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Santa Lives!: Five Conclusive Arguments for the Existence of Santa Claus PDF

107 Pages·2005·0.97 MB·English
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26907_ch00.i-viii.qxd 8/12/05 1:57 PM Page i Santa Lives! 26907_ch00.i-viii.qxd 8/12/05 1:57 PM Page ii ELLIS WEINER Riverhead Books New York 26907_ch00.i-viii.qxd 8/12/05 1:57 PM Page iii THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Copyright © 2005 by Ellis Weiner Cover design by Benjamin Gibson Book design by Tiffany Estreicher All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. RIVERHEAD is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. The RIVERHEAD logo is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. First Riverhead trade paperback edition: November 2005 MSR ISBN 0 7865 6021 5 AEB ISBN 0 7865 6022 3 Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability. www.penguin.com 26907_ch00.i-viii.qxd 8/12/05 1:57 PM Page v (cid:2)(cid:3) CONTENTS (cid:2)(cid:3) Introduction 1 Chapter One The Ontological Argument 11 Chapter Two The Causal Argument 21 Chapter Three The Argument from Design, or the Teleological Argument 35 Chapter Four The Experiential Argument 53 Chapter Five The Argument from Morality 71 A Final Word 89 Appendix: Lesser Arguments 93 26907_ch00.i-viii.qxd 8/12/05 1:57 PM Page vii Santa Lives! 26907_ch00.i-viii.qxd 8/12/05 1:57 PM Page viii Santa entering chimney. Although the moon is behind him, his face is well lit—proof of his quasi-divinity. 26907_ch01.001-099.qxd 8/12/05 1:26 PM Page 1 Introduction T HE figure of Santa Claus is shrouded in mystery and contradiction. Well before the founding of the Christian Church, men (and women, if the men let them go outside) would gaze up at the heavens during the bleakest, longest nights of the year and wail, although probably not in English, “Who will deliver us from this endless wintry gloom? What can sustain us through the long nights ahead besides heavy drinking, the worship of moss, and staring at endless reruns of the Bronze Age equivalent of Law & Order?” Then would every heart beat with a single desire and every voice give utterance 26907_ch01.001-099.qxd 8/12/05 1:26 PM Page 2 INTRODUCTION to the same wish: “Isn’t there some big fat man up there who can come down here and give me free stuff?”1 In response to such universal human longing, Santa Claus appears. And yet, from the first, he is a figure of controversy. It begins with his very name: Santa, scholars tell us, is the feminine form of the Spanish/Italian/Portuguese word for “saint.” But Clausis a masculine Nordic/Ger- manic name. Is Santa Claus a girl with a boy’s name or a boy with a girl’s name or what? It’s worse than Leslie or Alex! No wonder, then, that when we (henceforth, by “we” I will mean not only those of us in the intellectual elite but everyone else, too!) first think of Santa Claus, we 1Early polytheistic cultures had their own proto-versions of Santa Claus, the most familiar ofwhich comes down to us from the ancient Egyptians, as seen on the funerary offerings on the tomb of Ka aper (2465–20 B.C.; Old Kingdom, early Dynasty 5). The painted lime- stone bas reliefdepicts, among the familiar images ofvessels, snakes, birds, and eyes, a portly, bearded man standing in a chariot equipped with snow runners and being drawn by a team ofcreatures, each fea- turing the head ofa reindeer and the body ofan elf. (History is silent on where, in ancient Egypt, there was snow. Indeed, we know of no hieroglyph for the idea, although the Egyptians did possess twenty- three different hieroglyphs for “sand.”) Among the ancients the Claus figure finds its most enduring form in that of the Roman deity Gratuitas (goddess of tips). Santa and his precursors disappear entirely with the advent of Judaic (cid:2) (cid:3) 2

Description:
Does Santa Claus actually exist? In this slim-but-enthralling volume, Ellis Weiner addresses this age-old question and comes to a surprising answer. Guess what it is. Using many of the same arguments-and even some of the same words-employed by people much smarter than he to answer other, even harder
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