But first, before I totally sink my teeth into this, I'd like to start off with a little story, one that I think many of us have gone through: the time that we first found out Santa Claus wasn't real.
My parents called me down into the basement and sat me down. My first reaction was that I had done something bad, and I was about to get it. I racked my brain to try and figure out what I had done now, and how I could get out of it. Little did I know that my parents were gazing at me sympathetically. My step mom was the first to say it:
'Chloe, sweetie. We wanted to tell you something serious. Something very important: this Christmas, there isn't going to be a santa claus, because santa claus isn't real.'
They looked at me expectantly. What they were expecting I don't know, because all I did was sit there and say 'Oh.....that makes more sense.' and sit there some more. Apparently, they were waiting for me to start sobbing because that's what my step mom did when she first found out, and my dad was pretty much expecting the same.
See the thing is, I wasn't all that surprised or shocked or sad or anything, mainly because I had never really believed in Santa Claus in the first place (I know a lot of you are shaking your heads saying 'well THAT explains a lot').
Seriously, I'm not kidding: I never believed in Santa, or the Easter bunny, or the tooth fairy, or any of that crap. I don't know why, but for some reason, even as a kid, I was programmed to only believe it if I personally saw it myself. The fact that a fat guy in a suit could make land animals without wings fly across the world carrying not only himself, but a sleigh full of a WORLDS SUPPLY OF TOYS all in one night just didn't make any sense to my young brain, and since I had never actually seen Santa despite my 7 Christmases thus far on this earth, I had already come to the conclusion that Santa must not exist, because I hadn't seen him. The same goes for all the other little made up characters our parents produce: I never bought into any of it.
Sure, I wanted to, I wanted to be like every other kid and get all caught up in the whimsical-ness of it all, but my logically little mind wouldn't let me. 'No, Stupid! Don't leave cookies out for this fraud! THIS MAKES NO SENSE AND YOU KNOW IT! Stop it damn it, STOP!'
Okay, so the inner monologue thing IS going a bit far, but the rest is all true: I never believed in Santa because I never saw Santa. So I guess that you can pretty much guess where I stand on this whole 'Seeing is Believing' thing.
I'm one of those few that live by the 'if I can see it and I can touch it then its real' motto. That might be one of the main reasons why I'm an atheist: in my lifetime, I haven't had any spiritual journeys, or anything remotely close to what most people call an encounter with the divine. Religion has played a small to minuscule part in my life, and I can't say that its made it any better or worse, thus I am null and void when it comes to being spiritual. That's about the nicest, safest way I can put it, and I really don't want to open that can of worms anyway.
So there it is, plain and simple. My humble and mortal opinion: you have to see it to believe it. Maybe its selfish to assume this, but I think that you only get to live once, so why spend this life believing your little heart out to no avail, with no grantee that you're going to 'see' anything at the end?
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