Tag Archives: Halloween

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Yet another old man’s rant…

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Photo credit: Getty Images. Unsplash license.

Everyone knows that it’s one of the infirmities of old age to be forever comparing the present to the past – and the past always comes off better. Entertainment was better when I was young… the clerks in stores were more polite and helpful… everyone dressed better… books and movies were better… etc.

Which is all true, undoubtedly. The People in Charge of Stuff Today don’t even deny it – they tell us the old ways were founded on oppression and exploitation. We should be happy to live in a smaller, meaner time now. We’ve got it coming to us.

Still, purely as an intellectual exercise, I can try to name some things I like better about the present.

  • I like having the internet. It makes research a breeze. It’s endlessly entertaining.
  • I like… actually, I can’t think of anything else. All the rest seems diminished and shabby.

Which brings me, in a meandering way, to tonight’s topic (such as it is). Something I’ve probably discussed before here.

At the Viking Festival in Green Bay, I had a conversation with a fellow Christian Viking, one of about my own age.

He talked about getting interested in Norse mythology as a kid. Reading the books, imagining the stories.

“But nowadays there are all these people around who actually worship Thor and Odin,” he says. “It makes it awkward.”

“They took the fun out of it,” I said. He agreed.

Thor was fun when nobody believed in him. Now he’s an object of active worship. Anything I do connected with Thor has become suspect from a Christian point of view. I’ve never worn a Mjolnir, a Thor’s hammer, because I don’t want to look like a practicing heathen. It could do injury to my neighbor’s soul.

Halloween is similar. If there were Christians warning against celebrating Halloween when I was a kid, I never heard of them. We kids dressed up, we Tricked and Treated (not me, living in the country, but I did attend Halloween celebrations at the schoolhouse in town), and it was innocent, because everybody knew witches didn’t exist.

Nowadays, there are lots of people running around calling themselves real-life witches.

It stopped being fun.

Let me be clear – I’ve said this many times – I don’t believe in witches as such. Not witches with magic powers. In terms of magic, I’m a thoroughgoing materialist.

But other people do believe. So it’s become an area where Christians probably ought not to trespass. Just to avoid the appearance of evil.

Thus, Halloween is taken from the children, and given over to adults, who’ve now made it a season of kink. (Or so I’m informed.)

For me, it’s pretty much all about candy now. Halloween means candy – not to give away to Trick or Treaters, but for myself.

At the grocery store yesterday, I found the Christmas candy was already out on the shelves. Including the little ones from Lindt – I can ration those out, just a couple a day, until spring (there’ll be Easter candy later).

Okay, that’s something good we have now that I didn’t have as a kid. Lindt chocolate.

Hey, when civilization is sliding into ruin, you enjoy what you can along the way.

Religion

Happy Halloween, You Filthy Animal

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Here are a couple holiday ideas for you to consider when you can get a moment’s peace tonight.

Professor Collin Garbarino notes the connection Halloween has to Celtic paganism is largely, if not entirely, speculation. “The Celts didn’t write stuff down, and the Romans who did write stuff down didn’t give us much reliable information about the Celts or their religion.” But we do have a solid record of All Hallow’s Eve and All Saints’ Day.

The Protestant Reformation had political ramifications as well as religious ones, notes Professor Adam Carrington. Sola Scriptura supported the rule of the written law and public education so everyone could read the Bible for themselves. “The equality of human beings before God naturally bolstered ideas of human equality in the political realm. This enhanced arguments that the people should be the ultimate human authority since no person was born, or otherwise made by God, superior to another.”

Stay safe out there.

And also this artwork of Nazgul by Anato Finnstark.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Religion, Writing

Writing by Hand, Beastly Boy band, Blogroll, and Fear

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Paul Auster has written a biography on Stephen Crane and several other works without a word processor. He drafts by hand and types a paragraph with a typewriter (via Literary Saloon).

I have shelves of encyclopedias, foreign dictionaries, and all the reference books I use. And I must have five or six English dictionaries of various sizes and editions. I even have slang dictionaries. When I’m really stuck I look at a thesaurus, but it never helps me. I know all those words, but I always think, “Well, there’s one word I’m not remembering that would be better than the one I’m stuck on.”

City of Fear, by Alafair Burke, “a tight, pacy police procedural, in which three Indiana college girls hit New York for their spring break.” One of them doesn’t come back.

