Posted on 10/18/2014 12:03:30 PM PDT by lifeofgrace
In Part 1, I briefly discussed the origins of Halloween and debunked a few myths about the holiday. In Part 2, I covered how Halloween ruins kids and why you shouldn’t observe it. In this final part we’ll see how Halloween is destructive and fruitless.
3. Halloween celebrates fear, darkness, and mayhem.
Masks obscure. Costumes disguise. It’s okay for kids to pretend they are someone else, when they play. It’s even fun to dress up. But take a night when everyone is in disguise, and it’s all about secrecy. And fear. The purpose of Halloween is to scare and be scared.
The old neighborhood haunted house has now become a $6 billion industry. Attractions rivaling theme-park production values are all over the country. Scaring is big business. There’s a difference between thrills and scaring. Riding roller coasters, water slides, zip lines, or skydiving are thrills. Standing in a dark room, becoming disoriented, having hot moist air blown on your neck, seeing a bit of pyrotechnics and flash-bangs, then having someone in a creepy costume jump out at you with a bloody knife is not a thrill, it’s a scare. Once you’ve done the scare, the adrenaline rush is gone. Being scared for the sake of scariness is useless. Do you know anyone who goes through these haunted houses 20 times? How about Space Mountain, can you do that 20 times? I have, and the thrill is there every time.
Scaring my kids without teaching them to overcome fear doesn’t help them; it can actually harm them. There’s no value to experiencing fear for fear’s sake.
Halloween was not always such a tame holiday, and it rewards bad behavior and encourages hooliganism.
Do you know how trick-or-treat started? It was self defense. Back at the turn of the 20th century, Halloween was celebrated by Irish immigrants (remember, Roman Catholics), who went around in drunken mobs committing acts of vandalism and general mayhem. To combat this, merchants got together and started having festivals around the holiday. They targeted children, encouraging them toward less destructive behavior by handing out candy. And so it is today.
Halloween is a dumbed-down version of beast-night. Drunk teenagers and college students do plenty of damage. The insurance industry labels Halloween as the worst night of the year for vandalism. From simple pranks like toilet-papering your house, to serious crime like spray painting your car, Halloween is a time when crime is tolerated, and bad behavior is encouraged. Trick-or-treat is the training ground for more serious mischief as kids get older.
What’s a little mischief, you say? Let them be kids, you say. Most kids trick-or-treat and don’t pick up more serious crime. But some do. If there were a jaywalking day, I wouldn’t have my kids break the law simply because everyone was doing it. How many times have you heard “if Bobby jumped off a cliff….?” Yet it’s okay to egg Bobby’s (parents’) house or TP his yard on Halloween. Just a bit of mischief. If you want to raise a miscreant or a thug, no problem, at least you’re not a hypocrite. Everyone else? What is Halloween teaching our kids?
Fear, darkness and mayhem.
There’s one more, bonus reason why I don’t celebrate Halloween, and you shouldn’t either. Consider this a freebie: 4 reasons for the price of 3.
4. Halloween is incompatible with the Bible.
Only the Biblically illiterate would celebrate Halloween. If you call yourself a Christian, then I’ll safely assume you’re not interested in following pagan or Satanist beliefs. But you’re not celebrating those beliefs, right? You say you’re celebrating the Catholic feast day? Just so you know what that is, here’s what you’re celebrating, from Catholic Online:
Catholics celebrate All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day in the fundamental belief that there is a prayerful spiritual communion between those in the state of grace who have died and are either being purified in purgatory or are in heaven (the 'church penitent' and the 'church triumphant', respectively), and the 'church militant' who are the living. [emphasis mine]So what, it’s purgatory, you say. Purgatory is malarchy. There’s no such place. You can’t pray the dead into Heaven any more than you can pray the dead sinner out of Hell. There are only two destinations for the departed soul in the Bible: Heaven and Hell. This idea of being forgiven through Christ in this life yet not being pure enough to enter Heaven in death is unbiblical and ridiculously flawed; for it to be true either Christ’s forgiveness is incomplete (it’s not, see John 3:16), or our living bodies carry our mortal sins beyond the grave for the elect in Christ (they don’t, see Romans 7:5).
