Putting Christ back in... Halloween?

Every year about this time, evangelicals start stepping up the pressure on Christians to discourage them and their children from participating in Halloween, an event that they see as celebrating Satan.  Some of the devout even believe that demonic curses can be transmitted via Halloween candy.  This has made the candy manufacturers sit back, in the fashion of Jabba the Hutt, and say, "Your fundamentalist mind-tricks will not work on us.  Bo shuda."  Then they give a nasty throaty chuckle and respond by bringing out the Halloween candy even earlier each year, until eventually they'll be putting out next year's candy on November 1 of this year.

Most of the rest of us just seem to find the whole thing unintentionally hilarious.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Paul Hermans, Halloween in Uikhoven 27-10-2020 19-07-07, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The evangelicals, who in this fight see themselves in the role of Luke Skywalker, are not going to give up and let themselves be eaten by the Sarlacc (i.e. Satan), so every year, they gird their loins and prepare for battle.  This year's sortie, which I swear am not making up, is called "JesusWeen."  At first I thought, especially given the cringe-y name, that this was some sort of parody site intended to ridicule the fear-mongering, but it seems to be entirely serious.  Meant to encourage Christians to do something more than hiding inside and locking the doors on Halloween, JesusWeen suggests some bold and proactive steps, to wit:

• handing out Bibles or scripture verses instead of candy;
• putting up signs in your town, encouraging people to give up participating in Halloween;
• having prayer circles with neighborhood children instead of joining in trick-or-treating;
• and going door-to-door on Halloween night, evangelizing and trying to get the demonic-candy purveyors to see the error of their ways.

All of which makes me wonder if these people have ever met any actual children.  I don't know about you, but when I was a kid, if my friends and I had gone trick-or-treating, and a family had handed out scripture verses instead of mini-Milky Way bars, they would still be trying to find their house underneath the mass of toilet paper.

You have to kind of admire the JesusWeen people for their Daniel-in-the-lions'-den approach to winning a battle against impossible odds.  And however medieval their beliefs seem to be, no one can accuse them of being in the Dark Ages with respect to electronic networking. They have a JesusWeen chat, are on Twitter (@JesusWeen), and have several videos on YouTube.  They seem quite optimistic -- their website says, "Jesus Ween (Oct 31st) is expected to become the most effective Christian outreach day ever and that's why we also call it 'World Evangelism JesusWeen Venue: In Every Country, Every City, Every Street, Every Home.'"

I dunno.  That seems kind of like wishful thinking to me.  I'm doubting that Bibles are ever going to be the draw for kids that candy is.  My guess is that no one who wasn't already a believer is going to have some kind of epiphany because of JesusWeen, and once you get a reputation for inviting trick-or-treating kids into your house for a prayer circle, you probably won't be getting many visitors on Halloween night, except maybe the police.

So that's the news from the evangelical movement.  Whatever else you can say about these people, they're consistent -- once they decide something, they follow through.  I almost hope that we have some show up at our door on Halloween night, just for the amusement value.  Maybe I'll hand out Richard Dawkins books.

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A tale of a bizarre cocktail party

Today is Halloween, and in honor of that spookiest day of the year, I'm going to tell you a story.

It's a story about something that happened to me about thirty-five years ago, when I lived in Olympia, Washington, and it's definitely in the top five creepiest things I've ever experienced.  I still don't have a particularly good explanation for it, and it still makes me shudder to remember.

I was about twenty-five at the time, working a stupid desk job I hated, and to lighten the daily drudgery I decided on a lark to take an art class at Evergreen State College.  Now, I'll say up front that I'm not much of an artist.  My attempt in my biology classes to draw an animal on the whiteboard led to its being christened by students as the "All-Purpose Quadruped" because no one could figure out if it was a cow, a dog, an armadillo, or whatever.  But even considering my lack of talent, I thought an art class could be fun, so I went for it.

One of the students in the class was Laura L______.  Laura was between thirty-five and forty, at a guess, and in very short order she kind of attached herself to me.  There was nothing remotely sexual about it; I never got the impression she was coming on to me, or anything.  It was more that she hung on my every word as if I was the smartest, most interesting person she'd ever met.  We discovered a mutual interest in languages -- and it was off to the races.

Now, I hasten to state that at twenty-five, I simply wasn't that interesting.  I was a young, naive guy who had no idea what he wanted to do with his life, and at that point was just kind of flailing around trying to make enough money to pay for rent and groceries.  So as flattering as it was, even then I recognized that there was something weird and over-the-top about Laura's attentions.  Still, it was a sop to my ego, and I didn't do anything to discourage her.