The Album of Dr. Moreau, by Daryl Gregory, “deliberately and imaginatively breaks every one of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Rules of Detective Fiction.'” It’s a crazy premise, a genetically engineered boy band who find their producer dead in his hotel room, that apparently works.

Martin Luther: How Luther helped my depression. “I somehow found myself holding a copy of a Luther biography written by Roland Bainton.”

Why should we fear the Lord when perfect love casts out fear?

Halloween meditation: Jesus defines hell as the place when everyone is “salted by fire.”

No matter what you call your church or church movement, I think you’ll go astray if you claim your side is the one breathing life into dead orthodoxy. The message of the Reformation is still needed.

Photo by Andrew Seaman on Unsplash

Fiction, Reviews

Don’t Bob for Apples in Hallowe’en Party

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I picked up Agatha Christie’s Hallowe’en Party recently, because it’s the season for it, and I found the most interesting part of it on the dedication page.

To P. G. Wodehouse

whose books and stories have brightened my life for many years. Also, to show my pleasure in his having been kind enough to tell me he enjoyed my books.

It’s too bad this story isn’t a real zinger. Even a bold or ambitious effort that doesn’t quite pay off would have been good. But Hallowe’en Party is a somewhat fluffy tale that needs content editing.

A thirteen-year-old girl is drowned in a large bucket of water for apple bobbing during a Halloween party. Who would do such a thing? Perhaps it was a disturbed boy–they’re everywhere nowadays. But the girl did boast of seeing a murder a few years ago. Is it possible someone felt threatened and silenced her?

Many pages are spent rehashing mundane details that don’t advance the plot or open cans of red herring. How many characters need to complain about disturbed individuals who should be cared for in psychiatric wards or the dreadful mental health of modern children? “I don’t need to tell you,” they say repeatedly just before telling you the same thing you heard a few pages back.

Add to this Poirot pulling local history out of the air at a few points and his occasional observation on how remarkable this common something is. And why is he wearing apparently sensible shoes when he climbs into the quarry garden on page 85 and not again for the rest of the book, even though he continues to walk all around the place? He says he wears tight, patent leather shoes that hurt his feet because he thinks they present him properly. How did he ever put on the sensible shoes if he can’t do it again later?

My initial guess of the murderer at a third of the way into it proved true. That was unsurprising but good; any other explanation would have ruined the book.

Fiction

‘The English eerie is on the rise’

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A loose but substantial body of work is emerging that explores the English landscape in terms of its anomalies rather than its continuities, that is sceptical of comfortable notions of “dwelling” and “belonging”, and of the packagings of the past as “heritage”, and that locates itself within a spectred rather than a sceptred isle. . . . We are, certainly, very far from “nature writing”, whatever that once was, and into a mutated cultural terrain that includes the weird and the punk as well as the attentive and the devotional.

Robert Macfarlane writes about the eerie lands of England in many art forms, beginning with a good summary of a strange story. (via Alan Jacobs)

Music

Romanian Choral, Folk Music

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If Halloween turns your thoughts to Dracula’s Transylvania, then I have a bit of a remedy for you. This is a recording of part of the Suită Corală din Ţara Oaşului by twentieth century Romanian composer Dariu Pop. This may be only one of the folk songs in the original suite of songs, but both sound and visuals are wonderful.

Uncategorized

Not my usual Halloween

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If I’d known what I was getting into when I agreed to be one of the Vikings present last night at the American Swedish Institute’s annual “Loki’s Bash” Halloween party, I might not have done it. It was only after agreeing that I learned that one of the event’s sponsors was a local paranormal society, and that divination would be performed as part of the festivities.
But I’d given my word, so I set off. As it turns out, it wasn’t so bad. No doubt I was surrounded by people who would have considered me a Nazi if I’d shared any of my views, but that’s a less and less infrequent experience for me. And I don’t think anything went on, in terms of the occult, that didn’t also happen at the Science Fiction cons I attended. In any case, all of that was out of my sight.
What I did see was an endless parade of (mostly) young adults (total attendance, I’m told, was 1,600) adorned in costumes of varying degrees of quality, cleverness, and good taste. A fair number were dressed as they imagined Vikings would be, in keeping with the event theme. Many were identifiable characters from movies and TV shows. Many others, no doubt, were identifiable characters from movies and TV shows I’ve never heard of. Others were puzzles. Some were meant to be puzzles.
Take for instance, my favorite. There was a young woman there dressed in a black dress with white collar and cuffs. She wore a gray wig plaited in two pigtails. And she had an eyepatch and two toy ravens perched on her shoulders.
I finally had to ask. “Schoolgirl Odin?” I asked.
“No,” she laughed. “I knew it was too complicated. I’m Wednesday Addams. But Wednesday is Odin’s day.”
Makes perfect sense when you think about it.
I got home after midnight, and to bed after 1:00 a.m. My alarm clock picked this morning, of all mornings, to lose its bearings and set off its alarm about forty minutes early.
I blame witches.

