Evil Bastards and Pagans

Two blogs for the price of one. Lucky you.

Evil Bastards:

We received a political mailing the other day that invited us to “look into the mind of so and so.” I didn’t read it, the cover was enough for me. Under the guises of this somewhat benign title was a picture of the candidate whose mind I was supposed to look into, except that half of his picture was gone, replaced with a skeleton. Clever. Look into his mind, ha. I get it. CLEARLY the image was NOT meant to invoke the idea of peering into this candidates thought process but was, rather, intended to portray him in an ugly, scary, evil way and hopefully plant that image in my head when I think of him. This candidate was of course not the only victim of such caricature nor was the political party behind the ad the sole perpetrator of such things. Watch the political commercials with a discerning eye (it doesn’t actually have to be THAT discerning) and you will see that the images of the opponent are always the worst ones possible and the sound bytes are always taken out of context. Even the music used is chosen for the purposes of creating either a feeling of dread or joviality. Can you imagine if the politicians we send to Washington (or Salem) really were the evil bastards like their opponents tout? (Yeah, some are). If we really were to believe everything they say, and everything we act like we believe when talking about the “other side” then we really have to admire the separatists in hills of Idaho and Utah.

Pagans:

Pagans aren’t evil bastards, they’re just pagans. But that’s not the point.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, for an extremely brief moment, I debated internally whether or not I would one day allow my child to participate in the festivities of Halloween via trick or treating and jack o’ lanterns and so on. I debated it, because at the time I was part of a very conservative, and frankly rather legalistic church where that’s ort of thing simply wasn’t done. The rationale behind this is that Halloween is or at the very least is based on a pagan holiday where demons or dead people (or sometimes both) are invoked and worshipped and Satanists really like that day. Well, there is a bit of truth to it. There are some pagan belief practices that honor October 31st as a holiday, as do bona fide Satanists. However, they do not celebrate Halloween (unless they do it with their kids after worship). Halloween, as we know it today, is entirely a kid’s holiday. I will grant that October 31st is a pagan holiday, with some similarities, but what is practiced as worship is not nor has it ever been Halloween; that some people have some peculiar beliefs about pumpkins should not stop the rest of us from carving funny faces into them.

Another problem I have with the “Halloween is pagan” argument is that most of those who make that argument celebrate other pagan holidays too, either out of ignorance or because over the years we have cleaned it up enough for it to be palatable to them. The prime example of this is Christmas. Now hear this: Jesus was absolutely NOT born on December 25th, or any time close to that. Jesus, in other words, is not the reason for the season, Mithras is. The followers of Mithras celebrated his birthday on December 25th (they even called it Mithmas—seriously) and when the Roman empire became Christian the church had to decide what to do with all these feisty former pagans who wanted to party so they declared that everyone would celebrate the birth of Jesus instead of Mithras. We even celebrate with fertility (phallic?) symbols in our living rooms every year! Is this not pagan?! Now there are those who don’t celebrate either Halloween or Christmas, and are not Jehovah Witness’s, and I respect that (though you need to party sometime, right?). But seriously, if we are going to sit around our phallic symbols every winter and open our celebrations of greed, can we not take our little ones out for a bit of candy?

India dressed as a little kitty, by the way. SO CUTE.