When you die, your eternal fate is cast. That’s the whole reason Christians preach repentance in Christ. If you can put off your repentance until after you die and then “do time” in Purgatory until you’ve “repented enough” then nobody would enter Hell—they’d all be in Purgatory waiting for us to pray them out. The Bible doesn’t support this, and the Bible doesn’t support Halloween. There’s no “pray for the dead and the dead will pray for you.” Pray instead for the living and leave the dead to God.
1 John 4:18 reads “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 1 John 4:8 says “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” If you celebrate Halloween, you celebrate fear. If you have fear, you don’t fully have love. And to the degree you are not full of love, you don’t know God.
The best reason for a Christian to not participate in Halloween: celebrating Halloween distances you from God and everything God is, desires, and loves. Halloween is the absolute opposite of God and His plan. The quickest way to ignorance is separation from God.
Halloween is the only day on the calendar dedicated to the ignorant. Embrace Halloween, and you are embracing ignorance of God, ignorance of everything good, everything bright, warm, illuminated, and glad in your life. You are embracing fear, darkness, death and mayhem.
I cannot, and never will, observe Halloween, and unless you’re ignorant, neither should you.
Here we go again!
I do admit that in the last 20 years, Halloween in American inner cities has been a disaster - called Devil’s Night. Of course, this Holy Day was never meant to be that. It’s simply a very European attitude towards honoring the dead. Which I do every Halloween. A candle for a loved one! And a bit of candy for a sweet child at the door dressed up in her finest.
Dude needs to get a life, there are important things to worry about!
Ah, the yearly “Halloween is eeevil” article.
Well he does have a point there. For the past several years I've purchased candy that ultimately had to be thrown away since I never had any trick or treaters.......and I don't eat candy.
We, and some of our neighbors go all out to make it as fun and interesting as possible.
When we can, we find ways to include a little political education as well.
Making demos look as scary as they really are, etc.
When costumed kids come trick or treating to your door on halloween, what do you do?
Sorry, I only read the excerpt as that was plenty.
I was ruined as a kid? That seems odd as I have lived a long, happy and fruitful life. My daughter is quite well-adjusted too.
Obsession with evil gives evil the power to dwell in your mind. I suggest you turn away from evil and think positive.
No kidding.
This crap reeks of liberalism.
I was big on halloween as a kid. Not so much now. But my favorite ride at Disney is “the haunted mansion”, the ultimate haunted house ride:
When hinges creak in doorless chambers,
And strange and frightful sounds echo through the halls.
Wherever candle lights flicker, though the air is deathly still,
That is the time ghosts are present, practicing their terror with ghoulish delight!
Welcome, foolish mortals to the haunted mansion!
Muahaha!
CC
Sounds like you're doing it wrong.
For the last few years, every October someone, who has forgotten their childhood, comes up with this crap. As far as I'm concerned, these are folks that feel that a smile or the laugh of a child is somehow an affront to our Lord. I shake my head and wonder at the smallness of some people.
Here we go again.
This is becoming as predictable as a political advertising and every bit as boring.
It’s harmless,but some lawn displays go too far with their fascination with death.
I never even considered having my kids involved in Halloween. I just saw the roots of it, the overtones of evil, and that was enough for me. Thanks, but no thanks.
I don’t make a big deal of it. It’s just something that never appealed to me. As well, my kids are just fine. In fact, as Christians, they appreciated my going against the flow and standing up against it. I was quite taken aback that there were only 2 other families in our little private Christian school who didn’t participate. To me it was a no-brainer.
Ha! Here at the Jersey Shore we had an ancient Haunted House at one of our oldest amusement parks. You rode on shaky trolleys through the dark and spooks would pop out at you at various intervals. Completely unscary but somehow charming of a time gone by. Hurricane Sandy destroyed it, unfortunately.
I had a friend who had three tombstones on her front lawn for Halloween decorations, with the name of each of her three kids on them. That just blew me away.
Those heathens are goin’ ta HEY-Yell. They probably even go to a church that don’t a have an old lady playing organ music. (/sarc)
Some people are really bothered by the idea that other people might be having fun.
One thing my local nursery does is sell clay skulls at this time of year. They build them high into a pyramid. Every year I tell them: it looks like the killing fields of Cambodia - completely unappealing. They simply don’t get it. A pumpkin, a scarecrow, a ghoul...but skulls? Really ugly.
As they would say on a Geico commercial, “Halloween is stupid because it doesn’t have a brain.”
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