About three weeks into the art course, I wrote a letter to a college friend of mine (remember, this is in the days before email and texting), and along with the usual newsy stuff, I mentioned the art class and "this weird woman named Laura."  "Next time we talk, I have to tell you more about her," I wrote.  Nothing more in detail than that -- a passing couple of sentences that didn't capture how peculiar she was, nor even in what way she was peculiar.

Around that time, Laura asked if my wife and I wanted to come over to her house, that she and her husband were throwing a party for a few friends, and that she'd love it if we came.  I said okay -- again, with a mild feeling of trepidation, but not enough to say "oh, hell no" -- and she seemed really excited that I'd agreed, and was bringing along my wife.

Saturday came, and we showed up at Laura's house.  And... Laura's husband, and the other guests, were all the same kind of way-too-bright-eyed intellectual that she was.  The topics were all over the place -- science, linguistics, art, history, philosophy, you name it.  And just like conversations with Laura, everything I said was met with "that's fascinating!" and "wow, that is so cool!"  Looking at it from the outside, you'd have sworn that I was Stephen Hawking or something.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons David Shankbone creator QS:P170,Q12899557, House party in Denver Colorado, CC BY 3.0]

After about forty-five minutes of this, both my wife and I got freaked out enough that we decided to leave.  We invented some kind of excuse -- I forget exactly what -- and told Laura we had to go.

"Oh, I'm so sorry you can't stay," she said, her forehead creasing with dismay.  "Are you sure?"

I said I was sure, was "so sorry, too," and told her I'd see her next class.  She didn't argue more, but definitely looked disappointed.  My wife and I talked all the way home about how bizarre the evening had been, and how relieved we both were to leave -- even though nothing happened.

Two postscripts are what make this story even creepier.

About three or four days after the party, I got a letter from my college friend.  Best I can recall, the relevant passage went something like this:

I know you'll probably think this is ridiculous, but I felt like I had to say something.  When I read what you said in your letter about your classmate Laura, I got a real premonition of evil.  There was immediately a feeling that she meant you harm.  I know how skeptical you are about this sort of thing, so you'll probably laugh and then throw this letter in the trash, but I felt like I couldn't simply not tell you.

The second thing is that Laura never came back to the art class.

The first time she missed, I just figured she was sick or something (and was actually a little relieved, because I didn't want to get into it with her about why we'd left her party).  But then another class came, and another, and she never showed up.

I never saw her again.

My wife said, "Maybe she realized that she'd missed her chance to get you, and you weren't going to trust her enough to give her another opportunity."

I actually thought, several times, about driving past her house, just to see what I could see (I had no inclination to knock on her door).  But each time, the idea that she might see my car driving past gave me such a chill up my backbone that I didn't do it.  Where she lived wasn't on my way to work or anything, it was quite a bit out of the way, so I never did go back.

To this day, I don't have a good explanation for this.  Were they just weird, over-enthusiastic intellectual types, and it was all just innocent overcompensation for social awkwardness?  Was it a cult?  Were they planning on drugging our drinks or something?  If we'd stayed longer, were they going to drag out a display of Amway products?

I honestly have no idea.  But even though nothing happened -- "strange, extremely happy smart people freak out young couple," is really about the extent of it -- I still can't think of this incident without shuddering.  I've many times considered turning it into a short story or novel, but I have never been able to come up with a convincing ending.

And on that note, I'll end by wishing you a spooky, scary, and fun-filled Halloween.  Just be careful about befriending odd middle-aged women in your art classes.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a really cool one: Andrew H. Knoll's Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth.

Knoll starts out with an objection to the fact that most books on prehistoric life focus on the big, flashy, charismatic megafauna popular in children's books -- dinosaurs such as Brachiosaurus, Allosaurus, and Quetzalcoatlus, and impressive mammals like Baluchitherium and Brontops.  As fascinating as those are, Knoll points out that this approach misses a huge part of evolutionary history -- so he set out to chronicle the parts that are often overlooked or relegated to a few quick sentences.  His entire book looks at the Pre-Cambrian Period, which encompasses 7/8 of Earth's history, and ends with the Cambrian Explosion, the event that generated nearly all the animal body plans we currently have, and which is still (very) incompletely understood.

