No Santa lacktheists in foxholes

 

- Yes, Santa Claus lacktheists do exist.
I gave all four of them Xmas gifts once!
- Funny, my problem is to make people
stop believing in me!

A common kind of atheists on the web are jokingly known as "lacktheists". They "merely lack a belief in God or gods", and hence refuse to offer any positive evidence for their disbelief, instead aggressively arguing that "the burden of proof is always on the theist", while they can just sit in their armchairs rejecting it. In other words, lacktheism is an incredibly lazy position to take. It´s also clearly disingeneous, since no true lacktheists exist. *All* atheists *really* offer positive evidence for their nonbelief, making lacktheism a rhetorical pose. 

If lacktheists "merely lack a belief in God or gods", they should logically be Santa Claus lacktheists. In other words, they should offer no positive evidence against Santa´s existence, instead taking an agnostic position, while (of course) rejecting all purported evidences from true believers in Santa (who are usually under the age of five). 

But of course, no lacktheist really does that. But why not? Santa Claus is clearly a divine being, isn´t he? He has supernatural powers (flying sleigh and reindeer), omnipresence (gives gifts to millions of children simultaneously), omniscience (knows what all kids want for Christmas) and even supernatural helpers (angels, gnomes and sometimes the Devil). So logically there should be "Santa Claus lacktheists" out there. And indeed, I *did* manage to find a few in the YouTube commentary sections. But I think it can be safely assumed that 99.99% of atheists are hard/positive/Gnostic atheists towards my man Santa!

One possible response from the lacktheists is to argue that while *positive* god-claims are indeed open to positive refutation, negative god-claims are not. But since virtually all god-claims are positive, this reduces lacktheism to the 0.01% of the human population who believe in a god too abstract, inert or hidden to make positive claims about. So the defense fails.

A more interesting question is: why is lacktheism a thing at all? Why is this particular rhetoric so alluring to the fedora-wearing subset of the atheist population? :P