Why do faeries get the shaft?

You may have heard the usual disphemistic term Magical Sky Fairy; many find it obnoxious and make a lot of fuss about it, arguing that there's nothing fairy-like about the gods they believe in, how the great flood is a universal myth, pointing out bits and pieces of conventional wisdom that they assert proves their case, the whole shabang.

More interestingly, though, many people actually avoid drawing that parallel, as if it were ridiculous; and hence we have the Dragon in the Neighbour's Basement, Russel's Celestial Teapot, and lots more such examples. Unicorns do get a fair share of publicity too, at least in the Invisible image of Her Pink Majesty, blessed be Her Hooves...

It's evident that these examples are not concepts that arose in vacuo: there is such an enormity and other natural phenomena one would expect of a dragon that not being able to perceive one becomes patently absurd, hence the apparent connection. And none can argue that teapots don't have an aptly cozy and even a bit comedical value to them with their bulging china or silver standard forms, all prim and proper, flying in space. As for unicorns, they've always been a bit too fantastical for us not to mention, especially when they exhibit similarly contradictory aspects like being pink and invisible at the same time with the Abrahamic gods, so there you have them.

To that I have to add the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but I digress; the thing is, why do faeries get the shaft?

Let us start with some of the arguments presented: fairies are too childish.

Well, anyone saying something like this is apparently ignorant, as there is nothing childish about the Sidhe or the Redcaps, the Kobolds, the Dryads and Satyrs, the Tuatha Dé Danann, and the like; the Duergar, the Trolls and the Aelfin creatures of folklore were quite as wondrous and terrible, and maybe even less in the latter sense, than any godly creature you'll encounter in most religions. They are the daemons and angels and spirits they had, though, in any and every sense of the word, and that should make us pause for a while and think: why are devas different?

In fact, though, there is nothing different about them: a deva, much like a nymph, a nereid, a mermaid, an oni, a yuki-onna, a rakshasha and so forth, was no different in its essence to the rest of them all - a numinous, roughly if even conceivable entity that conforms to the notion of a global myth like the rest of the whole picture. Ellusive and mutable as they were, these myths have held great sway in our understanding of the cosmos no less that the sort of thinking that allows us to believe that the bus will arrive shortly after we light a cigarette up, or that it will rain in no more than a day after we wash our car.

What is it that makes the various worshipped deities of the world different? Nothing, really: they are no less the figments of our ripe imaginations than the Bluebird of happiness, dragons, vampires, ghosts, and fires that burn endlessly. It's their existence, along with the global myth of the great flood, that we need to remind ourselves of.