Knoll's book is fun reading, requires no particular scientific background, and will be eye-opening for almost everyone who reads it.  So prepare yourself to dive into a time period that's gone largely ignored since such matters were considered -- the first three billion years.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Trick or tract

Halloween is this Thursday, so you know what that means: pumpkin decorations and skeletons and ghosts everywhere, candy of all kinds for sale in the stores, people excitedly coming up with creative costumes for parties and trick-or-treating, and the extremely religious telling people that indulging in any of the above will doom them for all eternity.

This time the harbinger of fire and brimstone is none other than Ken Ham, who runs Answers in Genesis and is most famous for "Ark Encounter," a museum (to use the term loosely) in Grant County, Kentucky that has as its mission convincing people that a book documenting the beliefs of a handful of Bronze-Age sheep herders is the best resource we have for understanding science.  According to Ham, here's the way it all went down:

• The Earth is only about six thousand years old.  Any evidence to the contrary is either flat wrong or was put there by Satan to fuck with us.
• In a matter of a few weeks, Noah built a boat capable of holding two of each of the nine-million-odd species on Earth, using only hand tools and materials he could find in the desert.   [Nota bene: The Ark Encounter itself, supposed to be a modernized replica of the Ark, took several years and a few million dollars to finish.  And that was using huge work crews equipped with power tools.]
• The dinosaurs died because they missed getting aboard the Ark.  Oh, and before the Fall of Man, the dinosaurs were all peaceful herbivores.  T. rex, apparently, used his Big Nasty Pointy Teeth to munch on carrots.
• It rained enough to cover the entire land surface area of the planet, and after forty days all the water just kind of went away, presumably down a big drain in the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean or something.
• Afterwards, the kangaroos, dingoes, and wombats hopped, skulked, and waddled their way back to Australia unaided, conveniently leaving behind no traces of their thousand-mile journey.

But other than that, it makes complete sense.

Looks to me like there's an issue here with the lions.  Maybe they're gay lions, I dunno.  But even though I applaud them for coming out of the closet, it would still be problematic with respect to rebuilding the lion population, post-Flood.

So anyway, we're already on shaky ground, reality-wise, with Ken Ham weighing in on pretty much anything.  That didn't stop him from giving the devout some suggestions on how to deal with the upcoming Day of Evil.  "One way you can make the most of this once-a-year opportunity is by giving gospel tracts to children and/or their parents," Ham said.

Yeah, that'll make you popular in your neighborhood.

He also recommended buying (from his online store -- of course) some "million-dollar bills" printed with a picture of a T. rex on one side and a picture of the Ark on the other, with edifying messages such as:

• Have you ever lied, stolen or used God’s name in vain?  If so, you’ve broken God’s law.  The penalty for your crimes against God is death and eternal hell because God is holy and just.
• If you have engaged in lust, this is the same as committing adultery.  God sees you as guilty of sin.  The penalty of sin is death and eternity in hell.
• We broke God's law, but Jesus paid our fine.  Proving He satisfied God's justice, He rose from the dead.  Now God as Judge can legally dismiss our case!

Now wait a moment.  "Legally?"  What does that even mean in this context?  Isn't the whole point of the Bible that God can pretty much do whatever he damn well pleases, and we humans just have to suck it up and deal?  Seems like if God wanted to forgive us, he would have just done it, and not gone through the whole nasty crucifixion business.  So that "Jesus paid our fine" thing has never made a scrap of sense to me.  It's kind of like if your brother pissed your dad off, and your dad spanked you.  Then he says to your brother, "You're forgiven now."  When you understandably object to all of this, your dad says, "Well, I had to spank someone, right?"

In any case, I wouldn't throw away your bags full of Snickers bars and replace them with gospel tracts.  For one thing, it seems like a good way to get your house egged.  Second, warning trick-or-treaters about the dangers of lust seems to me to be targeting the wrong audience, even if you think lustful thoughts are evil, which I don't because that would mean that 99% of humanity is destined for eternal hellfire.

So have fun with your costumes and scary decorations and whatnot.  Honestly, it seems a lot more sensible than all the stuff Ken Ham is trying to get you to believe.  And that's even if you account for the gay lion couple.

************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a really cool one: Andrew H. Knoll's Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth.

