No Deities Blog

In many debates on the historicity of Jesus, the example of George Washington seems to be the whipping boy, trying to show that there is more evidence for an historical Jesus than Washington. This is nothing more than Special Pleading, wherein Apologists either change or lower the standards of historical research to suit their position.

William Lane Craig a Philosopher of Theology and one of the most prominent Apologists today; abuses the Special Pleading Fallacy quite liberally by completely misrepresenting the certainty of contingent truths as being equal with necessary truths.

His example is the unsolved problems of mathematics like Goldbach’s Conjecture, (This is one of the oldest unsolved problems in number theory and in all of mathematics) which is either necessarily true or necessarily false, though no one knows which. Craig stops here and never explains that this is “Theoretical Mathematics” and has absolutely nothing to say about what we can know about History. However, what I see here is, Craig using it as a back door (sneaky) way of proposing a possible world concept.

• True propositions are those that are true in the actual world (for example: “Richard Nixon became President in 1969″)

• False propositions are those that are false in the actual world (for example: “Ronald Reagan became President in 1969″)

• Possible propositions are those that are true in at least one possible world (for example: “Hubert Humphrey became President in 1969″)

• Contingent propositions are those that are true in some possible worlds and false in others (for example: “Richard Nixon became President in 1969″ is contingently true and “Hubert Humphrey became President in 1969″ is contingently false)

• Necessarily true propositions (usually simply called necessary propositions) are those that are true in all possible worlds (for example: “2 + 2 = 4″; “all bachelors are unmarried”)

• Impossible propositions (or necessarily false propositions) are those that are true in no possible world (for example: “Melissa and Toby are taller than each other at the same time”)

He (Craig) goes on to say…

“By contrast I have tremendous certainty that George Washington was once the President of the United States, though this is a contingent historical truth. There is no reason a contingent truth which is known with confidence might not serve as evidence for a less obvious necessary truth”.

Craig is trying to shift a True/False proposition (George Washington) into a contingent proposition to favor his hypothesis that Jesus as a contingent proposition is also valid; even though, George Washington is necessarily true, but, that we can only infer that Jesus is also necessarily true using Other World’s propositions.

Now onto some historical facts

George Washington (February 22, 1732 – December 14, 1799) was the dominant military and political leader of the new United States of America from 1775 to 1799. He led the American victory over Britain in the American Revolutionary War as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army in 1775–1783, and he presided over the writing of the Constitution in 1787. As the unanimous choice to serve as the first President of the United States (1789–1797), he developed the forms and rituals of government that have been used ever since, such as using a cabinet system and delivering an inaugural address. As President, he built a strong, well-financed national government that stayed neutral in the wars raging in Europe, suppressed rebellion and won acceptance among Americans of all types, but also saw the advent of contentious political parties. Washington was universally regarded as the “Father of his country” From wikipedia

• Has Documents and Treaties signed by him,

• Has personal letters written to many friends and enemies alike and his lover Martha Dandridge Custis signed by him,

• Has Portraits made in his honor that he personally sat for,

• Not only has Biographies, but other peoples Biographies and Auto-Biographies talk about him.

The Library of Congress has 1,000’s of Books, Periodicals, and Manuscripts in digital format to look at HERE. This is not only a necessarily true/false proposition, but, a contingent truth based on historical fact with verifiable lines of Provenance without using other world’s hypothesis.

Jesus has NONE OF THIS… Not one single letter from somebody that may have seen him preach or do a miracle, not one.

Oldest extant New Testament manuscript P 52     Bible: John also known as the St John’s fragment is a fragment from a papyrus codex. The dating of the papyrus is by no means the subject of consensus among critical scholars. The style of the script is strongly Hadrianic, which would suggest a most probable date somewhere between 117 CE and 138 CE. But the difficulty of fixing the date of the fragment is based solely on speculative paleographic evidence which allows a much wider range, potentially extending from before 100 CE past 150 CE. All the rest of the known manuscripts are all copies of copies of copies just as P52 is extending into the 16^th Century 1400 years after the proposed death of Jesus.

