Years ago, a mother who had recently joined up with some nut-job Christian church told me how she would no longer allow her daughter to go out on Halloween because of its Pagan origins. I said that is would be too bad that she would no longer be able to celebrate Christmas or Easter, since both of those holidays also used to be Pagan celebrations. She seemed confused, as if she actually thought that December 25 was the day that Jesus (if you believe) was born, and that the date of his execution wandered about the calendar from year to year, and for some reasons rabbits hiding eggs were involved. I’ll admit that when I was young, these details didn’t seem odd, but then High School came along, and now agnosticism followed.
I know she was just trying to do what was right, but it becomes a sort of pointless excercise when she (and indeed so many others) don’t even realize the origins of the holidays that they do celebrate. But since Halloween has a particularly dark history, and since most Christians do not realize they are worshipping a repackaged faith, I suppose this shouldn’t really be all that surprising.
When a faith tries to help people, or give them sound advice and counsel when they need it the most, it matters very little if the belief is factual or even sensible. And as long as religion keeps its beak out of secular affairs, and tries in earnest to help people, then they can worship the images of Jesus on toast all they want to and I would never care.
But of course, they do not restrain themselves, and somehow think that they are actually helping people by laying enormous guilt trips on everyone, as if we nailed Jesus to a cross or something. But it is not only Christianity, most religions lay guilt trips, and charge those how do not conform with heresy, or worse, being a complete non-believer in whatever faith they happened to be, and of course whatever faith they happen to be is the right one. And they should know.
If people want to have harvest festivals instead of Halloween celebrations, that is their business entirely up until the point where they try and tell everyone else that whatever it is that they are doing is wrong. What strikes me so odd about their revulsion to more frightening Halloween costumes and parties is that they could look at what has happened as a victory, whereas many years ago Halloween was a day to celebrate evil, and now we just laugh in evil’s face and say suck it. Whatever the origin of the holiday, we have made it something else entirely.
Sure, the costumes can be scary, but is scary the same thing as evil? Take a look at the CEO’s wearing suits, and legislators, and lobbyists, and all the rest of that scum. No matter how expensive and nice their clothes may be, they wreak havoc on the world in the name of profit, but then so does religion.
Now that is scary.
