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.

Rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's

A lot of what you hear talked about under the heading of "religious freedom" seems to me to boil down to "reasonable expectations of what a particular profession or institution's responsibilities are."

Take, for example, the kerfuffle last week over a Killeen, Texas public school administrator's choice to take down a poster of Linus (of Peanuts fame) that included the biblical quote he recites in A Charlie Brown Christmas: "For unto you is born this day in the city of David a savior which is Christ the Lord.  That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown."  Dedra Shannon, the school nurse who had put up the poster, said she was told "it had to come down because it might offend kids from other religions or those who do not have a religion" and that the administrator's decision was "a slap in the face of Christianity."

When I saw this posted on social media a few days ago, it was accompanied by a comment to the effect that diversity and tolerance are apparently all fine except when they apply to white Christians.  Todd Starnes, who wrote the Fox News article I linked above, clearly agrees.  "Those who holler about tolerance are the least tolerant of all," Starnes writes.  "Public schools are supposed to be in the education business and Ms. Shannon was simply educating students about the true meaning of Christmas."

My question is why on earth public schools should be in the role of teaching religion in the first place, except insofar as it has an impact on history and literature.  Imagine, for example, if a teacher decided to teach children the "true meaning of the holiness of the Qu'ran" and put "There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet" on the door of the classroom.  My guess is the same people who flipped out about the removal of the Linus poster would flip out in the other direction (and rightly so).

Schools are not in the business of religious instruction.  And why should they be?  Don't churchgoers get enough religious instruction in their churches?  You wouldn't go to the doctor's office and object when they didn't give you advice on your investments -- it's outside of the purview of their responsibilities.  Likewise, it's not the job of a public school to give students instruction about the "true meaning of Christmas."

Then we have the story about Linda Harvey, founder of Mission: America and host of a radio show of the same name, who lamented last week that she had nowhere to shop now that so many businesses have stood up for equal treatment of LGBT individuals.  Harvey said:

For any Christian who wants to spend hard-earned dollars with family-friendly, Christian-affirming retailers, restaurants and service providers, the list is growing shorter all the time.  I stopped shopping at Macy’s in 2011 after learning about the retailer’s grossly unjust policy against women. 

Macy’s management said ‘yes’ to a transsexual young man’s demand to change in the women’s dressing room and rejected a Christian employee’s attempt to block his inappropriate access, even firing her because of her principled actions...  Then there’s Target.  Where to start?  Selling ‘gay pride’ T-shirts a few years back was bad enough, but Target is now ‘proudly standing’ with homosexuals and cross-dressers who want to change America’s 1964 Civil Rights Act to add ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’. 

Joining Target in supporting this anti-American, pro-deviance legislation are Amazon, General Mills, Google, Facebook, Paypal, Levi-Strauss and others.

Well, first, saying "I am not going to discriminate against LGBT people" is not synonymous with saying "I am anti-Christian."  No one at Target, or Macy's, or anywhere else is trying to convince anyone of anything except that you should buy what they're selling.  All they said is that they're going to make sure that the rights of their workers and customers are protected regardless of their sexual orientation.

So she, too, is expecting an institution to do something that's outside its purview -- expecting department stores to adhere to Christian values, as if retail outlets were branch offices of the local church.  The point is that the stores are saying they'll serve anyone; what Harvey wants is not only to follow her own code of ethics, but to mandate that everyone else does, too.

The same kind of thing applies to B&B and bakery owners who won't serve gays, and strict Catholic pharmacists who won't sell people birth control.  None of those people are in the business of dictating others' ethics and morals; they are in a service job and therefore should expect that under anti-discrimination statutes, they would be expected to serve any customer who comes in.  And in fact, a B&B owner, baker, or pharmacist who went into the business unaware that they would have customers who differed from them in terms of religion or sexual preference is, in a word, dumb.

C'mon, a pharmacist who didn't know he was going to be expected to sell birth control pills and condoms?  Really?

But all of this is cast as part of the more general War on Christianity, as if telling people "you can't act in a bigoted fashion" is some kind of infringement of their rights to practice their religion.

It comes down to the general rule that you are completely free to attend the church of your choice and adhere to any and all rules the religion requires, but you are not free to expect that businesses and public institutions adhere to any of it.  So honestly, Linda Harvey is completely within her rights not to patronize Target et al.; but expecting that department stores are going to be venues for "Christian values" is a little ridiculous.

So I guess if you believe that tolerance of diversity equates to intolerance of the majority, you'll never be without something to be offended by.  Me, I'd rather try to get along with the people around me than constantly harp on the fact that everyone isn't like me.  All in all, I think it's a much happier way to be.

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.