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What Christians Should Know About Halloween
The Gospel Coalition ^ | 31 October 2013 | Justin Holcomb

Posted on 10/31/2013 10:10:25 AM PDT by Gamecock

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To: editor-surveyor

6:10 today, 6:09 tomorrow.

Celts did it too.

:)


41 posted on 10/31/2013 11:37:47 AM PDT by Salamander (Blue Oyster Cult Will Be The Soundtrack For The Revolution.....)
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To: Gamecock
The notion that we can mock Satan at Halloween is ridiculous.

Using that logic why don't we choose a day to dress up as child molesters to mock them too?

Satan is more powerful and more destructive than any child molester, yet anybody in their their right mind would recognize that dressing up as a child molester is bizarre, creepy, scary and insensitive behavior. Yet somehow many Christians have accepted the notion that it's perfectly okay to do this when it concerns the devil.

42 posted on 10/31/2013 11:39:02 AM PDT by DouglasKC
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To: thackney

The Romans had a lot of contact with the Celts long before the church got really rolling.

Did you know that London is actually Lugdunum and was a thriving place before the Romans popped in with their roads and plumbing?

The sacred stones, hot springs and groves were Celtic holy places before Romans even existed.

History gets rewritten...a lot.


43 posted on 10/31/2013 11:43:44 AM PDT by Salamander (Blue Oyster Cult Will Be The Soundtrack For The Revolution.....)
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To: CodeToad
1. It’s fun. 2. It’s innocent. 3. Kids love it. 4. Adults love it. 5. Anyone who thinks religion is so weak as to be harmed by such a fun day is a fool.

We have a winner.
44 posted on 10/31/2013 11:44:56 AM PDT by needmorePaine
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To: editor-surveyor
If you wish to celebrate Yeshua’s birth, His Father provided a way to do that; its called the Feast of Tabernacles, or more properly, Sukkot.

No, God gave it to the Jews to celebrate the harvest.

Yehova said that he cares

Show me where it says that God cares if I celebrate the birth of His Son on the actual day of the man-made calendar on which he was born. Besides, it may be more historically accurate to say that Jesus was born sometime around the time of Sukkot, but you don't know what day He was born on, either. Do you think God is concerned what day of the year you celebrate the birth of His Son? Or the fact that you celebrate it?

45 posted on 10/31/2013 11:50:22 AM PDT by tnlibertarian (Shut 'er down and leave it.)
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To: Salamander

So when it originally started as the first Sunday after Pentecost, and is still celebrated then by Orthodox...


46 posted on 10/31/2013 11:50:43 AM PDT by thackney (life is fragile, handle with prayer)
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To: tnlibertarian

Perfect!! I love that you bring up the celebration of The Savior’s birth, then someone objects, whining “straw man” at the same time making up a calendar “argument” that you ALL READY dealt with, ignoring your point of celebrating The Savior’a coming. Talk about straw men!


47 posted on 10/31/2013 11:59:06 AM PDT by Hegewisch Dupa
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To: Gamecock

Like the December 25th Christmas, Halloween was established by the LATE Church, sometime after the 4th century, as a Christian purpose put to, and to compete with, already established local European festival days - in Halloween’s case, local harvest/end of summer festivals.

The accutrements of “All Saints Day” is of institutional church origins, not local customs of the original harvest festivals. However, depending on the area, many of the “end of summer” and “harvest” festivals, before and without Christianity, coincided with practices that believed that the souls of the dead return on one special night or day of the year, and those beliefs are ancient and predate Christianity and are found in cultures all over the world. “All Saints Day” was coined by the institutional church to try to supplant the original beliefs about the dead that held October 31/November 1st as that special night/day each year when the souls of the dead returned - briefly.

So again, we have a case of the institutional church vying for attention and respect and following, within cultures, by creating its own practices to compete with already established local festivals.

In the case of Halloween though, it never seemed to have greatly fulfilled the hopes for it that the institutional church wanted for itself - Halloween as another “sacred” day.


48 posted on 10/31/2013 12:14:56 PM PDT by Wuli
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To: Gamecock

The only victory that Christain culture has had over the pagan origins of Halloweeen (origins from before the instiutional church gave it that title) is not that Christians repsectfully and liturgically celebrate “All Saints Day”, but the entire day, including its “dark side” is not taken seriously by most people.

The dead are neither greatly celebrated or feared and being “fightened” arrives via pranks and manufactured scare tactics and not real beliefs in “the walking dead” or fairies or ghosts, nor a belief that naming it “All Saints Day” actually made it more religious - NOT.


49 posted on 10/31/2013 12:25:48 PM PDT by Wuli
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To: I want the USA back
but the fixation on death, blood, and gore says there is something gravely wrong with some people.


50 posted on 10/31/2013 12:37:35 PM PDT by Hot Tabasco (Make sure you have removed the kleenex from your pockets before doing laundry)
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To: All

I’ll get carsick if I keep this up.

See y’all when I get home.


51 posted on 10/31/2013 1:03:48 PM PDT by Salamander (Blue Oyster Cult Will Be The Soundtrack For The Revolution.....)
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To: Wuli

Not to mention the early churches were built right on top of the old pagan holy places.

They had no choice but to ‘attend’.


52 posted on 10/31/2013 1:08:02 PM PDT by Salamander (Blue Oyster Cult Will Be The Soundtrack For The Revolution.....)
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To: redleghunter

53 posted on 10/31/2013 1:19:52 PM PDT by RckyRaCoCo (Shall Not Be Infringed)
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To: tnlibertarian
Where’s the ‘Aw, Geez’ guy when you need him.


