Related on OB: Lying to Kids The Third Alternative
My wife and I are planning to have kids, so of course we've been going through the usual sorts of debates regarding upbringing. We wondered briefly, will we raise our children as atheists? It's kindof a cruel experiment, as folks tend to use their own experiences to guide raising children, and both of us were raised Catholic. Nonetheless, it was fairly well settled after about 5 minutes of dialogue that atheist was the way to go.
Then we had the related discussion of whether to teach our children about Santa Claus. After hours of debate, we decided we'd both have to think on the question some more. It's still been an open question for years now.
Should we teach kids that Santa Claus exists? This isn't a new question, by any means. But it's now motivated by this thread about rationalist origin stories. Note that many of the posters mark the 'rationalist awakening' as the time they realized God doesn't exist. The shock that everybody, including their parents, were wrong and/or lying to them was enough to motivate them to pursue rationality and truth.
If those same children were never taught about God, Santa Claus, and other falsehoods, would they have become rationalists, or would they have contented themselves with playing better video games? If the child never realized there's no Santa Claus, would we have a reason to say, "You're growing up and I'm proud of you"?
Interestingly, this is related to a question of whether being religious is a good thing because of the various associated benefits, even if it brings certain grave flaws, and an objection that certainly religion with all its lies can't be anywhere near the best thing to practice, that one can greatly improve on the status quo. But guess what, it's hard to improve on the status quo, it may be a right thing for the humanity to try, but it may be an impossible thing for a person to try. So, you need to choose not between the status quo and the best thing that's theoretically possible to construct, but between the status quo and the best thing that you, personally, can construct.
So, the Santa Claus lie has a benefit of pervasiveness in the culture, everyone repeats it. You can't fake this for a different, improved lie.