I seem to remember something very similar to this occurring a while back, but the story, in the Torygraph, gives today’s date. The headline already makes me chuckle:
Oh, dear Ceiling Cat, the vicar told the kids that something that they believed in was fictional! As the paper reports:
A vicar has been forced to apologise after claiming at a primary school assembly that Father Christmas does not exist and recounting the gruesome story of Saint Nicholas.
Reverend Simon Tatton-Brown infuriated parents of youngsters at Charter Primary by questioning the existence of Santa.
He told children that Father Christmas was based on a grisly legend about Saint Nicholas, who bought three murdered children back to life.
The Church of England vicar described how the youngsters were killed by an evil butcher and placed in a barrel to be pickled and sold as ham.
Parents complained when their children, aged between five and 11, came home shell-shocked and the vicar of St Andrew’s Church in Chippenham, Wilts. has now apologised.
But some mothers have already withdrawn their children from the school’s Christmas concert at his church later this month.
After all, it’s much grislier than the true story that the vicar is paid to purvey, which is that the son of a divine being, who in fact was also that divine being, was killed by evil Jews and Romans by being nailed to two sticks.
The blunder came as the reverend, who is due to retire at the end of the year after 13 Christmases at his church, delivered his annual festive address to the local school last week.
Due to a technical issue he had to abandon his prepared talk and had to ‘ad lib’ without notes.
It is reported he also claimed Christmas stockings exist only due to a myth about St Nicholas dropping a gift down a poor family’s chimney which happened to land in a sock hung by the fire to dry.
He said his biggest concern was that he had spoilt Christmas for the kids.
I suppose we atheists should also apologize for spoiling Christianity for the Christians.
h/t: Grania
Those damn christians and their War on Xmas!!11!
Ha Ha!
“I suppose we atheists should also apologize for spoiling Christianity for the Christians.”
When the fictitious Hell freezes over.
According to Dante, the ninth circle of Hell is already frozen over.
It would seem that Dante has informed Christians about Hell and the Devil more than the Bible has.
So many levels of silly.
The silliness that haunts.
I was nine years old when I told the neighbor’s six year old that monsters lived in the wall between our houses. Not nice, I agree. The father told me that I should only tell the truth. So I told the kid there is no Santa, no easter bunny, not even angels. Oh man…the dad was not happy with the truth nor was the kid. I am not sure that was nice either, but it was the truth.
Yes, last year it was an Irish priest making children cry.
I don’t think they can help it.
LOL, priests are terrifying on their own without the scary stories!
In France, Belgium and the French-speaking part of Switzerland, this story about Saint Nicholas resurrecting three children seven years after they had been killed, chopped into pieces and put in a barrel to be salted, is well known by all children. They are not traumatized by the story, either. There is a song about this which most kids have learned. You can find the lyrics here: http://www.lexilogos.com/saint_nicolas_chanson.htm
It’s not the kids. They love all that stuff it’s their parents and the army of faux counsellors.
Just wait until Sean Hannity deals with this Mr. Tatton-Brown. A day of reckoning is coming faster than Donner and Blitzen.
This whole event would make a great skit for Saturday Night Live. I’m trying to think who would play the vicar. Ian McKellen? Eddie Izzard? Nathan Lane? No! Patrick Stewart!!
I’m thinking an episode of South Park, with Cartman as the vicar.
George Carlin would have been great in that role.
Lewis Black would be funny as hell too. He is kind of wishy washy semi accommodationist, but I bet he would have no problem with this role.
Patrick Stewart – that would be strongly reminiscent of William Shatner’s “Get A Life!” sketch on Saturday Night Live years ago.
But I thought that everybody already knew that there ain’t no sanity clause….
b&
That Marx your age…
Sheesh! What a groucho!
Let’s not harp on it.
But Dan Dennett IS real!
“We’ve got ourselves caught in a hypocrisy trap, and there is no clear path out. Are we like families in which the adults go through all the motions of believing in Santa Claus for the sake of the kids, and the kids all pretend still to believe in Santa Claus so as not to spoil the adults’ fun? If only our current predicament were as innocuous and even comical as that!”
Breaking the Spell
Once more: “I hated Christmas when I was a kid. I believed in Father Christmas. And so did my parents.” (Carrot Top)
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Here’s my Christmas haiku:
Failure to follow
ancient advice to work out
our own salvation
The haiku form is more than just a syllable pattern. The first two lines are supposed to set up an ambiguous image that is resolved by the third (within that syllable pattern).
Aren’t seasonal references also generally required?
b&
A common motif, but not required. I was schooled in this by a Japanese friend of my college days whose uncle was a poet. One of my favorite examples of this “riddle” form is this haiku (the author of which, I have unfortunately forgotten):
Oh! I ate them all!
And oh! What a stomachache!
Stolen green apples.
Many amateur haiku I’ve seen can be easily fixed by switching the first and last lines. Then there’s this, by Willard Espy, from one of his Almanacs of Words at Play:
Haiku, you ku, he
she or it kus we ku, you
ku they ku, thang ku.
It’s not in riddle form, but it appeals to language nerds.
I think a couple of commas would help to convey the meaning.
