- Topic
I don't care for this day but for the purpose and intent of this site, I'd like to know what Wmscog thinks of this holiday or celebration. Personally, I feel this celebration would be great for them to celebrate because it fits their whole personality, that is, the fake one. It'll be a good day to go out and recruit. After all, they are trying to collect more souls out of this city of refuge into the abyss.
Question: Is this a good or bad celebration?
They hate Halloween and don't encourage it at all. Personally, I don't love Halloween myself, but I see it as harmless fun for the kids and I participate in that way. My son who is now a member used to especially love Halloween. He even trick or treated in junior high.
Halloween is nothing more than druid witchcraft. And it's even more clear-cut than christmas.
The lanterns, which weren't originally made of pumpkins meant that a person in that household has been sacrificed to demons in order for the druds to get more magical power. The candle inside the pumpking was usually made out of the body fat of that person.
Treats were left ouside for the spirits who were allegedly always hungry and if you were to dress in a costume of a certain being that being might be friendlier and give you more power. This was all done at this time of year because the veil between the two worlds was supposedly thinnest and you could chat with your dead relatives.
Just because you don't understand it, doesn't make it less harmfull 🙂
This sort of desensitising is what's going to bring us all down. We tend to get more ignorrant by the minute.
Halloween is one of those days, one of those things, that Christians have a hard time coming to terms with. It is like whether to shop at a store that supports a cause that is evil or fundamentally opposed to the message of Christianity—what do you do?
When I asked my Twitter and Facebook friends whether Christians should celebrate Halloween, I got varied responses. One person indicated that they didn’t celebrate it because it is all about death and Jesus was all about life. Another had indicated that they didn’t think it was a problem since the holiday essentially boils down to getting dressed up and going trick-or-treating for most Americans. When asking my friend Google this question, he (she?) was kind enough to pull up a plethora of blogs and articles ranging from “Who cares?” to “Sure … if you want to put your kid in danger of hell.” (These are my summaries of others’ thoughts.)
Before I answer, I should give you some history. There’s two sides to Halloween: the name and the practices. The practices find their origins in a Celtic holiday called Samhain. Celebrated as the end to their harvest season, they believed the boundary between the living and the dead dissolved and that evil spirits caused trouble for the living. The story goes that the living escaped this trouble by disguising themselves as evil spirits—you know, the whole blending in technique … works every time. The name is actually Christian in nature—it means All Hallows Eve, which is All Saint’s Day—a day set aside to honor saints past. But it is undeniable that Halloween has pagan, if not satanic, roots.
So the question becomes, Should Christians celebrate a holiday that has pagan/satanic roots even if it is largely commercialized today? While I understand why many would not want to, I think the answer to this question should be yes! Allow me to explain why:
Halloween Provides a Unique Opportunity for Community
How many days out of the year create the same opportunities that Halloween does? Not only are kids knocking on your door every two minutes, but families are getting together, having fun and building community. Opportunities like that don’t come around all the time (a couple times a year, maybe). Ask yourself this: What good is being done by excluding yourself from community with your neighbors?
Bueller? Bueller?
Celebrating Halloween Gives Evil Less Power, Not More
Think about it: If Satan can’t get you to worship him, what would he be willing to settle for What cripples people? Fear, maybe? If he can convince you to stay inside and lock the doors guess what you won’t be doing—loving people, serving your neighbors and living like you believe that “greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world” (1 John 4:4, NASB). Celebrating, on the other hand, turns Satan’s mission on its head. To conquer evil, do good. To conquer sadness, laugh. To conquer death, live.
To conquer Satan, celebrate. Love. Serve. Pray. Give. In doing so, you’re-proclaiming the victory of Christ.
Halloween Today Is Different From Halloween a Long Time Ago
True, Halloween, at one point in time, involved all kinds of things that can legitimately be considered evil and to participate in those activities would be a participation in evil. But unless you are part of a minority group of neo-pagans or wiccans (i.e. unless you are not a Christian), your participation in Halloween won’t come close to participation in those activities. It is one thing to be against legitimately evil practices, and it is quite another to be against practices that aren’t really all that evil (putting on a costume and having fun) because some people, at some point in time, believed things far different from what we believe today.
