"Nick - the claim is that they make you believe that you are always being watched by a moral judge, not that you behave morally when noone is watching you. I'm not sure how you'd distinguish the two in practice, however."

This is perhaps true in the beginning. But what happens once they figure out that Santa isn't real and that there are times when no one is watching them. I suppose this is why religion tries to pound it into your heads that there is a god, and judgment leading to either heaven or hell. I can't think of a better way to try to coerce people into following your morals. If you think about it, it really is a brilliant method of social control if you can scare your followers enough.

Many children are taught that god exists and they have to accept that at faith. It doesn't take long for a kid to figure out that Santa doesn't exist; it is nearly impossible to indefinitely perpetuate that lie. Religion on the other hand... how do you disprove something that MUST be taken completely on faith.

I hope we can someday find a better way to instill morals into kids other than to tell them they are going to be punished by a moral judge at the end of their lives if they are bad.

How careful do we have to be deriving laws from our empirical observations... deriving laws that we think must be true because we have observed them to always be true.

I believe this is analogous to Hempel's Paradox, otherwise known as the raven paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven_paradox .

I wonder what, out of everything we think we know, must actually be true. Is there anything we can really say with 100% confidence? What truths can be derived by examining what happens when a proposed truth is not in fact true?

Perhaps not an "arbitrary mess of surface rules," but why not just one of an infinite number of possible laws.

We have but only begun to gain an EMPIRICAL understanding of our world.... why should our observations equate to what must be a higher truth governing all possible other universes.

However, if we restrict ourself to what we think we know about our world, it is hard to imagine the extent of what else must also change to accommodate a match failing to strike. Nonetheless, new phenomena and discoveries over the years have continually forced us to abandon our current theories about our existence. What do we really know for sure about this world anyway?