Knoll starts out with an objection to the fact that most books on prehistoric life focus on the big, flashy, charismatic megafauna popular in children's books -- dinosaurs such as Brachiosaurus, Allosaurus, and Quetzalcoatlus, and impressive mammals like Baluchitherium and Brontops.  As fascinating as those are, Knoll points out that this approach misses a huge part of evolutionary history -- so he set out to chronicle the parts that are often overlooked or relegated to a few quick sentences.  His entire book looks at the Pre-Cambrian Period, which encompasses 7/8 of Earth's history, and ends with the Cambrian Explosion, the event that generated nearly all the animal body plans we currently have, and which is still (very) incompletely understood.

Knoll's book is fun reading, requires no particular scientific background, and will be eye-opening for almost everyone who reads it.  So prepare yourself to dive into a time period that's gone largely ignored since such matters were considered -- the first three billion years.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Candy bars for Satan

Happy Halloween to all of my loyal readers.  I'm saying this because "Happy Scary Day Of Your Choice" sounds ridiculous, so if you don't celebrate Halloween, you can feel free to get your knickers in a twist.

Because it's a day long associated with legends about ghosts and hauntings and demons and so on, Halloween is not a big favorite with the ultrareligious types.  It's interesting, however, that the day itself has a (sort of) Christian origin; in the Celtic calendar, there were twelve months of thirty days each, which left five days at the end that belonged to no month.  Because of this, they were thought to be days when all of the natural laws were suspended, the dead came back to life, and other special offers.  The culmination was the last of the five days, Samhain, on which your local priest was supposed to get together with the pious members of the village and fight back the forces of evil, after which there was a big celebration complete with high-fives about how they beat the hell out of the demons yet again.  This practice was later co-opted by kids, who would disguise themselves as demons and go from door to door, demanding a gift (a treat) in exchange for their not vandalizing your house (a trick).

The next day, November 1 (All Saints Day) was a holy day, celebrating the start of the new year and the triumph of good over evil, and a time to remember the dead, at least the ones who were buried on sanctified ground.  All Saints Day is sometimes called "All Hallows Day," so the day before is "Hallow's Eve."

And thus Halloween was born.

[image courtesy of photographer Jarek Tuszynski and the Wikimedia Commons]

So the whole thing has a connection to some at-least-sort-of-Christian mythology, although its roots go back much further, to the pagan rites of the ancient Celts.  I suppose I can see how the ultrareligious would object to the whole thing.  But this still doesn't explain Linda Harvey, televangelist and founder of Mission:America, who said last week that you should definitely not let your kids participate in trick-or-treating, because it could...

... turn them gay.

I kid you not.  Harvey said:

Yes, America’s recent exaltation of Halloween as a festival second only to Christmas owes a lot to promotion by homosexuals and their new favorite comrades — gender-confused males and females. 

And as usual, the “LGBTQ” folks have no problem using any tool, Halloween included, to corrupt children.

How did she figure all this out?  It's hard to say, although she says she escaped from the magnetic lure of evil only by the skin of her teeth:

When I was 14, I had my own bizarre encounter with the enemy spirit world by experimenting with a Ouija board.  Since my parents were Episcopalians, I received no warnings of spiritual danger because at that time, they lacked a mature, informed level of faith. 

But when my friend and I asked the “board” questions, some unseen force pushed the pointer around.  At times, our fingers were hanging on for dear life as it flew around the board, often spelling out messages. 

I had little biblical background to understand what this presence surely was.  Now, I can only thank God for mercifully protecting me from being drawn more deeply into this spooky and alluring world where the unseen has real, tangible power.

What "this presence" was is the well-studied ideomotor effect, where people's conscious or subconscious thoughts drive their bodies to respond, often in such a way that it feels "reflexive" or out of their control.  So there's nothing much to a Ouija board, and it's only able to tell us what we already knew (or what we might imagine).  No evil "presence" required.

Oh, and Linda: that's a hell of a dig at the Episcopalians, not to mention your own parents.  I guess "ecumenism" forms no part of your religious practice, then?  Nor familial respect?

Fortunately for Linda and her followers, there's an alternate celebration available.  It's called -- and I am so not making this up -- "JesusWeen."  The idea is instead of dressing up in costume and getting candy on the evening of October 31, you dress in conservative clothing and pass out religious study materials.

I just bet the neighborhood kids are going to be busting down the front door to participate in that.

Anyhow, if you're planning on going out trick-or-treating tonight, be ready for attacks from Satan and coming back gay.  I guess we all have to decide what kind of risks we're willing to take.  And this is just me, but if I heard that a neighbor was passing out full-sized Mounds bars, I would throw caution to the wind with respect to either of these.

