While Jesus represents the religious meaning of Christmas, Satan Clause represents the secular aspects. By shifting peoples attention away from seeing Jesus as the symbol of Christmas and to worship a secular symbol instead, he turns people away from faith.
Making people more materialistic
Satan Clause doesn’t reward people for good behavior with absolution for their sins and an eternity in heaven. He rewards people with material goods. But Jesus told us, craving materialistic wealth is wrong (Matthew 6:19-21). People should be nice for niceness itself, not just for their own benefit.
When Satan Claus gifts to the poor, others don’t need to
Charity is one of the seven virtues of Christianity. According to the bible, giving to those in need is important to receive salvation. But when Satan Clause gives presents to the poor, rich people will no longer feel the necessity to do the same. Rich people are already a main source of souls for Satan (Marc 10:23-25). But by discouraging rich people further to be charitable, it becomes even more likely that their souls will become Satan’s after judgment day.
with one minor correction if I may. “giving to those in need is important to receive salvation” – Giving to those in need doesn’t help receive salvation. This implies that you can earn Salvation. On the contrary, giving to those in need (freely, in secret, not for show) can be an outward expression of Salvation, as you recognize that you were of the greatest of need (spiritually bankrupt) and by unmerited favor were met your greatest of needs. As such, you take up your Savior’s cause
Regarding the first point: Santa removes the Christ and adds more mass. – Thomas Jacobs Dec 24 ’15 at 22:19
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“According to the bible, giving to those in need is important to receive salvation” … humm, not really dude. According to the bible, only faith in Jesus is needed for salvation.
The seven deadly sins are greed, envy, gluttony, sloth, pride, wrath, and lust.
The entire point of Christmas is to encourage greed, envy, and gluttony. The tradition of giving gifts encourages the first two, and feasting encourages the third. Santa just oversees it all, and gives the gifts that will best fan the flames of these sins.
Greed: People asking for, hoping for, wishing for big expensive gifts. Retailers going to ever more excessive lengths to boost sales. Commercials encouraging even little children to beg for impossible toys. Greed is everywhere this holiday season.
Envy: Some people can afford more than others. The nice things on TV or on the shelves that only a few can afford encourage huge amounts of envy. It’s a fact of life, but in the Christmas season, it gets rubbed in the face of the have-nots.
Gluttony: Who hasn’t gone to a Christmas party and come home drunk, stuffed, or both? It happens to most of us several times over the Christmas season.
To a lesser degree, Christmas fuels sloth, pride, and lust.
Sloth: Christmas is a day when people do not go to work, and many take the day to do nothing. Sure, there are others hosting their family’s Christmases, but I’m talking about the people who open gifts in the morning, then do nothing else for the rest of the day. Not to mention all those gluttons sleeping off their excess.
Pride: So much of Christmas is about excess: showing off with parties and lights, buying expensive gifts to prove you can. All this pride is not good for the soul.
Lust: Have you watched the commercials lately? They use sex to sell everything these days.
The season doesn’t encourage wrath in particular, but Black Friday has filled some of the gap. You haven’t seen wrath until you’ve seen a dad who missed out on the last must-have toy on the shelf to some over-aggressive grandmother.
Karen
3,0881324
Even if you use the nonsexual definition of lust, it still applies. The commericialism is designed to make you crave what is being advertised to you, whether it’s the status afforded you by the fancy car you bought during the Holiday Sales Event (side note, why do they have a sales event 29 out of 31 days a month? anyway…) or little girls going nuts over whatever is trendy this year that they just have to have, everyone whose everyone will have it. – corsiKa Dec 24 ’15 at 7:57
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+1 even tho i disagree with your sloth analysis. Just because people take the day off doesn’t make them sloths. You might as well say the same thing about weekends or any other holiday. Everyone needs the occasional break from work. It would have been more effective to argue slothiness from the perspective of greed or entitlement: I just got a bunch of gifts, I don’t hafta do anything for anyone else now. – DrZ214 Dec 26 ’15 at 16:40
Also, by constantly monitoring children to see who is ‘naughty’ or ‘nice’, and letting them know it, Santa is psychologically grooming the world to become a surveillance state. Why not let businesses and governments monitor us at all times? The wonderful Santa does it already.
In addition, Santa enters people’s houses without their permission or even without their noticing, thus normalizing home invasions as a tolerable or even a desirable activity.
Clearly Santa is attempting to usher in (sweetened by the giving of gifts) a future dystopian corporate-government surveillance state. Nothing would give more joy to Satan, er, Santa.
Satan wants to encourage dependency and entitlement from a child’s earliest moments of sentience. He can build on this through the elementary-school years, encouraging a demand for things things things, and now, dammit. He wants those kids to grow up thinking the world owes them, but he has to start with one fat guy in a red suit owing them. Just as candy from strangers is the first step to drugs and gangs, toys from strangers is the first step to teen years filled with petty crime to support one’s online-gaming habits (the Warcraft mods on eBay are so attractive, and really not that expensive all things considered!).
How does this serve his purposes, you might ask? When he gets lucky he’ll create the next wave of teenage thugs and criminals, but the real payoff is with the ones who stick with school, go to college, and end up on Wall Street. Satan is hoping to draw everybody with a tendency toward greed, materialism, and the desire to play with other people’s life savings to one place, where he can hang out with people who understand their priorities in life.
Sure, he figures he’ll get them later in another place, but you can’t beat the night life in New York City and Satan gets lonely down in the firepits.