New Testament Writers

The New Testament writers (Greeks) are using a common religious “resurrection/fertility” theme in their stories (myths) about Jesus. The ancient world is full of religions that use resurrection stories as authenticators for their gods, and the first century (and neighboring time periods) are full of individuals for whom their followers claim resurrection. In fact, Apollonius of Tyana supposedly did miracles and rose from the dead.

The idea of a virgin birth was a common notion among many other ancient groups, including the Greeks, Romans and Persians. Many famous people and mythical heroes were said, by one group or another, to have been born of a virgin. Among them were Julius Caesar, Augustus, Aristomenes, Alexander the Great, Plato, Cyrus, the elder Scipio, some of the Egyptian Pharaohs, the Buddha, Hermes, Mithra, Attis-Adonis, Hercules, Cybele, Demeter, Leo, and Vulcan.

Nothing more than a mistranslation

The Hebrew word “almah” which is used in the Isaiah verse does not mean “virgin” but “young woman”. It is correctly translated in the Tanakh, the Revised Standard Version, the Revised English Bible, and the New Jerusalem Bible, but is incorrectly translated by the King James Version, the New International Version, and the New American Bible. It is also incorrectly translated by Matthew, who probably relied upon the incorrect translation in the Septuagint (The Greek translation of the Tanakh). There is another Hebrew word, “bethulah”, which definitely means “virgin”. Since a virgin birth is such an extraordinary event, presumably Isaiah would have used that other word if indeed he really meant to say that the woman is a virgin.

However, we also have a more fallacious avenue that needs to be explored. There are several Old Testament verses that are referred to as prophases such as the Matthew interpretation of Isaiah. These are nothing more than writings by people about people or their offspring in their own time and are being Cherry Picked by the writhers of the New Testament to suit their needs as a prophesy after the fact. This is completely knocked down by the mistranslation of Isaiah by Matthew showing the intentional Cherry Picking of the writer.

If anybody is interested in Textual Criticism (or lower criticism) Higher Criticism and Biblical History you may want to look at such Writers as…

Here are some perspectives of today’s most notable scholars;

Jesus the Myth: Heavenly Christ

• Earl Doherty
• Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy
• Robert M Price

Jesus the Myth: Man of the Indefinite Past

• Alvar Ellegård
• G. A. Wells

Jesus the Hellenistic Hero

• Gregory Riley

Jesus the Revolutionary

• Robert Eisenman

Jesus the Wisdom Sage

• John Dominic Crossan
• Robert Funk
• Burton Mack
• Stephen J. Patterson

Jesus the Man of the Spirit

• Marcus Borg
• Stevan Davies
• Geza Vermes

Jesus the Prophet of Social Change

• Richard Horsley
• Hyam Maccoby
• Gerd Theissen

Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet

• Bart Ehrman
• Paula Fredriksen
• Gerd Lüdemann
• John P. Meier
• E. P. Sanders

Jesus the Savior

• Luke Timothy Johnson
• Robert H. Stein
• N. T. Wright

Please be aware this is just a short list of authors and historians and some of their views. There are thousands of historians anthropologists and biblical scholars to read and explore.

Eric M Knight

Religion the Bigger Picture

(A view of Pascal’s Wager)

Pascal’s Wager

Pascal’s wager (or Pascal’s Gambit) is a suggestion posed by the French philosopher, mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal that, even though the existence of God cannot be determined through reason, a person should wager as though God exists, because living life accordingly has everything to gain, and nothing to lose.

Begging the question

Pascal’s wager commits the fallacy of begging the question, by assuming in its premises, certain characteristics about the very god the argument is intended to prove. Because the notion of a God or gods is subjective then one can make up anything and call it god. If you accept Pascal’s Wager as a realistic reason to believe, that leads you to a point where you have no choice but to believe just about anything on the same grounds. This then leads us to Special Pleading.

Special pleading

Another flaw is that Pascal’s Wager makes the assumption that belief and disbelief are a true dichotomy, and invokes special pleading to apply the argument only to a specific religion’s god. Belief in one god often excludes belief in another. The Wager can be invoked by any religion which claims to reward belief and/or punish disbelief. One is not left with a choice, only belief and disbelief, but a choice between hundreds of different gods. In using the argument, one asks that it be applied only to his particular god, not all the others. This is Special Pleading. This then leads us to Which Religion?

Which religion?

