outgrown this game now". He couldn't ever remember a time when he thought of Santa as fact, because by the time he even had "fact" as a concept, he'd already put Santa in the "game" category, and he knew that games aren't usually about facts.

I guess that's what happens if you're raised by a Wittgensteinian - it's turtles language games all the way down ;-)

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

This sounds roughly true to my own experience. My kids, aged almost-six and three-and-a-half, are still "believers", but my daughter (the older) has taken control of the myth and insists she's met Santa, and will tell me how things are with the elves etc., so I presume she has it all in the realm of make-believe to some extent. Same with the tooth fairy.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

My UNACCEPTABLE would have an exemption clause for such lies, I think. I mean, we have to tell ourselves those lies to make sense of stuff all the time - we 'believe' all sorts of things because they are a convenient belief to allow us to think critically about something in the meantime while we wait for the Truth (or a better lie).

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

I don't even feel too bad about people lying to themselves when they know it's reasonable self-deception, so long as nobody gets hurt. If I ever think about it for too long I come to the conclusion that governments lie to their people and individuals in them run them (in part at least) for the good of a limited few at the top of society and that there's very little I can do about it.

Generally that makes me quite depressed and so I'm happy to quickly think that actually they're probably doing the best thing by the people and it's all really alright. I emotionally accept the lie, even though the rational truth seems to point in a different direction. Not much better than believing in deities to give your life more meaning and being angry when people try to rationally explain that it is otherwise.

[andrewducker]

According to the people I know who work with goverment officials, most MPs are actually good people trying to do the right thing. Some of them will also skim cash off for themselves, but very few of them are just in it to pad their pockets.