Posted on 10/20/2005 11:09:48 AM PDT by Millee
An Ellettsville family whose home is decorated for Halloween contacted police after someone placed on its porch a flier that suggests Halloween praises the devil.
Dalene Gully told Indianapolis television station WRTV that she took offense to the flier, which was placed outside her home by the House of Prayer Church of Bloomington.
"I started reading it, and I was very, very upset by it. I found it very accusatory and very threatening," Gully said.
The church's pastor, Larry Mitchell, said the people who left the flier would have preferred to talk with Gully, but she wasn't there.
Mitchell said the church didn't intend to upset the Gully family, but rather tell people that Halloween isn't harmless fun.
"Halloween is not fantasy," Mitchell said. "We're training up our children, and obviously this lady was trained up in this. Halloween seems like it is taking just as much prominence as Christmas."
The Gully family filed a complaint with the Ellettsville Police Department. The incident also prompted the family to install an alarm system at the home, the station reported.
"This is my home, and I like Halloween. If I want to decorate my home, I have every right to decorate my home," Gully said.
You want Hobbes???
Leviathan in 1668:
Part III. Of a Christian Commonwealth.
Chap. xxxviii. Of Eternal Life, Hell, Salvation, and Redemption.
[12] And first, for the tormentors, we have their nature and properties exactly and properly delivered by the names of the Enemy (or Satan), the Accuser (or Diabolus), the Destroyer (or Abaddon). Which significant names (Satan, Devil, Abaddon) set not forth to us any individual person, as proper names do, but only an office or quality, and are therefore appellatives, which ought not to have been left untranslated (as they are in the Latin and modern Bibles), because thereby they seem to be the proper names of demons, and men are the more easily seduced to believe the doctrine of devils, which at that time was the religion of the Gentiles, and contrary to that of Moses, and of Christ.
[13] And because by the Enemy, the Accuser, and Destroyer, is meant the enemy of them that shall be in the kingdom of God, therefore if the kingdom of God after the resurrection be upon the earth (as in the former Chapter I have shewn by Scripture it seems to be), the Enemy and his kingdom must be on earth also. For so also was it in the time before the Jews had deposed God. For God's kingdom was in Israel, and the nations round about were the kingdoms of the Enemy; and consequently, by Satan is meant any earthly enemy of the Church.
Part IV. Of the Kingdom of Darkness
Chap. xlv. Of Demonology and other Relics of the Religion of the Gentiles.
[10] Another relic of Gentilism is the worship of images, neither instituted by Moses in the Old, nor by Christ in the New Testament; nor yet brought in from the Gentiles; but left amongst them, after they had given their names to Christ. Before our Saviour preached, it was the general religion of the Gentiles to worship for gods those appearances that remain in the brain from the impression of external bodies upon the organs of their senses, which are commonly called ideas, idols, phantasms, conceits, as being representations of those external bodies which cause them, and have nothing in them of reality, no more than there is in the things that seem to stand before us in a dream. And this is the reason why St. Paul says, "We know that an idol is nothing": not that he thought that an image of metal, stone, or wood was nothing; but that the thing which they honored or feared in the image, and held for a god, was a mere figment, without place, habitation, motion, or existence, but in the motions of the brain. And the worship of these with divine honour is that which is in the Scripture called idolatry, and rebellion against God. For God being King of the Jews, and His lieutenant being first Moses, and afterward the high priest, if the people had been permitted to worship and pray to images (which are representations of their own fancies), they had had no further dependence on the true God, of whom there can be no similitude; nor on His prime ministers, Moses and the high priests; but every man had governed himself according to his own appetite, to the utter eversion of the Commonwealth, and their own destruction for want of union. And therefore the first law of God was: they should not take for gods, alienos deos, that is, the gods of other nations, but that only true God, who vouchsafed to commune with Moses, and by him to give them laws and directions for their peace, and for their salvation from their enemies. And the second was that they should not make to themselves any image to worship, of their own invention. For it is the same deposing of a king to submit to another king, whether he be set up by a neighbour nation or by ourselves.
[14] An image, in the most strict signification of the word, is the resemblance of something visible: in which sense the fantastical forms, apparitions, or seemings of visible bodies to the sight, are only images; such as are the show of a man or other thing in the water, by reflection or refraction; or of the sun or stars by direct vision in the air; which are nothing real in the things seen, nor in the place where they seem to be; nor are their magnitudes and figures the same with that of the object, but changeable, by the variation of the organs of sight, or by glasses; and are present oftentimes in our imagination, and in our dreams, when the object is absent; or changed into other colours, and shapes, as things that depend only upon the fancy. And these are the images which are originally and most properly called ideas and idols, and derived from the language of the Grecians, with whom the word eido signifieth to see. They are also called phantasms, which is in the same language, apparitions. And from these images it is that one of the faculties of man's nature is called the imagination. And from hence it is manifest that there neither is, nor can be, any image made of a thing invisible.
[15] It is also evident that there can be no image of a thing infinite: for all the images and phantasms that are made by the impression of things visible are figured. But figure is quantity every way determined, and therefore there can be no image of God, nor of the soul of man, nor of spirits; but only of bodies visible, that is, bodies that have light in themselves, or are by such enlightened.