But – nice!
You’re right – I missed two commas and a semicolon.
If it appeals to me, does that mean I’m a language nerd?
b&
It’s a possibility
Haikus can be fun,
but sometimes they don’t make sense.
Refrigerator.
Good one!
Another perfectly good irony meter bites the dust. Thanks, Christians!
According to The Guardian:
“Linzi Merritt, whose son Levi, nine, attends the school, said: “We wouldn’t just walk into the church during one of his services and tell everyone there that Jesus isn’t real.”
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/dec/12/pupils-father-christmas-ruined-by-vicar-santa-claus-origins
If its C of E then they already know that.
I think the Santa story is silly too, but isn’t it more fun (and admirable) when kids figure it out for themselves?
The real story of Santa Claus is told in Rare Exports (highly recommended).
Now *that’s* a good Xmas story!
Ours realised that Santa wasn’t real about two minutes after they’d realised that it was us not the Easter Bunny who hid chocolate eggs around the house on Easter Sunday …
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LOL
As a child I never believed in Santa or any other gift bearing figment of imagination. Mostly because my Mom remembered who horribly disappointed, even devastated she was, when she learned that Santa wasn’t real as a child.
My Mom was moderately religious and I turned out atheist.
Christians always wave away Santa Clause comparisons to God, as if there is no serious
analogy. But there are all sorts of direct connections in the problems with the Santa Clause belief…ones that kids actually start noticing at some point and which starts the road to skepticism.
For instance, the problem of reconciling the “Good” and “fair” and “Just” Magic Powered God with the inequities of the world. God loves everyone…but then why do only some luck out and end up growing up in Christian families, or why is suffering so unevenly distributed among good, bad people, Christians and non-Christians? And why if God is good and has the power to make things
more equitable, does it seem left to the power of human beings only to do acts of goodness and charity to address the inequality? It’s pretty much like God isn’t
there at all. When asked about this, Christians will also come up with excuses like “Well, God could do all that, but He desires us to do that kind of work.”
(The same excuse is given for why God seems impotent in revealing Himself to other cultures and it has always fallen for human beings to spread the idea of Christianity – “Oh, that’s for us to do, not God, we’re God’s helpers…”)
This easily finds it’s mirror in Santa Clause belief.
Kids are told that Santa is Magic, and Kind and Good and loves all children equally.
And yet, how does this gel with some rather obvious observations any child can see: Why then does Santa seem to give the best, most expensive gifts to the rich kids, less impressive gifts to the middle class kids, and the stingiest gifts to the poor kids.
In fact, sometimes Santa DOESN’T EVEN GIVE ANYTHING to poor kids! I mean, why in the world do we need toy and food drives for underprivileged families during Christmas time? If Santa cares about the poor kids as much as us, and has the power to give them gifts…why doesn’t he? What’s going on there?
I remember as a young kid asking my mom similar questions when my Santa belief began to waver, and noted also that it seemed parents may be the source of the gifts, not Santa. Her attempt to bolster my belief in Santa was something like “Oh, Santa is real, it’s just that Santa likes some helpers some times, so we help by giving gifts…”
Once you posit fictional beings with magic powers and good will to humans, you are on the same road to making the same moves to protect that belief in the face of reality.
Vaal
I don’t know about Father Christmas, but I can’t believe that many people would mistake a pickled child for a ham. And even if his customers were gullible Christians he could just have sold them a packet of biscuits and some red plonk instead.
At what minimum age of their child(ren) would parents have no problem with the reverend’s revelation of truth?
You mean that god is a delusion? I think he could say that at any age, don’t you?
I mean the specific revelation at hand for which he received so much grief – the non-existence of Santa Claus.
As long as he reveals both delusions at the same time, I’d be fine with it.
MAGICAL THINKING OVERCOMES ALL OBSTACLES OF LOGIC (A true story):
A woman’s daughter lost yet another baby tooth- the woman decided that her daughter was old enough to be able to handle the truth about the “Tooth Fairy”, so she sat her down and told her that it was really she who had been placing money under the little girl’s pillow in exchange all along. The mother was surprised at how matter-of-factly the daughter took this revelation, until later when the daughter came up to her and said, “But mom- how do you get into all of those OTHER kids’ houses?”
Excellent!
Santa must be real cos Fox News said he was white and they would never lie.
Yeah and they said Jesus was too. They actually believe those 6 foot northern European portrayals of him!
My son’s friend told him that Santa (or Father Christmas as we call him in the UK) did not exist. But my son’s friend’s parents are fervent Catholics, and while having no qualms about revealing FC to be a myth, continue to support the ludicrous notion that we call “Christianity.”
The irony is so heavy that all the compasses in the village point to their house.
Is this some strange new use of the word “blunder”? Sounds very non-blundering to me.
The face of that man – senescent, confused, vulnerable, and frail, seems to personify the current plight of the traditional, hardline Christian churches in Western Europe. Let’s hope this waning of influence and power spreads to the US as well.
I should like to point out that the Church of England is sooooo broad and liberal that sometimes it’s clergy do not even believe in God:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/393479.stm
Interesting article.
I have for a great many years said that Man created God in his own image and not the other way round.