Many arguments for the existence of God fail to distinguish between different gods. If an argument such as the Kalam Cosmological Argument fails to distinguish between the Muslim conception of Allah and the Hellenistic conception of Chaos, that should make it clear how weak the conclusion of the argument really is.

1. Christianity: 2.1 billion

2. Islam: 1.5 billion

3. Secular/Nonreligious/Agnostic/Atheist: 1.1 billion

4. Hinduism: 900 million

5. Chinese traditional religion: 394 million

6. Buddhism: 376 million

7. Primal-Indigenous: 300 million

8. African Traditional & Diasporic: 100 million

9. Sikhism: 23 million

10. Juche: 19 million

11. Spiritism: 15 million

12. Judaism: 14 million

13. Baha’i: 7 million

14. Jainism: 4.2 million

15. Shinto: 4 million

16. Cao Dai: 4 million

17. Zoroastrianism: 2.6 million

18. Tenrikyo: 2 million

19. Neo-Paganism: 1 million

20. Unitarian-Universalism: 800 thousand

21. Rastafarianism: 600 thousand

22. Scientology: 500 thousand

Christianity

A short list of groups which self-identify as part of Christianity include (but are not limited to): African Independent Churches (AICs), the Aglipayan Church, Amish, Anglicans, Armenian Apostolic, Assemblies of God; Baptists, Calvary Chapel, Catholics, Christadelphians, Christian Science, the Community of Christ, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (“Mormons”), Coptic Christians, Eastern Orthodox churches, Ethiopian Orthodox, Evangelicals, Iglesia ni Cristo, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Local Church, Lutherans, Methodists, Monophysites, Nestorians, the New Apostolic Church, Pentecostals, Plymouth Brethren, Presbyterians, the Salvation Army, Seventh-Day Adventists, Shakers, Stone-Campbell churches (Disciples of Christ; Churches of Christ; the “Christian Church and Churches of Christ”; the International Church of Christ); Uniate churches, United Church of Christ/Congregationalists, the Unity Church, Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, Vineyard churches and others.

This does not include the 30,000 world wide and over 1,000 U.S. various sub-groups of each of the aforementioned sects. These groups exhibit varying degrees of similarity, cooperation, communion, etc. with other groups.

However, none are known to consider any of the other Christian sub-groups to be equally valid. Each group in one form or another considers each group to NOT BE TRUE CHRISTIANS. This leads us to the No True Scotsman fallacy.

No True Scotsman

Is an intentional logical fallacy, an ad hoc attempt to retain an unreasoned assertion when faced with a counterexample to a universal claim, rather than denying the counterexample or rejecting the original universal claim. This fallacy modifies the subject of the assertion to exclude the specific case or others like it.

A simple rendition would be:

1. All Scotsmen enjoy haggis.

2. My uncle is a Scotsman, and he doesn’t like haggis!

3. Well, all true Scotsmen like haggis.

Broad Brushing Christianity

I have been accused of making broad assertions about Christianity or Religion in general and I would like to address this issue. Do I assert that all religious people are Divisive? NO I do not, but what I do assert is that all religious people either knowingly or unknowingly give credibility to those that do create the problems by not speaking out against them. This is either because they hold the same belief or do not want to “rock the boat” Because it is their “Religion” all be it not their particular flavor of religion.

When I say religion is divisive it is because religion is a purely human activity. Humans can be divisive by nature and when they feel they have to follow the crowd or their particular dogma, humans will instinctively want to fit in for fear of not being accepted as part of that group or ostracized from their community or even family. This is especially true in small communities where family members, friends and neighbors all belong to the same religion. Pentecostals and Evangelicals are a good example of this in where Baptism, Receiving the Holy Spirit and even Speaking in Tongues are accepted activities on any given church going day. This includes rolling around on the floor as if having an epileptic fit receiving the spirit and mumbling odd noises to represent speaking in tongues. Some may actually be having an emotional experience, one they can’t explain; and in the heat of such an experience one can easily become over stimulated, become dizzy, or even pass out. This does not mean the Holy Spirit has entered them; this just means they have in most cases overexerted themselves entered a euphoric state of consciousness and become caught up in the heat of the moment. However, in most cases they are just faking it to fit in. To go to and even more extreme and dangerous line of following blindly, we can look at the Westboro Baptist Church a Religion gone wrong. In fairness WBC does consist of mostly Fred Phelps large extended family and has been some what shunned by mainstream Baptist Churches, it still shows how group corruption gets started and can easily perpetuate.