The bottom line is this: Halloween has no power that you refuse to give it. It is evil to the extent that you buy into the beliefs behind it. If you don’t buy those beliefs, then there’s no harm in throwing on a costume and having fun. In fact, that may be the very thing God is asking you to do.
Just like the Internet Monk rants here, I was raised in a fundamentalist Baptist home. We read the King James Bible, went to Sunday School, prayer meeting, revival, and every other time the church door was open. We didn’t wear shorts at my childhood home, nor go swimming in mixed company. My dad went to the public school and had me excused from the two weeks of swimming our P.E. class had in August. Dad was a street preacher, standing on the corner of a downtown city block shouting the Gospel at passing traffic. (He still does that once a week, but I no longer hand out tracts to pedestrian passersby.)
But you know what my parents did let us do? Go trick-or-treating. I dressed up for school on Halloween all the way through 6th grade. I remember going to at least one church sponsored haunted house. Other church members handed out candy. And I remember well the day that Halloween was taken away from us. I was about 11 or 12, and don’t remember everything said in the sermon that night, but one point was how that putting a jack-o-lantern on your front porch was a sign that you had sold your daughter to Satan. The “Halloween is the Devil” sermon was an eye-opening experience for my parents, and marked the death of it’s celebration in our home.
Yes, there are pagan festival roots to the celebration of Halloween. Most of those roots are either barely or in fact no longer visible in our Americanized children’s version of the day. Let me ask you this: every struggle with a child’s question about what hiding eggs has to do with Jesus? How do you deal with “Was Jesus birthday December 25th?” If you’re tossing Halloween and all things pagan from your house, Easter and Christmas are gonna’ have to go as well.
The changing of seasons and phases of the moon have always had significance in pagan belief and practice. Each spring as the world reawakened, pagan worshipers observed a feast for Beltane. Springtime is all about fertility, and new life, and… you don’t want me to go into it here. That’s what the eggs are about. In simplest terms, the early Christians were well aware that a big party was going on that they were not allowed to participate in. So rather than worship Beltane, they decided to have their own celebration – scheduled to coincide with the Beltane rituals – and make it about Jesus. That’s why our celebration of Easter is all mixed up between sermons of resurrection and the coloring and hiding of eggs. “We” took a pagan holiday and Christianized it; we stole Easter from pagans.
The same with Christmas. Why is it on December 25th? The dates for Easter and Christmas were set long ago, well before the Protestant Reformation by the Catholic Church. That ought to be enough to send fundamentalists over the edge, who don’t believe Christians existed prior to Protestantism and that the Bible was written in 1611. The first day of winter, just like spring, was a significant marker on the pagan calendar. I’m going to close with a passage of scripture from Jeremiah 10. My dad quoted this each year when we asked about a Christmas tree. Like the holiday itself, we Christianized the tree.
Thus says the Lord:
“Learn not the way of the nations,*
nor be dismayed at the signs of the heavens
because the nations are dismayed at them,
for the customs of the peoples are vanity.
A tree from the forest is cut down
and worked with an axe by the hands of a craftsman.
They decorate it with silver and gold;
they fasten it with hammer and nails
so that it cannot move. -Jer 10:2-4
I found these two articles online
I agree with Prettyeyes. Halloween doesn't mean what it did in the dark ages. (Pretty interesting stuff you wrote, though, Fly Lice. I didn't know any of that.) I certainly don't celebrate Halloween for those reasons, and I'm sure most others don't either. Just a tradition of fun that I didn't even think of as bad, ever. Neither have I ever thought to dissect Christmas and Easter. I just experienced the joy of these occasions and having a good time with the family.
