When Insanity Runs Riot....

From The Times Monday 30th October
When Evil Runs Riot

Rev Dr Peter Mullen

The Bishop of Bolton has asked supermarkets not to sell Hallowe’en nasties, such as masks of serial killers, to children. He is right to be concerned. Hallowe’en has become a celebration of sensational evil and nothing more.

Once, Halloween was celebrated for what it is: the Eve of All Hallows, All Saints Eve. Thus evil was placed in the context of the supremely good and the lesson taught that the light triumphs over dark. Perhaps the worst degeneration of our culture is shown in the fact that there is universal scepticism about God and universal fascination with the Devil. Modern people pride themselves on their critical faculties and feel competent to disbelieve in God, but in all things dark, nasty and satanic they are mindlessly credulous. This was G. K. Chesterton’s prediction of what would happen with the rise of secularisation: “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.”

There is horror galore in the Bible and in the old European fairy stories, but the evil is always set in the overriding context of the good. Scripture and the brothers Grimm are moral tales. When we sever this moral link and dislocate good from evil, allowing evil to run riot and dominate the cultural agenda, we lose our ethical defence against evil.

When Rev Dr Peter Mullen wrote the above piece for The Times, he was I'm sure in the middle of an annual state of anxiety at the approach of hordes of little children performing the now expected round of U.S inspired begging we all have to endure for Halloween these days.

While I share the Reverend Doctor's apparent distaste for the event, I can't help but raise issue with his naive reasoning. Halloween is far from a 'celebration of sensational evil' as he so dramatically puts it. These days it’s yet another celebration of capitalism, another excuse for the marketers of pointless products to part the all too willing from their cash.

To describe the activities of ten year olds dressing in silly costumes and touting for some free sweets, in such terms is frankly ridiculous.

He's right that Halloween was once celebrated as 'All Saints Eve'. It was also once a much older Pagan festival until Pope Gregory III moved All Saints Day to 1st of November to obliterate the old celebrations. Neither set of imaginary beliefs on arbitrary dates are any more truthful in their basis than the other.

To define a "growing universal scepticism about God" as a degeneration of our culture is not only insulting but wholly inaccurate. If anything it represents a degeneration of blind acceptance in one of a sadly all too long list of fantastic creation myths.

Where I wonder does he base his assumption that those who now accept God is a myth, would then be "mindlessly credulous" of other parts of that same myth?

His final arrogance in apparently concluding that we cannot have a moral code without embracing his own favourite brand of myth is sadly typical of the church.

His example of Grimm Fairy Tales alongside that of Scripture as moral guides actually demonstrates that we as humans do not need religion or God to make moral decisions or influence one another to do so.

The sooner we accept that we, and not some imaginary powers are the root of all good and evil, the sooner we can focus our efforts on nurturing the former and combating the latter, rather than waste our valuable energies and talents indulging pre-medieval fantasies.