Luke Muehlhauser posted a video of a debate between an 8 year old and a 9 year old on the existence of Santa Claus. The first comment was by one pissed-off David Rodgers, which I decided was ripe for parody:

David, your dismissal of belief in Santa Claus does not indicate you are actually practicing Common Sense.

Any aclausist who watches that video and comes away thinking Ethan won one is deluded. It’s clear that he was totally unprepared for Anna’s points from the very beginning. For example, he never responded to Anna’s point that Santa might be able to make chimneys bigger so he can get through.

He’d probably never heard this argument before, not surprising, since he seems like exactly the sort of arrogant aclausist who doesn’t think he needs to study Santaology to dismiss it. No wonder Anna wins all her debates.

This and other comments got a response:

Santalogians do not exist among sane adults. They are pathetic sarcastic attempts to equate belief in Santa Claus with belief in the Christian God. The attempt to make them equivalent is pathetic and unworthy of any time spent examining the analogy.

Name one serious conversion of a sane functioning adult who was a disbeliever in Santa Claus as an adult who then converted to fully living his or her life as a Clausist based upon the testimony of other Clausists who have fully dedicated their lives to Clausism.

Part of me agrees with this. Generally, I avoid comparing belief in God to belief in Santa Claus. I would much rather compare it to something that many sane function adults have converted to after initial disbelief. Like Scientology.

Now that’s largely besides the point–I suspect that David would be no happier about comparing belief in God to Scientology. This is because, in my experience, when people don’t like an analogy, they just shut down the rational part of their brains. “How dare you compare something I believe to something I don’t believe!” “Christianity is good, Scientology is bad, comparisons are off limits!” And David is pretty clear that this is what he’s doing. Rather than argue that the analogy is a bad one, he explicitly refuses to even examine it.

He might protest that it’s a waste of his time to rebut the analogy, but if so, why did he waste his time posting not one, not two, but seven replies to Luke’s post? Commenter Justgreatthanks nails it:

You know, the ratio of “Serious posts” to “Joke posts” on this site has to easily exceed 20 to 1, yet every single time there is satire, there is invariably one or more butthurt theists who decry the lack of intellectual rigor.

If you scroll down just a single post, you will see Luke offering a thoughtful reply to WL Craig’s argument regarding the absurdity of life on atheism, part of an ongoing series on the same topic. If you are only interested in serious discussion, why don’t (and didn’t) you comment on that instead? If I were to speculate, it would be because you get off on being sanctimonious in this way much more than you do ACTUALLY engaging in intellectual discussion, but I’m certainly open to alternative theories.

This kind of refusal to even consider the relevance of analogies is a fundamental failure of rational thinking. This is because, in general, people are far too good at failing to see the obvious when their own beliefs (or loyalties, or self-image) are at stake. Analogies can remedy that. Many people do not seem sure that genocide is always wrong, but they are sure that it’s wrong when Hitler does it. While internet discussions of religion are rarely matters of life and death (well, not usually), the refusal to even consider analogies in matters of real moral significance is downright morally odious.

But back to Santa Claus: even though I prefer to stick to comparisons to things adults have actually believed, I think it is interesting how many standard rhetorical tropes used to defend religion can be adapted to defend belief in Santa. As I said a few months back:

If any adults actually believed in Santa, can anyone doubt that the same people who complain about Dawkins’ ignorance would say that this is just an expression of bigoted ignorance of what Santa Claus believers believe? After all, Santa Claus is not the sort of being who is subject to ordinary laws of physics. Santa Claus is a magical being. The Santa Claus that the argument refutes is a Santa Claus nobody believes in.

Put another way: many defenses of belief in God depend on insisting that normal standards of plausibility shouldn’t apply to God. But why not cut Santa the same breaks?