MountainMom wrote:
I agree with Prettyeyes. Halloween doesn't mean what it did in the dark ages. (Pretty interesting stuff you wrote, though, Fly Lice. I didn't know any of that.) I certainly don't celebrate Halloween for those reasons, and I'm sure most others don't either. Just a tradition of fun that I didn't even think of as bad, ever. Neither have I ever thought to dissect Christmas and Easter. I just experienced the joy of these occasions and having a good time with the family.
Thanks Mom…well put!
While being a member, the one thing I didn’t take WMSCOG’s explanation at face value was the history & pagan roots of holidays. Prior to me becoming a member I celebrated all of the holidays. After joining and receiving their view of the holidays, I set out to do my own homework. I actually agree that I shouldn’t participate in the holidays. I see many ex members have decided to participate in the holidays and to that I say, do what works for you. I feel like I’ve done enough damage trying to force my views on other innocent people that I will no longer do that. Life goes on and we all have our own choices to make.
fly lice wrote:
Halloween is nothing more than druid witchcraft. And it's even more clear-cut than christmas.
The lanterns, which weren't originally made of pumpkins meant that a person in that household has been sacrificed to demons in order for the druds to get more magical power. The candle inside the pumpking was usually made out of the body fat of that person.
Treats were left ouside for the spirits who were allegedly always hungry and if you were to dress in a costume of a certain being that being might be friendlier and give you more power. This was all done at this time of year because the veil between the two worlds was supposedly thinnest and you could chat with your dead relatives.
Just because you don't understand it, doesn't make it less harmfull 🙂
This sort of desensitising is what's going to bring us all down. We tend to get more ignorrant by the minute.
Folks, what Halloween is or is not has ALL been twisted around and misconstrude especially by the ignorant. What most people believe were rituals done in the Dark Ages or whenever were origionally done on November 1st not October 31st. The church in an effort to reach people where they were at the time implemented many Christian type events to bring people away from ungodly type things. The best example of what the church was trying to do is represented by Paul when he posted up next to the idol representing any other gods (elohim) and using it to show the people the one true God. The church implemented Hallows Day on November 1st as a way of honoring those who had gone to Heaven during the previous year. In Spain they do special events to honor those who passed away and it has nothing to do with witchcraft or evil. The church in essence created the holiday that is celebrated on October 31st quite by accident. How could the church members ever imagine that October 31st would become ALL HALLOWS EVE? It would be ignorant to not realize how some things have gotten mixed into this but even more ignorant to think that this is some kind of exclusive h e l l fest for evil. Use this time to show good and show God to others and stop showing just how ignorant and or cowardly so called Christians can be.
as I see it pagan dates can be made secular and if you do it secular its fine but something pagan can never be made holy
So if you're unable to figure out a blatantly obvious evil holiday like halloween, Brian, how do you expect to get to the bottom of the WMS??
Smurf wrote:
So if you're unable to figure out a blatantly obvious evil holiday like halloween, Brian, how do you expect to get to the bottom of the WMS??
Save it for your therapist smurf, whatever it was or wasn't in the dark ages, it's a kids fun day now… and some adults
No need to be mean.
It's a kids fun day? That's quite a shallow way to look at it. If you always take things at face value you won't get far under the surface.
It's an attitude that gets you duped.
Smurf, in case you did read the other thread, keep my name out of your mouth
What's with all the hate, Brian?
No hate, its a HAPPY halloween, remember?
And that’s the wonderful thing, if you think that halloween is evil, that’s great! Don’t celebrate it. But you’re not gonna tell me what I canand can’t say, or what I can or can’t celebrate. I’m not a part of wmscog anymore, but I’m not about to adhere to smurfanity either.
Brian Taylor wrote:
And that's the wonderful thing, if you think that halloween is evil, that's great! Don't celebrate it. But you're not gonna tell me what I canand can't say, or what I can or can't celebrate. I'm not a part of wmscog anymore, but I'm not about to adhere to smurfanity either.
So true Brian. You can't be told what to think or say or believe, for that matter. Thank you for all the videos and everything else you have done to help. Don't let anyone try to make you feel bad for a simple "Happy Halloween."
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