Mindless people are generally always mindless, I suppose, but no day is as perfect as Halloween for the direct observation of that mindlessness. Let me count the ways.
1. The fascination with things generally considered unreal. Most people among us never take the time to study to any appreciable extent whether witches, werewolves, goblins, sorcerers, vampires, ghosts, and the like are (or were ever) real. Even so, however, they toy with them annually as if their existence is established fact—or worse, as if the question of existence is neither important nor compelling. This is reminiscent of the annual toying with the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, in which cases the devotion to each entity continues, even though the unreality of each is unquestioned. Wouldn’t a more mindful society give more thought to such questions?
2. Idle Threats. Just what is the value of threatening “trick or treat!” when no tricks are planned or carried out? And what are we doing when we encourage children to play such a game? For every 100 children making such threats, how many of them understand what “trick or treat!” means? Either way, it is an unthinking affair. On the one hand, little Johnny is repeating “trick or treat!” without knowing that it carries a threat he never intends to carry out. On the other hand, little Johnny is repeating a threat that he understands, but that he has no intention of carrying out. Both are silly at best. Besides all this, have we lost our disdain for extortion? Is it now a play thing with which to entertain our children?
3. Glorification of evil. If you ask “On what holiday mischief and creatures of the night celebrated?”, you’re sure to get “Halloween” for an answer. This raises two questions in my mind:
- Why is anyone inclined to celebrate evil things at all, on any night?
- Why is there no holiday on which paradigms such as kindness, service, honor, or honesty are celebrated with the vigor of Halloween?
Indeed, what does this say about our society?
4. Astounding conflicts with popular religions. Most people in America believe in God and practice or adhere to (to some extent) one of the major world religions, in its various forms. In all major religions, God is supreme and Satan is his arch enemy. Similarly, in all such religions, witchcraft, sorcery, vampirism, divination, as well as mischief, theft, vandalism, threats, entitlement, and the like are prohibited and shunned as acts associated with Satan. How is it, then, that so many millions of professing believers celebrate such an obvious contradiction as Halloween? Indeed, if a real demon or vampire were chasing them, wouldn’t they beg the God of Heaven to save them from this evil threat? In contrast to this, however, to dress their children as such hardly gives pause to most. And what better evidence do we need that ours is a mindless society?
5. Incongruity. So many will say, “Ah, but when we celebrate Halloween, we do it for the fun, and not to celebrate evil.” I’ve always been disappointed with this response. Rather than having the intended calming effect on me, it simply serves to demonstrate how mindless is the person employing it.
Suppose that I sent you an invitation to a gathering for Adolf Hitler’s birthday. I invite you to dress up in your favorite Nazi costume, to muster your best German accent, and to bring your favorite German dish for dinner. When you arrive, you see my house all decorated with Hitler regalia, included scores of photos of Hitler’s death camp atrocities. And let us suppose that I have gone to the extravagance of decorating my house like a gas chamber, and that I have dug an open mass grave in my front yard, and have filled it with paper-mache “bodies” .
Now I ask you, how will you feel at my party? Will you have any conflict of conscience? Will you be repulsed by the celebration of such a profound evil? And if you should try to leave early because you are uncomfortable with the setting, will you be at all comforted when I tell you, “Oh, we’re not here at all to celebrate Hitler’s evil; we’re just here to have fun.”?
How is it that so many millions seem so ready to dismiss Halloween as mere “fun” when they would likely have a palpable moral conflict with the Hitler party? This is simply incongruous, and is indicative of our national mindlessness.
5. Co-opting. I’ve run across several groups who have Halloween parties, but who call them something else. For instance, one church calls it a “Costume Party”. They even discourage their members from wearing the typical ghost and monster costumes. Yet they hold the party on the same night as all the “Halloween Parties”, and they invite their friends, neighbors, and relatives to it, obviously in competition with other events. The idea is that “While the rest of the world is mindlessly celebrating Halloween, our fellowship will be having a righteous gathering that won’t violate anyone’s conscience.”
Interestingly, however, nary a word is ever heard from this particular church condemning the celebration of Halloween by others. Nor do they insist that their members refrain from sending their kids out trick-or-treating. Therefore, we can observe that it is not their intention to take a stand on the issue. Rather, they seem more interested in fitting in with everyone else, having virtually the same party on the same day, but merely calling it something else.