Religion

The Empty Food of Idols

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One of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s early stories is called “The Hollow of the Three Hills,” in which a woman seeks counsel from a witch and receives nothing but bad news. That appears to be the witch’s point, to break the woman’s heart, and that is the reason I believe her revelations to be complete lies. The story doesn’t say the witch is lying, but I see no reason to believe she isn’t. After all, she is in the service of the father of lies.

Deception is my primary filter for viewing occultic things. On the one hand, trusting the stupid words of a horoscope is a great way to hamstring your life. On the other hand, hoping for special advice from a medium or psychic is like trusting your money to Bernie Madoff. Even if what you hear rings true to you, it’s very likely to be a lie.

So it troubled me hear a caller to a radio program about Halloween say that she understood there were witches in her area placing curses on Halloween costumes and she and her church were praying against them this weekend. I suppose prayer against the enemy for any reason is a good thing, but I don’t remember anything in the Bible and I can’t find anything online from trustworthy sources to support the idea that these curses mean anything.


Note the list of occult practices in Deuteronomy 18:9-12 (John Piper has a great sermon on this.)

“When you come into the land that the LORD your God is giving you, you shall not learn to follow the abominable practices of those nations. There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, anyone who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens, or a sorcerer or a charmer or a medium or a necromancer or one who inquires of the dead, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the LORD. And because of these abominations the LORD your God is driving them out before you.

Most of these are ways someone would seek knowledge, and the rest don’t suggest to me the legitimacy of casting spells on objects in order to harm innocent people who use them. Perhaps the “charmer” is someone who places charms on things, but is there any real power behind this? Isn’t this just another deception? I think it is. Moreover, I don’t believe Christians have a reason to fear “cursed” costumes, but the Spirit of the Lord within them is far greater than anything the devil is able to do.
Such curses have no power. They are like the empty food of lifeless idols. And though other methods of the occult are dangerous lies for anyone who trusts them, I believe these curses are worthless.

Creative Writing

Windy Street Halloween Writing Prompt

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Here’s a bit of creative writing fun we can have for the last half of October, the approach to Halloween. Look at this photo from Carlos Miguez Macho of someone walking in the street. (I don’t believe I would be permitted to display the image here.) Then write a few sentences, a momentary scene based on the photo.
I suppose I should start, but look at the photo before reading the submissions. Continue reading Windy Street Halloween Writing Prompt →

Religion

Pastor Burns Bibles for Halloween

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A misguided pastor from North Carolina plans to burn “satanic” books this Halloween, including recent translations of the Bible.

“I believe the King James version is God’s preserved, inspired, inerrant, infallible word of God… for English-speaking people,” the pastor said.

Of the non-biblical books to be burned, they have works by Billy Graham, Rick Warren, John Piper, John MacArthur, Mother Teresa and many others. You can read a list here. (Maybe a Christian bookstore closed recently.)

I guess my impulse is to laugh off such foolishness, but I can’t do it this time. I’m grieved. This man and his congregation are deceived about the nature of God’s holy word in English and the mercy or gracious freedom he gives to his people. I’m even more bothered by his claim to have studied at a Christian college in my town. He says he left because they were too liberal, which is a little funny. Fundamentalists are known by the way they divide up believers and separate themselves from others. The plain meaning of the text is all they need to know God’s will, and by “plain meaning” they mean their interpretation alone. They have gone to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses, and the voice they hear is Jesus’ voice, so how could they misinterpret anything?

I’m not too bothered, of course, because there isn’t anything I can do about it. Still, having heard stories of religious abuse, I can’t laugh when those who appear to be clanging cymbals like this hit the news. I’m not a satirist, I guess–which brings to mind this video of a panel discussion from a Ligonier Ministries conference. Doug Wilson gets into acting like Jesus acted, saying we throw some heavy interpretation into our answers when asking what Jesus would do. We almost never think that Jesus would give a satiric or biting answer, like calling some religious leaders a brood of vipers. Piper, Sproul, and Mohler all comment on that idea.