Halloween hijinks

Happy Halloween!  The day that little children are rewarded for wandering around in the dark wearing plastic masks with improperly lined-up eyeholes by being given enough sugar to induce diabetes in the entire population of China!

Which, of course, makes me sound like a grumpy curmudgeon.  To be honest, it's the crass commercialism that bugs me, not the holiday itself.  I actually rather enjoy a good costume, and have been known to don one myself, on occasion.

So I don't have anything against Halloween.  I just wish the stores would hold off on pushing candy and plastic pumpkins and the like until a little closer to the day itself.  (And the same goes for Christmas decorations, which I've already seen in our local grocery store.)

But of course, there are people who have strong feelings about Halloween.  That it's not just an innocent fun time of putting on Elsa costumes and wandering around saying "trick or treat."  That it amounts to...

... giving your child directly to Satan.

At least, that's the contention of Linda Harvey of Mission America.  Harvey warns us that that any kind of participation in Halloween is tantamount to dropping your kids straight into the maw of hell:

It's Halloween time again, and parents need to use caution and discernment about their family's participation in Halloween events.  Here's why: it's all about the spiritual safety of our children...  Halloween celebrates the spirits of darkness like no other event.  Demons are real.  So is Satan.  And these forces are more active than ever in recent times in America because we are inviting their activity in our lives.  So here’s my question about Halloween: Why hand your children to dark spiritual powers on a silver platter?  Oh, sure, maybe your smaller children only collect candy at a few houses, but down the road, what will Halloween be in their lives?  It's sure to develop into trick-or-treating with their friends, minus parents, and then... parties.  And what goes on at a Halloween party?  I've been talking for years about the dangers for years, and I have not changed my mind; the dangers are more prevalent all the time.

No, not parties!  Anything but that!  What is the world coming to?  We start with little kids in Captain America suits, and before you know it, we have teenagers holding demonic parties with satanic blood sacrifice rituals.

Slippery slope, that.

Then we had the ever-amusing Rick Wiles, claiming that even donning a costume makes you a Satan-worshiper:

You really see this present in South America, where the Catholic Church recognizes very paganistic holidays and practices.  I've traveled to some Third World nations and developing nations, and I've seen some pretty bizarre things, the locals marching down the street in their costumes, devil masks and Satan and skeletons and so forth, and you stand there and you think, "What a bunch of uncivilized pagan barbarians!"  But you realize they're lost, they're spiritually lost, they don't know the truth, they don't know god, they don't know Jesus Christ.  But then you come to America on Halloween, and you go, "What a bunch of uncivilized pagan barbarians!"  It's the same group of people!  They're worshiping their god.  And that's what we have to tell people.  They're worshiping their god, their father.  Lucifer.  That's the reason they're drawn to this day.  It's because he is their father.  

Thus weaving together fear about demons with cultural insensitivity, prejudice, and white privilege to make a picture that is far uglier than some guy wearing a devil suit.

And the whole thing wouldn't be complete without Pat Robertson weighing in:

It used to be called All Saints' Eve.  Now we know it as Halloween...  That’s the day when millions of children and adults will be dressing up as devils, witches, and goblins … to celebrate Satan. They don’t realize what they’re doing.

So anyhow, that's this year's message from the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Paranoia.  Myself, I'm not going to wear a costume this year, but it's not out of any fear that I'm offering myself up to the Dark Lord.  It's more that living out in the middle of nowhere, we never get any trick-or-treaters, so the only ones I'd be in a position to scare are my wife and dogs.  My wife already thinks I'm odd enough, and my dogs would probably just give me the Canine Head-Tilt of Puzzlement and then take a nap.

Instead, I'm thinking of going with a friend of mine to investigate a claim that our high school auditorium is haunted, something I've heard more than once from people who've been there at night.  I downloaded a ghost-hunting app on my iPad, so I should be all set.  Plus, our local fortuneteller consulted her mystical future-reading device (a "Magic 8 Ball").  She asked if we were likely to detect a ghost if we went to the auditorium on Halloween night, and was told "My Sources Say Yes."  So I think we've got a sure bet, here.

Halloween 2.0

Well, Halloween is this Friday, and you might want to be aware that if you're planning on going trick-or-treating, there are some folks who won't be playing along.

