To that effect I'm recommending Joe Carter's annual Halloween post at evangelicaloutpost.com. Actually, its focus is less on Halloween in general, and more on some of the awful tracts written by Jack Chick. But I particularly liked this broader paragraph though that responds to some of the urban legends that Christians (especially conservatives and fundamentalists) have bought into:
None of this, of course, is true. Halloween is the holiday equivalent of Wicca -- a 20th century invention that pretends to have ancient pagan roots. Halloween has nothing to do with Samhain, a Celtic agricultural festival that marked the beginning of winter. There is also no evidence that Samhain was a celebration devoted to the dead or to ancestor worship, much less to kidnapping, human sacrifice, playing with chainsaws, or walking with snakes on a rope.
I would add that I don't even think it's that big a deal for people to dress up as ghosts and the like. I find it interesting that the church in which I grew up, which would not allow children dressed like devils or witches into its "Harvest Party," had no problem with prominent members playing the role of Satan when Heaven's Gates and Hell's Flames came to town.
Of course HG&HF gives a different context to the costume than Halloween, but it does demonstrate in principle that it's possible to dress up like a bad character without it meaning, "I want to be like this." Part of Halloween is celebrating the fact that we can be scared, and that getting scared actually adds something to our lives (hence horror films, roller coasters, etc.). The spiritual, with its unavailability to our senses, is scary and will naturally play a part.
Anybody think I'm way off here?
2 comments:
For the record, I would not think it okay for a kid to dress up like Satan for Halloween, even though my argument would seem to work for him as well as for generic witches and devils. I think this can be quickly understood as consistent by analogy to the intuition that there is something different between dressing up as a generic murderer and dressing up as Adolph Hitler. I believe I could make this rigorous.
I think this depends largely on how the costume is viewed: as another personna or as something absurd. Maybe Kant would care to weigh in about the role of intent in a Halloweeen costume. Or maybe not.
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