[16] And whereas a man can fancy shapes he never saw, making up a figure out of the parts of divers creatures, as the poets make their centaurs, chimeras and other monsters never seen, so can he also give matter to those shapes, and make them in wood, clay or metal. And these are also called images, not for the resemblance of any corporeal thing, but for the resemblance of some phantastical inhabitants of the brain of the maker. But in these idols, as they are originally in the brain, and as they are painted, carved moulded or molten in matter, there is a similitude of one to the other, for which the material body made by art may be said to be the image of the fantastical idol made by nature.
Part IV. Of the Kingdom of Darkness
Chap. xlvii. Of the Benefit that proceedeth from such Darkness
[1] Besides these sovereign powers, divine and human, of which I have hitherto discoursed, there is mention in Scripture of another power, namely, that of "the rulers of the darkness of this world," [Ephesians, 6. 12] "the kingdom of Satan," [Matthew, 12. 26] and "the principality of Beelzebub over demons," [Ibid., 9. 34] that is to say, over phantasms that appear in the air: for which cause Satan is also called "the prince of the power of the air"; [Ephesians, 2. 2] and, because he ruleth in the darkness of this world, "the prince of this world":[John, 16. 11] and in consequence hereunto, they who are under his dominion, in opposition to the faithful, who are the "children of the light," are called the "children of darkness." For seeing Beelzebub is prince of phantasms, inhabitants of his dominion of air and darkness, the children of darkness, and these demons, phantasms, or spirits of illusion, signify allegorically the same thing. This considered, the kingdom of darkness, as it is set forth in these and other places of the Scripture, is nothing else but a confederacy of deceivers that, to obtain dominion over men in this present world, endeavour, by dark and erroneous doctrines, to extinguish in them the light, both of nature and of the gospel; and so to disprepare them for the kingdom of God to come.
Question the Practice of Halloween... Or the Christian Practice of Satanism
feed them the most unhealthful things you could give a child to eat
October 31 is my birthday. I plan to go off low-carb and consume as much unhealthful stuff as I can fit on a plate. And I plan to carve the scariest jack-o-lanterns I can manage. Now, where are my Michael Moore and Ted Kennedy patterns?
Suicide on the installment plan?
I think all that sugar is bad for kids. There are too many fat children these days. Soda pop, chips, candy; sugar sugar, sugar...
It is really stupid.
Enjoy your birthday indulgence!
If that yanks your chain, then, yes.
Thanks! :-)
You're not one of these people who gives unsalted pretzels to kids on Halloween are you?
I was actually thinking about passing out cigarettes! LOL!
Wow, I can call the police whenever I'm offended?
So if my Jewish friends invite me over for Rosh Hashanah dinner, I should refuse, right?
You mean this church and it's members didn't have anything else better to do than to attempt to preach to some 6 yr olds and their soccer moms?
I find that really hard to believe. And I think they take Halloween WAYYY to seriously too.
God allows millions of people to be born as Hindus or what have you. So I really doubt he has a problem with it.
Wicca is a modern form of the pagan nature religions of northern Europe. The beliefs called New Age originate in the Theosophy and Spiritualist movements of the Victorian period.
But there's not much dispute regarding the date of Easter because it's pinpointed in the Gospels themselves -- we know it was right at the Passover. The Church had a good deal of debate regarding how to set the date of the Easter celebration, because of course Passover being based on the Jewish lunar calendar moves around with respect to both the old and modern Western calendars. But they did figure out a formula, it moves around a little (that's why it's called a "moveable feast") but it stays very close to the actual date. More than you wanted to know about how to calculate the date of Easter.
The date of Christmas is far more uncertain, but believe it or not it's in the ballpark. A list of dates for priestly service in the Temple was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and if you figure out when John the Baptist's father Zechariah served as a priest, you can calculate from there because we know from the Gospels that he was told of his son's conception while he was serving in the Temple, and that Elizabeth was six months pregnant when the Virgin Mary conceived. It works out to some time in December . . . obviously it's much fuzzier than the Passover date, but it wasn't just picked out of thin air as a pagan holiday.
(And A.Pole rightly observes that ANY day you pick will be on or near SOME pagan holiday -- they had a lot of them.)
I think the best cure for those folks is to laugh at them!
Or how 'bout a message from the local mosque on the front porch of the house with decorated with the cross, with quotes from the Koran about non-believers?
This is a problem of English/Germanic languages. In Greek Easter is called Paskha (Pas'ha) from Hebrew Pesah, Pasover, in French Pâques, in Italian Pasqua.
The fact that Jesus was resurrected around this time of year made it a great excuse to replace the pagan festivals of "Eostre" with a Christian celebration of the resurrection.
Anglosaxons who worshiped Eostre became Christians much LATER than Greeks, Romans etc . And King James Bible is the not original Bible :) Trust me. As to the church having "authority" to establish a holiday, the Puritans in England would have disagreed.
Puritans were a sect which came into existence sixteen centuries after the Church was established by Jesus Christ. They were grew up withing the Church of England under the influence of Calvin.
It was invented out of whole cloth by a dude named Gardner, who just wanted to meet chicks.
Naturally, like everybody in England does, he claimed an ancient origin for his new religion, asserting that it had been passed down in secret from Ye Olde Tymes. But there's absolutely no support for that proposition, and if you do a little textual analysis it's clear that he picked up a mish-mash of his predecessors Stukely, Williams, Price, and Crowley.
It's just not possible for anyone with a solid historical education to take Wicca seriously. (That's not to say that they don't get in trouble messing with things they don't understand . . . )
Nope - radar love.
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