And I don't just mean leaving their lights off and their front doors locked, something that I have to admit I occasionally do.  Dealing with kids in school all day leaves me unenthusiastic about their coming to my house at night.  Call me selfish, but there you are.

But this year, it may go further than that, if folks listen to the urgings of actor Kirk Cameron.

Cameron, you're probably aware, has brought his sort-of-high profile to the Christian apologetics scene, and has partnered with evangelical wingnut Ray Comfort (he of the "bananas therefore god" argument) in a ministry called The Way of the Master.  He has been vocal in his disbelief in evolution, and his attitude that homosexuality is "unnatural, detrimental, and ultimately destructive to the foundations of civilization."

And now he's decided that he needs us to retool Halloween.

[image courtesy of photographer Gage Skidmore and the Wikimedia Commons]

He's not the first, of course; Pat Robertson has for years claimed that Halloween is evil, and in fact went on record as saying that candy companies were hiring witches to curse Halloween candy, and that if children ate it, "the curse would enter them."  But this hasn't slowed the sale of candy and costumes, nor put a significant dent in the number of kids participating in trick-or-treat, so I guess it's only natural that the next option is to turn the day into something more in line with Christian beliefs.

Christians, he said, have to take back the holiday, because it was originally intended as a day to show that Christianity had defeated Satan.  "Early on, Christians would dress up in costumes as the devil, ghosts, goblins and witches precisely to make the point that those things were defeated and overthrown by the resurrected Jesus Christ," Cameron says.  "The costumes poke fun at the fact that the devil and other evils were publicly humiliated by Christ at His resurrection."

Well, not exactly.  Halloween traces back to the Celtic celebration of Samhain.  The Celts divided the calendar into twelve months of thirty days each, which left five days at the end that didn't belong to any month.  During those five days, the ordinary laws of nature were suspended -- the dead could rise, ghosts came back to haunt places or people, monsters walked the roads.  On the night of the last of the five days, the priests and their followers would drive the evil spirits back where they belonged, bringing right order back into the world.  And food was left out as both propitiation for the spirits (in hopes that they'd leave households alone) and for the priests and their helpers, so the tradition of going from place to place to get free food was worked into the whole thing.  Once the beliefs in the actual spirits began to wane, and especially when Christianity was introduced and the celebration had to be sanctified, it slowly morphed into the harmless kids-running-around-in-costume that we have today.  (Followed, it must be noted, by "All Saints' Day" -- the day in which holiness is restored and the good guys are back in charge.)

So Cameron is wrong.  Unsurprising, honestly.  But then he goes on to urge his fellow Christians not to buy into the dark side of Halloween, but to throw "the biggest party on the block" to reclaim the holiday.  Part of this involves not handing out candy, but handing out religious literature.  "Halloween gives you a great opportunity to show how Christians celebrate the day that death was defeated, and you can give them Gospel tracts and tell the story of how every ghost, goblin, witch and demon was trounced the day Jesus rose from the grave," Cameron says.  "Clearly no Christians ought to be glorifying death, because death was defeated, and that was the point of All Hallows Eve."

Whoo-wee.  The kids will just be lining up to get to your door, Mr. Cameron.  What first grader wouldn't pass up mini-Snickers bars and Reese's Pieces in order to get a gospel tract or a flier from a local church?  Hallelujah to that, right?

Of course right.

But Cameron never lets a little thing like "reality" intrude on his vision.  In fact, he's already got his next salvo planned.  In November, he's releasing a film called "Saving Christmas," presumably all about how we atheists are determined to undermine everything that's holy about the season by wishing people "Happy holidays."

So anyhow.  I doubt Cameron's ideas for reworking Halloween are going to catch on, frankly.  Too many people enjoy it like it already is, and every year it happens and almost never do you see some kid in an Incredible Hulk costume become possessed by Satan.  Bellyaches abound the next day, to be sure, but I doubt that any of them are due to demons.

Boo.

It is not, perhaps, particularly insightful to state that Halloween is a weird holiday.  However, in this case I don't mean "weird" in the sense of "spooky," but in the sense of "why the hell do people actually enjoy this?"

That said, it's not that I don't enjoy participating myself.  Last year, for example, I spent the entire school day wearing a vampire costume, complete with fake blood, a cape, and white stage makeup.  The only downside was that I couldn't wear the plastic teeth during class because they had a regrettable tendency to make me drool, something that I bet never happens to real vampires.