This leads me to one of the problems of Christianity in America. We find ourselves in a time when far right wing Christian groups are dominating or trying to dominate almost every aspect or our society. In 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. The school board tried to get Intelligent Design (originally creationism) added to the curriculum in 9^th grade evolution classes. Here is a list of School districts that have had to battle to keep ID out of their curriculum

WIKI List Creation and Evolution in Public Schools

The latest in March of 2010 in Texas, Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”) See whole story here NYTimes

Now it was brought to my attention that these are just small groups of people that do not speak for the whole of Christianity. Let’s really see how small this group is. Evangelical Christians make up almost 26% of Americans almost 78 mil. that is not a small number by any means. 42% of all Americans believe that we were created and not a product of evolution! This is totally absurd. This is clearly an influence of Christianity and school boards influenced by right wing Christian beliefs. Another disturbing outcome of these polls is that 79% of Christians believe in the second coming of Christ and 20% of them believe it will come in their lifetime. pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections It is clear that people like this can easily be influenced by any radical nut job in their respective communities. THIS IS NOT A SMALL NUMBER OF PEOPLE.

Eric M Knight

Where is God?

The 21^st Century Omni

God seems to be quite silent these days, in a world where there is much violence and suffering. A world where there are over 100 million people at any given time homeless, the majority being women and children. I find myself reflecting on a simpler time when God used to do everything for us and tell us how to live our lives and when to commit genocide on anybody that was not an Israelite or what type of animal to slaughter for a specific type of atonement.

On October 23 4004 BCE God created the heavens and Earth in roughly 6 days to end with a rest and a cup of tea provided by Russells’ Teapot. This miraculous achievement was brought to you by Ibn Ezra (1089 – 1164 CE) and then very accurately dated by none other than James Ussher (1581 – 1656 CE).

On October 31 4004 BCE the trouble in the garden started (woo hoo the first Halloween) However, God who seems to have the ability to create a flat earth covered with a crystal dome standing on four pillars or a turtles back depending on what God you ask, has to ask Adam where he is when wandering around the garden. Seems his omniscience has not quite fully developed yet.

Pythagoras of Samos (570 – 495 BCE) put forth a strange idea that maybe just maybe the Earth might be a Sphere, but alas poor Pythagoras was just a Mathematician. But a glimmer of hope perched on the precipice of intelligentsia when Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BCE) agreed that it seemed a spherical Earth might be a sound hypothesis. But then again, somebody with such kooky ideas like physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology clearly had no place telling people that their world might not be flat.

Interestingly enough it was about this time that God who actually made himself known to Adam and the likes of Abraham in some physical form reduced to nothing more than smoke and mirrors in the time of Moses, (this I guess was to protect his identity when they came looking him for ordering all the carnage, destruction and genocide). However, many still felt that God did many great things and was pertinent and physical in their lives.

Did I forget to mention that the Earth was the center of the Universe? Yup I did! But have no fear Nicolaus Copernicus is here (1473 – 1543 CE) was a Renaissance astronomer and the first person to formulate a comprehensive heliocentric cosmology, which displaced the Earth from the center of the universe. Are we no longer the apple of Gods eye?

Hans Lippershey (1570 – 1619 CE) was a German-Dutch lens maker, commonly associated with the invention of the telescope for whom Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642 CE) showed us that God did not live in the clouds or breath the wind that moves the trees and to our astonishment there seemed to be no crystal dome holding the pinpoints of light in the night but a vast expanse of well, nothingness, yup nothingness and a few specks of light far off in the distance of that nothingness along with a couple of other spheres that seem to have similar movement around our Sun. It appears that God is getting further away or was he? “God” or the Catholic Church nevertheless condemned heliocentrism as “false and contrary to Scripture”, “God” and Galileo was warned to abandon his support which he promised to do. When he later defended his views in his most famous work, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, published in 1632, he was tried by the Inquisition, found “vehemently suspect of heresy”, forced to recant, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

We now seem to find ourselves in a world where “God” now relegated to mystery with words like, (He) is outside of time or (He) is unknowable or we can’t know the mind of “God” and the everlasting “Faith” which by definition is nothing more than the temporary suspension of reality to believe in something that has no evidence. How much further away does reality have to push God to finally rid ourselves of out dated moral codes, faith healing and just plain ignorance of statements like, God made me do it or the Devil is in me superstition?

