When you are a teenager, it seems very knowing the first time you think back to that scene in Peter Pan where they all go "I do believe in Fairies, I do believe in Fairies, I do I do I do believe in Fairies," or to Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, and you say -- belief in God is just as ridiculous as all of those things!
News flash -- there's a reason all of those things are strangely reminiscent of debates around belief in God. Because all of those things were created by nineteenth and twentieth century writers and journalists who were transparently using them as code for belief in God. They are all drenched in the rhetoric of faith and doubt that derive from Victorian and Edwardian debates between skepticism and evangelicalism.
More people, and for more of recent history, have entertained serious doubts as to the existence of God that is dreamt of in the philosophy of the typical American teenager. The doubt about God came first. Belief in God became relegated to the ranks of the juvenile sometime in the reign of Queen Victoria. Santa Claus and the rest of them were a later addition. They entered our public consciousness as an in-joke among faithless adults. So there.
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