So far today at my school, I've seen a variety of witches, several clowns, a few butterflies, a pink inflatable pig, a Viking, and Barack Obama.  I found Obama the scariest, and I don't mean that as some kind of sly political statement.  It's odd, but I've always found rubber masks of all kinds - even the ones intended to be funny - to be seriously creepy.  I think it's the fact that they look human (the best ones look really human) but even while the person inside the mask talks, the expression never changes.  I, and I suspect a lot of people, react viscerally to facial expressions, or lack thereof; we're wired to pick up cues from people's faces, and when there are none there to pick up, it's disconcerting, even if you know that the mask is just rubber and that there's a real (and friendly) person underneath. It's no coincidence that we describe the affect-less faces of the insane "mask-like."  The whole thing is reminiscent of the concept of the "uncanny valley," about which I wrote last year (you can read the post here if you're interested).

Even so, I should perhaps mention that I collect masks.  I have brought home masks from most of our many overseas travel adventures, and they are hung all over our walls (usually in places that take you by surprise and so elicit a bigger reaction when you come around the corner or close the door).  I also really enjoy costumes, especially well-done or clever ones.  (At a Halloween party years ago, a biology teacher friend of mine and his wife, who was a physician's assistant, came dressed in an odd fashion.  He was wearing the pants from a set of military camouflage, and nothing else.  She was wearing the top half (with very short shorts).  When I asked what they were, he replied, "Guess. We're a human body part."  After some questioning, I discovered that they were the upper and lower G.I.)

But I do love being scared, and also being scary.  My mask collection is one of my most prized possessions, even though -- or perhaps because -- it's kind of creepy.  I thoroughly enjoy a good horror movie, and in my fiction writing I frequently make a valiant attempt to scare the absolute bejeezus out of you.  This tendency, which if not universal, is at least very common, begs an explanation.  Why do we like to be scared?

It probably varies from person to person, but I can say that for myself, it's kind of a reassurance that I'm safe and sound.  I don't gravitate toward slasher films -- to me, those are too close to the kind of thing that actually happens, and I have no real desire to watch people, even if they are actors, getting gruesomely massacred.  But a really atmospheric, spooky film about the supernatural is a wonderful experience, largely because after it's over (whew) I can look around at my comfortable house, and think, "thank god this house isn't haunted by ghouls."  And if, later that night, there are some bumps and creaks, and I get scared again, I still know that when I wake up the next morning the sun will be shining (well, okay, this is upstate New York; at least the sun will be rising) and I will still be safe.  I'm alive and unhaunted, and I can get a cup of coffee and revel in the fact that my disbelief in evil spirits has been once again supported by events.

In my opinion, the best exploration of this need to be absolutely terrified was The X Files.  I'm not referring to the movies, both of which (to me) were disappointing, but the television series.  Like any series, they had a few dogs, but the best of them rank right up there with the scariest things I've ever seen.  If you're an aficionado, you might remember the episode "Patience" -- about the batlike creature who waits for twenty years to avenge its murdered mate, and goes around killing all the people who had anything to do with its death.  At the end - when the only remaining survivor is in his cabin in the woods, and hears a noise in the fireplace, and goes to investigate - there's nothing's there, but then he turns around, and OH MY GOD THE BAT THING IS RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIM.  Quite possibly the single scariest moment in the history of television.  Even if you knew it was going to happen, it was the quintessence of all of those childhood fears of the monster under the bed, or what might be looking in the window if you pulled the curtains apart just a crack in the middle of the night.  I don't know about you, but I had a hard time opening the back door to let my dogs in after watching that.  I love my dogs dearly, but it was a sore temptation to let them fend for themselves outside that night.

Then again, we have the added benefit that watching horror films burns calories.  A study just released by some researchers at the University of Westminster found that you can burn a good 200 calories just sitting there shivering.  The best burn, they found, came from watching The Shining (which I would agree is a damn scary film), followed by Jaws and The Exorcist.  Of course, this is probably offset by the tendency of most movie watchers to nosh on pizza, popcorn, and beer while watching, but still, it bears mention as one benefit of indulging in a scary movie every so often.  And there's also, of course, the fact that if you're watching the movie with your significant other, the inevitable huddling together on the couch that these movies usually cause could result in some further, um, calorie-burning activity after the movie ends.

So you can see that there are a multitude of benefits that come from being frightened.  It's only human -- the evidence is that we've been telling scary stories for a very, very long time, and in virtually every culture studied.  Still, it may be that some of you don't share this need to periodically be scared to the point of pants-wetting.  If so, you may find this post nothing more than mildly mystifying.  To the rest of you, I will only wish you a happy Halloween, and sweet dreams tonight.