Eric Knight

Before You Thank GOD:

This year before you post to facebook or send your next tweet to thank God for all the wonderful things you have in life, like your home, car, wife or husband and your wonderful caring family and children, here are some things to think about.

Go into your kitchen and poor yourself a glass of water, then, ask yourself where God is for the 1.5 million children under the age of 5 that die each year because they can’t get a clean glass of water? wateryear2003.org

Go outside today and take a newspaper or an old blanket, look at your home and all the great shelter and warmth it gives you and your family, then lie on the ground and try to fall asleep, then ask yourself where God is for the 100 million people that are homeless throughout the world, the majority of them women and dependent children. UN.ORG

Go to your refrigerator and cupboards; look inside at all the food and candy and beverages you have to eat each day. Go to the bathroom and step on your scale and then ask yourself where God is for the 6.5 million children that starve to death every year? USA Today

Before you go to church this Sunday and get on your knees to ask God forgiveness for some minor unimportant sin that you may have committed because some ancient desert sheep herders wrote it in a book, that believe payment of some coin to the father and marriage to his daughter is suitable recompense for the crime of rape.

Now, look around and ask yourself, who purchased the home you live in? Who provided the food you eat everyday? Who pays the bills that keep you from living under a bridge?

Now look around yourself and ask, where is GOD?

Eric Knight

Atheism is not a Choice:

There are many different things that one can believe in and most of those beliefs are conclusions. A CHOICE however, is a thought process of judging between two or more options to a desired end.

Example 1: At a restaurant I am given a menu with several items to eat, I must choose among those items for something I am going too enjoy eating.

Example 2: I am sitting on my couch and wish to watch television, will need to make more than one choice, such as, whether I want to be entertained or educated. If I choose entertained, then I must choose between several options in that category.

Belief on the other hand is a cognitive string of processes like research, testing or collaboration with others to come to a conclusion or consensus as to whether your belief is true or false. Conversely you can choose to believe or not to believe in the conclusion but you may be going against the information presented to you.

Let’s take the simple statement “what goes up must come down”. We are given the hypothesis that Gravity is the cause of objects falling back to earth. We are told that the Earths mass relative to its relationship with the other planets, moon and our central star (which causes tidal effect) is roughly 9.8 m/s2. Gravity of Earth Now, I have absolutely no idea what all that means but I do know something about it. I am told that if an object is thrust into the sky and unless it is able to reach Escape Velocity It will fall back to earth. Now, I can also perform my own crud experiment to try and falsify this hypothesis by throwing an object into the sky and watch it return to Earth.

My conclusion is to believe that Gravity is the cause of objects returning to Earth. Now, I can choose to not believe in the Law of Gravity, but I would be denouncing the work of Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and a whole string of Scientists and Physicists that have put years of their lives to this Theory.

Theism is not a Choice:

You might be thinking, but of course it is not a choice! However, in almost all cases it is not even a conclusion.

All of us, we were born into this world not of our own choice. This choice was made in part by our parents or maybe not so much a choice but maybe a night of unprotected sex that ended up in an unplanned pregnancy or some might say, by the good graces of God. At some point when our consciousness evolves and we are in a manner of speaking, thrust into the world of our parents, family and friends all of whom probably go to church, (If you live in the United States it would most likely be a form of Christianity) we just take it for granted that this is how life is supposed to be. We go to church every Sunday, take Sunday school, many go to bible classes some time during the week and even go to summer camps or bible camps in the summer, all this because our parents did it, our grand parents did it and so on and so on.

