The author in his favorite Halloween get-up ©2004 UrbisMedia
“Accept Christ as you personal savior, or go to hell when you die.” [Hell House]
Another Halloween is imminent. It’s a time of year in which we like to scare the hell out of each other. All Hallows Eve has its origins in religious beliefs and superstitions, but it has become something of an occasion to dress up, party, to dust off horror films and play trick or treat.
Scaring ourselves is something that goes back to the fundamental origins of religion. Religion is based in fear, fear of the unknown. It goes back to our earliest human origins, when we sat around at night in the penumbra of campfire light and wondered what the hell was making those scary noises beyond our vision, what creatures those luminous eyes belonged to, what happened to the clan members who wandered off and disappeared. Our ancestors made “sacrifices,” literally tossing food to those snarling creatures to buy them off; they made incantations, wore amulets, and eventually (much later) refashioned those creatures into gods, and then into a God, one that looked like themselves.
But people never quite got rid of the fear, because they could never get rid of the unknowns; what, for example, happens to us after we die (among other mysteries). Fear makes for good business (good politics, too, if you have been listening to Bush “terrorizing” the electorate with the “evil” terror card), and shamans, priests, gurus and other religious “authorities” knew that it was the basis of their business. Like Bush they learned how to terrorize in the name of fighting terror, and they conjured – and I do mean conjured – what was necessary to retain their influence over the lives of the terrorized.
Despite the fact that not one single person in history, not the Pope, not Mother Theresa, not anyone, has ever died and come back to tell us about the other side, whether there was a heaven or hell, or even an afterlife, an elaborate fiction was composed in most faiths about paradise and perdition, and the gods, angels, and devils that inhabit them. Oh, there’s the story of this Yeshua bar Yusef (aka Jesus Christ), who some say pulled it off, but there’s no proof.
Well, it’s a familiar story, the only debate being whether one thinks it should be filed under fact or fiction. So what has it to do with Halloween. Just this: for the past several Halloweens there has been a fundamentalist Christian organization that sets up what are called “Hell Houses” for kids. They apparently come in, innocently thinking they are in some scary house with witches and goblins, but the scenes are of women who have had abortions, gays and lesbians being tortured in hell for eternity, and a person being sacrificed in a satanic ritual. After being exposed to the fundamentalist Christian’s version of hell, the patron’s, usually impressionable kids, are told that’s what awaits them if they don’t accept the salvation of Christ.
Nice folks these extreme Christian evangelists. As far as I’m concerned they are the best reason there is why we could really use a place called “Hell”.
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©2004, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 10.31.2004)