The wrath of Pat

Last week, I commented that politics was the only venue where you could make a statement that was demonstrably false, continue to defend it, and not lose your credibility.  It may therefore not be a coincidence that in the job of political commentator, you can make statements that are neither true nor false, but completely insane, and people will keep listening to you.

I'm referring, of course, to Reverend Pat Robertson, who is wildly popular despite being crazy as a bedbug.  And I don't think that people are listening to him for the humor value, either, the way people will sometimes read Ann Coulter just because they can't wait to hear what she's going to blame liberals for next (I have money that eventually she'll find out a way to blame liberals for the Black Death).  With Pat, though, I have a feeling that the people who listen to him mostly agree with what he's saying, which is a scary thing, given that he's said the following:

• The Haitian earthquake was a "blessing from god" because the Haitians had sworn a pact with the devil during the French Revolution.
• Be careful about studying martial arts, because in some martial arts traditions the practitioners "inhale demon spirits" prior to working out.
• Hurricane Katrina was sent by god to "teach a lesson to the American people" because they support laws that allow abortion.
• Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered a massive stroke because god was punishing him for his negotiating with the Palestinians.
• We should nuke the US Department of State and send in covert operatives to assassinate Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.

So you have to wonder why we would expect anything he says to make sense, but only after spending a lot more time wondering why anyone listens to someone who seems to have a giant wad of Laffy Taffy where most of us have a brain.

Be that as it may, Pat's latest pronouncements are still making news, and this time he's turned his Roving Rant Machine onto the subject of Halloween.  Halloween is often a sticky subject with evangelicals, who don't like its occult origins.  You'd think, however, that sooner or later they'd relax about it, now that it's turned into little more than a day for kids to wear plastic Buzz Lightyear masks with eyeholes that don't line up, wander around in the dark being followed by parents who would really much rather be home watching television, and collect enough candy to meet the diabetes needs of the nation for another ten years.  All pretty innocent, no?

No.  Christians shouldn't participate in Halloween, Pat says, because "Halloween is Satan's night.  It's the night for the devil."  He goes on to say that, "we (Christians) don't believe in hauntings, we don't believe in ghosts, we don't believe in all that stuff," and then in the same breath follows it up with, "(Halloween) is skeletons, it's like, it's the dead rising."

So, let me get this straight; you don't believe in ghosts, but you do believe in the dead rising?

Of course, it's not the first time that a prominent evangelical has spoken vehemently against Halloween.  Two years ago, Kimberley Daniels of the Christian Broadcasting Network implied that not only was Satan abroad on Halloween, even the candy wasn't safe:

During Halloween, time-released curses are always loosed.  A time-released curse is a period that has been set aside to release demonic activity and to ensnare souls in great measure ... During this period demons are assigned against those who participate in the rituals and festivities.  These demons are automatically drawn to the fetishes that open doors for them to come into the lives of human beings.  For example, most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches.  I do not buy candy during the Halloween season.  Curses are sent through the tricks and treats of the innocent whether they get it by going door to door or by purchasing it from the local grocery store.  The demons cannot tell the difference.

Given the volume of candy sold during October, I wonder how the candy manufacturers manage to curse it all. They must employ thousands of witches, working round the clock, saying satanic prayers like mad over moving conveyor belts. I guess the witches have to pray quickly, or they'll back up the whole process, and end up flinging un-cursed candy about in the manner of Lucille Ball.

In any case, I find it baffling that people listen to these people, and downright astonishing that anyone believes it.  On the other hand, is it really so inconsistent with what the bible actually says?  One thing you have to say for people like Robertson and Daniels: they walk the talk.  The bible is full of stories of people, and sometimes entire cities, who did something naughty in god's eyes and got the crap smitten out of them.  God had no problem with the righteous killing the unrighteous, including unrighteous infants ("Happy the man who takes your babies and smashes them against a rock!" [Psalm 137:9])  Natural disasters were always attributed to "god's will."  Demons and evil spirits were everywhere.

So, honestly, once you decide that the bible is literally true, it's a reasonable result that you'll believe all of this sort of stuff.  Reverend Pat is just the furthest reaches of the logical chain that begins with the assumption, "the bible is god's revealed truth."  It is perhaps the rest of the Christians that have some 'splainin' to do.