When I was in a group like this, I eventually came to consider it unconscionable, and even after I was talked into “going along to be unified” on a couple of occasions, my objection never died. The further irony here is the amount of energy that was invested by others in the group to get me to go against my own conscience to partake in these events. In a church culture where purity of heart was said to be paramount, the reality was that it was quite acceptable to have a guilty conscience as long as you were going along with the congregation’s expectations.
Not Rocket Science
When it comes to Halloween and the justifications and motivations for it, one gets the idea that no “rocket science” was involved. I am always impressed with a certain story line in Steinbeck’s East of Eden, where a group of Chinese philosophers spent 10 years in consideration of the accurate translation of a certain word in a Bible passage. With Halloween, however, one hardly gets the impression that churches all across the land have convened an ongoing council of their best and brightest to determine God’s will for their churches regarding this pagan holiday. Indeed, when I have heard people dare to explain why their churches officially celebrate Halloween, their profusion of words are thinly-veiled attempts to obscure the obvious nature of the holiday itself.
One imagines some sort of Old-Testament-era fictional account in which a person was caught with several wood or stone idols in his house—which was strictly forbidden as the worship of foreign gods was anathema to the Law of Moses. “Oh, you must understand that my possession of those idols in no way proves that I actually worship them as do the pagans. No, I keep them only because I enjoy the artwork.”
Or imagine that a man is on trial for stalking a movie star: “Your honor, the fact that my client had hundreds of photos of the movie star stapled to the walls of his house does not at all indicate that he had any sort of unhealthy obsession about her.”
Or how about a man on trial for domestic terrorism?: “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the defense wants to make it perfectly clear to you that just because the defendant attended the terrorist group’s annual gala every year for the last 20 years, this in no way indicates that he holds to any of their paradigms.”
Or, to leave the world of hypotheticals, how about a president accused of associating with a politically-radical preacher, having sat for twenty years of his sermons?: “The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation.” Thus did Obama imply that never once in 20 years of hearing Wright speak, had anything politically untoward come out of the man’s mouth. Thus are we to assume that Obama, in spite of a 20-year association with this man, was left completely untarnished by it. (Lest the reader think I am a “Republican”, I have serious issues with Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Kennedy, and so forth…right back to Washington.)
Obama’s excuse sounds absurd, even to Obama supporters, yet this is exactly the nature of the excuse made by so many with regard to their Halloween practices. “Sure, I’ve been doing it all my life, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it.” They will claim that there is nothing to blame them for, that they are not obsessed with the holiday, and that it’s all just “innocent fun”. Suggest to them that the sit out Halloween this year, and not celebrate it, and will you find the same open-mindedness they claim to have when the celebrate it? Will they treat the idea of not celebrating as of equal merit to the idea of celebrating it? If not, they are not as objective as they claim to be. Like the smoker who says, “Quitting smoking isn’t hard; I’ve done it hundreds of times”, one gets the feeling that what the Halloween celebrator says and what he really believes are not the same thing.
What I’m suggesting here is that it is philosophically and morally unhealthy to try to separate one’s paradigms from one’s entertainment. “Oh, no, I would never worship Satan”, one might assure us of his paradigms, and yet he participates in an annual pageantry that appears on the surface to glorify satanic things—all, of course, in the name of “good, clean fun”. This is the same sort of thinking that allows some people to hold the idea of marital fidelity in one hand, while exercising adultery in the other and claiming that there is no contradiction between the two.
Many points could be made here, but this year, I’ll leave it simply at this: Halloween is, at best, a mindless affair for millions and millions of people. Why do they celebrate evil as if there could not possibly be any moral, ethical, religious, or logical implications or consequences of such? A mindful people would do no such thing. Religious considerations aside, the sheer mindlessness of it is troubling enough.
Never mind the fact that many millions of Jesus devotees believe that he has not, in nearly 2,000 years’ time, managed to defeat the inferior Satan whose shenanigans they celebrate on Halloween. That they are so fundamentally wrong about the facts of their own religion makes it easy to see how a mere holiday issue such as Halloween could get by completely unexamined.
NOTE: Halloween constitutes about an $8 Billion industry. It seems to be working splendidly for the marketers. Read about it here.
Jack