54 posted on 10/31/2013 1:32:47 PM PDT by redleghunter
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To: tnlibertarian
>> “No, God gave it to the Jews to celebrate the harvest.” <<

.
No, Sukkot has absolutely nothing to do with any harvest, it was at every moment in time the prophesied day for the birth of our savior. It is a commanded feast for every person and nation on Earth.

>> “Show me where it says that God cares if I celebrate the birth of His Son on the actual day of the man-made calendar on which he was born” <<

Yehova does not honor man's calendar, he goes by his Biblical calendar:

Biblical Hebrew calendar/

Zec 14:18
And if the family of Egypt go not up, and come not, that have no rain; there shall be the plague, wherewith the LORD will smite the heathen that come not up to keep the feast of tabernacles.
14:19 This shall be the punishment of Egypt, and the punishment of all nations that come not up to keep the feast of tabernacles.
>> " Do you think God is concerned what day of the year you celebrate the birth of His Son? Or the fact that you celebrate it?" <<

Yes, there is not the slightest question.

55 posted on 10/31/2013 1:41:42 PM PDT by editor-surveyor (Freepers: Not as smart as I'd hoped they'd be)
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To: katana; Gamecock
The correlations in dates probably stem from the fact that getting pagans to understand and believe in Christ and even a Triune God was relatively easy compared with getting them to abandon their cherished holiday practices. So the Church accommodated and altered the associated holiday stories into Christian themes.

If that were the case, then there would be a combination of the days ordained by YHWH and the pagan days that you assert were adopted as we went along - But that is *not* the case - Not a single day that YHWH ordained is observed at all, to include the weekly Sabbath.

Moreover, not only are they not observed, but they don't even come to mind - Most Christians have no idea what they even ARE, not to mention when they are, with no idea of what they represent - The reason YHWH hallowed them is to put them in our memory, because most everything that matters happens on_those_days... But Christians who are content to bow to the pope and observe the pagan holidays and the pagan sabbath will not see the end coming. The distraction and substitution keeps them from seeing the truth. 'Anti' can mean 'alter', you know.

56 posted on 10/31/2013 1:42:50 PM PDT by roamer_1 (Globalism is just socialism in a business suit.)
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To: Hegewisch Dupa
Here is a post that will clear your head:

Post #55

57 posted on 10/31/2013 1:54:16 PM PDT by editor-surveyor (Freepers: Not as smart as I'd hoped they'd be)
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To: tnlibertarian; editor-surveyor
No, God gave it to the Jews to celebrate the harvest.

No, YHWH says, "these are MY feasts," not 'these are your feasts'. And everyone who is under the covenant is to keep them.

58 posted on 10/31/2013 1:55:23 PM PDT by roamer_1 (Globalism is just socialism in a business suit.)
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To: MuttTheHoople; Gamecock
The Puritans strongly denounced celebrating Christmas
To mention in advance one critical point of difference, the colonists assumed that there was a right way of doing things. Any modern reader who lingers on the passage I quote in the Introduction in which John Cotton evokes the colonists' determination to establish "purity" is abruptly confronted with this assumption. Purity is purity, and purity is God's law, a premise Cotton translated into the argument that Scripture mandated how the true church should be organized and religion practiced....

....As I have learned from trying out some of this book on other historians, the Puritanism in these pages does not coincide with the entrenched opinion that the movement was authoritarian or "theocratic." For persons of this mind-set, the most "Puritan" aspect of my story may be the migrants' confidence in the "saints" and the attempts to establish "godly rule" (Chapter Three). But in contrast to interpretations that focus on social discipline or the suppressing of dissent, I bring other aspects of Puritanism as we now understand it into the story, including the currents of popular or insurgent religion that can be discerned in fears of "arbitrary" rule and ecclesiastical "tyranny," the emphasis on participation, and the importance given to consent. Nowhere do I presume that Puritanism embodied a particular political ideology, and nowhere is it translated into social control or top-down authoritarianism, for reasons I spell out in the Introduction and in more detail in succeeding chapters....

.......the Puritans had "a more elevated and complete view" of our social duties than the Europeans of that time. They took care of the poor, maintained their highways, kept careful records and registries, secured law and order, and, most of all, provided education for everyone — through high school. The purpose of universal education was that everyone should be able to read the Bible to know what's most important — his or her duties to their Creator — for themselves. Everyone must read in order that no one be deceived or suckered by others. This noncondescending egalitarianism was the first source of the American popular enlightenment that had so many practical benefits. "Puritan civilization in North American," our outstanding novelist/essayist Marilynne Robinson observes, "quickly achieved unprecedented levels of literacy, longevity, and mass prosperity, or happiness, as it was called in those days"....

....In Robinson's Calvinist view, generosity, liberality, and nobility are all synonyms in the Bible, and they express even better than charity the virtue that distinguishes who we are. What's left our culture, with our surrender of the common celebration of Sunday — what impressed Tocqueville as our most precious inheritance from the Puritans — is the respect, and so the time, for the disciplined reading and reflection required for us to practice the social, civilized virtues that are the truest source of our happiness.

-- David D. Hall, Preface, A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New EnglandAfred A. Knopf, New York, 2011.


59 posted on 10/31/2013 2:27:21 PM PDT by Alex Murphy (Just a common, ordinary, simple savior of America's destiny.)
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To: roamer_1

>> “No, God gave it to the Jews to celebrate the harvest.” <<

.
Ya gotta admit that one was creative! :o)

They would rather sniff sulfur smoke for eternity than give up their entrenched paganism.


60 posted on 10/31/2013 3:02:48 PM PDT by editor-surveyor (Freepers: Not as smart as I'd hoped they'd be)
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