This is not a choice it is indoctrination, unwitting indoctrination, but, indoctrination none the same. It is a long line of family tradition, not unlike many other family traditions, going to the baseball game on Saturdays, or movie night, ect… But, in some cases such as in the Asian and African American communities, their ancestors were forced into Christianity through Imperialism, Military Occupation or Slavery. This is not a choice and has over the millennium become just a way of life not thinking about the circumstances by which they came about their religion. But worst of all when you ad in the threats of Absolutism, Obedience to Authority, Threats of Eternal Punishment and the Focus on an Afterlife and Not This Life you get the impression that there is no way out.

Atheism is a Conclusion:

I’m asked if I think atheism is a choice, I say that it does not seem like anything I had deliberately chosen. Instead, it is a reflection of the available data, I don’t believe in gods because I have never encountered any evidence that gods exist and not because I made a conscious choice to be an atheist. This also fits my daily experience too.

Now you ask why does it matter. Suppose we decide that one’s initial discarding of theism and one’s continued lack of belief in gods are not a conscious decision but instead reflect one’s appraisal of the available data. This has important implications, such as, it would make anti-atheist bigotry even less acceptable and if atheism is not something one chooses, then bigotry directed at atheists would indeed resemble anti-gay bigotry or even racism and would be equally difficult to justify.

Eric Knight

Family values brought to you by the Holy Bible… #1

Exodus 21:17 And he that curseth his father, or his mother, shall surely be put to death.

Lets say a new family goes to a family counseling center to learn how to be good parents. While talking to the counselor they’re given a booklet with a few basic guidelines of how to  care and raise their child according to their current cultural biases. And along with several great and helpful tips and guidelines is…
Tip # 13… And he that curseth his father, or his mother, shall surely be put to death.
The young couple asks! What about tip #13 That seems a bit rash for how we would want to live our lives! The counselor comes back with… Well, rule #13 is not really something you have to abide by, it is there because some families believe that it is a good rule to have.

At this point the guide book that should be a relatively objective source of values to work with , has just now become an ambiguous and subjective set of values to pick and choose from. Now all the other rules and objectives to strive for are now open to personal interpretation and in some cases if not followed or interpreted correctly could lead to severe consequences.

As our culture expands, unfolds and grows up, world views change, popular sentiment changes and beliefs change. Suddenly a 2000+ year old cultural bias is no longer a viable road to travel. If we keep trying to cling to a system that has all but been eroded to nothing more than an idea, a culture that has absolutely no moral or value ties to an ancient culture that thought stoning an unruly child was morally correct then we are destined to slowly keep lumbering along dragging our book and chain behind us.

ORIGINS OF HALLOWEEN

This is my first official Blog post on No Deities and hope it will be a predictably consistent out poring of my inconsistent mind. I choose Halloween as my coming out so to speak, because this just happened to be the moment that I managed to get the site up and running. Also, many people really don’t know how or why Halloween is apart of their culture or why we celebrate it today. For children and many adults we do enjoy a good party and dressing up. (And candy)

For those of you that are actually reading this, thank you for doing so. For those of you that do not even know I am here or the site even exists, I am sending you telepathic messages to join in on the fun. (Insert laugh)

HALLOWEEN

Although the end of the Harvest season has for thousands of years been a time of celebration it was also a time of remembrance and a beginning of a time of fear, the fear of loss of friend’s and family because of the looming harsh winter months. It is usually during this time that the very young, very old and sickly tended to not survive. It is the latter point that made the harvest time a more spiritually centered event. Some folklorists believe the first was Feralia or Parentalia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead. The second was a day to honor Pomona, a feast to honor the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple and the incorporation of this celebration into Samhain which means summer end (Celtic) probably explains the tradition of “bobbing” for apples that is practiced today on Halloween. However, Halloween is more typically linked to the Celtic festival of Samhain. By A.D. 43, Romans had conquered the majority of Celtic territory and in the course of the four hundred years that they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain.

The Celts

The Celts culture known to have formed around 1200 B.C.E. in areas near France and Austria and have been found to have inhabited areas of Ireland in the UK in the 5th century B.C.E. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred and on the night of October 31, they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make predictions about the future. For a people entirely dependent on the volatile natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort and direction during the long, dark winter.

The Christians

All Saints Day is also known as All Hallows, or Hallowmas, where “hallow” means “saints”, and “mas” means “Mass”. The day before All Saints Day, “The Eve of All Hallows”, is Halloween. Throughout the earlier years, Christians had been persecuted by others and all Saints Day is to remember all those who sacrificed their lives, rather than their religion.

