Ping!
So, he's saying tha one cult's excess excuses another evil.
Great read, great points-Thanks!
There’s no excuse to not have fun on Halloween. If any children show up dressed with Hussein stickers we can redistribute their candy to someone else.
It’s just a holiday for children.
If you’re Christian and you choose not to celebrate Halloween that’s your business. They’re your kids. I can see both sides.
The Christianizers didn’t just base the new calendar around the pagan calendar because they like the pagans... I think more to the point was that they wouldn’t have been able to impose the change without fitting the new celebrations into the existing ones. It was a compromise.
Really good piece though. Thanks.
We have a long tradition of tales, about ghouls and goblins, around campfires and in front of fireplaces. I still remember “Bloody Bones” and share it with the younger generation on occasion. I think it was harmless, I don’t remember any mutilated animals, decapitated corpse (okay maybe one, read about it for days so it was highly unusual) nor people particularly deranged.
I think the most disturbing part of Halloween now is the danger to the children who engage in the practice. It is very sad that one has to discard unpackaged goodie, look for needle marks and check “goodies” with a metal detector. That is why a lot of celebrations are confined to supervised carnivals. Some are advocating an alternative to Halloween, similar to first night for New years, which is also a good idea. It is all in good fun and kids (mostly) love it.
I’m currently working on my Christian defense of pornography.
bump for later
Haven’t read the article yet, but I’ll post my 2 cents anyway.
We have two daughters. One is 17 and the other is 2.
We disallowed any Halloween celebration for our first daughter because we believed it to be the devil’s holiday. No costumes, no candy, no trick-or-treat.
Every year we found something else for her to do, usually the “Harvest Party” at church where she had a good time with other kids.
We were pretty uptight about Halloween.
The past few years, we have changed our view. As long as WE are not celebrating Satan, who gives a rip whether or not we allow any Halloween festivities?
My wife will take my 2 year-old trick or treating tonight. She’s dressed as a fairy tale princess.
See:
Candy and kids dressing up like Dora the Explorer or whatever other character is popular on TV that year.
Some killjoys want to project more onto the Halloween than that, but kids don't care.
Halloween is based on the fact that it is the night before All Saints Day.
In prior times it was believed that the forces of darkness were allowed, semi-free, rein on this night.
Goblins, witches, zombies, vampires, etc were allowed to roam freely throughout the countryside.
The practice of costumes was to disguise who was, and was not, one of the evil ones.
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, etc.
The treats were to appease the evil ones with a, sort of, sacrifice.
We are today, sort of, too literate and sensible to believe that evil flies on the wings of the wind on All Saints Eve, but the tradition lives on.
....These early missionaries actually liked the people they were converting. They liked their folkways, and their culture. They liked their music, their dances, and even their local death festivals — or liked, at any rate, everything about them that could be liked without compromising the faith. Interestingly enough, we know from history that Pope Gregory sent his missionaries out with explicit instructions that anything in the local culture which was not actually incompatible with Christianity was to be left strictly alone....the truth is that the whole evangelization of Western Europe (325-1100 AD) was accomplished under this principle.
....The pagan death festivals were superceded in just this way by two Christian holy days based on a similar theme — All Saints Day (November 1) and All Souls Day (November 2). The pagans found it natural to remember their departed loved ones at this time of the year, and the Church wisely allowed them to maintain continuity with the old ways. To say, however, that the Church merely “Christianized” the existing paganism is to miss the point badly. As St. Paul dramatically points out in his Epistle to the Romans, paganism already had a good deal of inchoate truth in it already. What the Church actually did was to gather up some of these inchoate truths, sift out what was patently unusable, and then point the pagans to the final fulfillment of their ancient longings as revealed in the faith of Christ....
....You might say that Halloween is an “echo-holiday.” Halloween is to All Saints & All Souls Days as Mardi Gras is to Ash Wednesday — sort of their outlaw second cousin. Halloween is that part of the ancient death festivals which couldn’t quite be comfortably domesticated. It’s the part that still wants to run wild on the autumn winds, to soap windows and overturn outhouses. And yes, like Mardi Gras, this urge is difficult decently to restrain at times; the sowing of wild oats often produces crops that have to be reaped by the whirlwind. But just because a thing is subject to abuse doesn’t mean the thing itself is evil....
....[Jehovah's Witnesses] teach their disciples to hate and fear all holy days and holidays alike, and will have nothing to do with either Christmas or Easter for precisely the same reasons that Evangelicals are now despising Halloween. And this is the reason I have found it worthwhile to mount, from time to time, a Christian defense of Halloween.
Ping for reference.
BTW, the article should be renamed “ A Catholic defense of H’ween”...it would make much more sense.
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Obama Says A Baby Is A Punishment
Obama: “If they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.”