In about the 4th century, several churches began to commemorate the death of martyrs. The origins of the festival of All Saints, as celebrated here in the West, date to around May, in the year 609 or 610. The Pope Boniface IV restored the Pantheon at Rome, to become a church to the Blessed Virgin and all the martyrs. In some countries, (Spain, Mexico, Portugal), offerings are made on All Saints Day. There are countries in which the people lay flowers at the graves of their deceased relatives, such as Italy, France and Spain. In Poland, Slovakia, Croatia and others, traditionally people light candles and visit graves of their relatives.

Costumes

The practice of dressing up in costumes and begging door to door for treats on holidays dates back to the Middle Ages and includes Christmas wassailing. Trick-or-treating resembles the late medieval practice of souling, when poor folk would go door to door on Hallowmas (November 1), receiving food in return for prayers for the dead on All Souls Day (November 2). It originated in Ireland and Britain, although similar practices for the souls of the dead were found as far south as Italy. Shakespeare mentions the practice in his comedy The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1593), when Speed accuses his master of “puling [whimpering or whining] like a beggar at Hallowmas. Dressing up in costumes and going “guising” was prevalent in Scotland and Ireland at Halloween by the 19th century. Costuming became popular for Halloween parties in the US in the early 20th century, as often for adults as for children. The first mass-produced Halloween costumes appeared in stores in the 1930s when trick-or-treating was becoming popular in the United States.

Pumpkin Carving

On this magical night, glowing jack-o-lanterns, carved from turnips or gourds, were set on porches and in windows to welcome deceased loved ones, but also to act as protection against malevolent spirits. Burning lumps of coal were used inside as a source of light, later to be replaced by candles. When European settlers, particularly the Irish, arrived in American they found the native pumpkin to be larger, easier to carve and seemed the perfect choice for jack-o-lanterns. Halloween didn’t really catch on big in this country until the late 1800′s and has been celebrated in so many ways ever since!

Pumpkins are indigenous to the western hemisphere and were completely unknown in Europe before the time of Columbus. In 1584, the French explorer Jacques Cartier reported from the St. Lawrence region that he had found “gros melons”, which was translated into English as “ponpions,” or pumpkins. In fact, pumpkins have been grown in America for over 5,000 years. Native Americans called pumpkins “isquotersquash.”

Opposition to Halloween (fun governors)

Other Christians feel concerned about Halloween, and reject the holiday because they feel it trivializes – or celebrates – paganism, the occult, or other practices and cultural phenomena deemed incompatible with their beliefs. A response among some fundamentalist and conservative evangelical churches in recent years has been the use of ‘Hell houses’, these are haunted attractions typically run by American, fundamentalist Christian churches or parachurch groups. These depict sin, the torments of the damned in Hell, and usually conclude with a depiction of heaven. They are most typically operated in the days preceding Halloween.

A hell house, like a conventional haunted-house attraction, is a space set aside for actors attempting to frighten patrons with gruesome exhibits and scenes, presented as a series of short vignettes with a narrated guide. Unlike haunted houses, hell houses focus on occasions and effects of sin or the fate of unrepentant sinners in the afterlife. They occur during the month of October to capitalize on the similarities between hell houses and haunted attractions.

The exhibits at a hell house often have a controversial tone focusing on issues of concern to evangelicals in the United States. Hell houses frequently feature exhibits depicting sin and its consequences. Common examples include abortion, suicide, use of alcoholic beverage and other recreational drugs, adultery and pre-marital sex, occultism, homosexuality, and satanic ritual abuse. Hell houses typically emphasize the belief that anyone who does not accept Christ as their personal savior is condemned to Hell. To this, themed pamphlets, or comic-style tracts such as those created by Jack T. Chick in order to make use of Halloween’s popularity as an opportunity for evangelism. Some consider Halloween to be completely incompatible with the Christian faith because of its origin as a pagan “Festival of the Dead”. For example, Jehovah’s Witnesses do not celebrate Halloween because they believe anything that originated from a pagan holiday should not be celebrated by true Christians.

Happy Haunting