Here's an interesting Beliefnet piece about the Catholic origins of Halloween. I was particularly intrigued to learn about the origins of "Trick or Treat":
"Treat or treat" is perhaps the oddest and most American addition to Halloween and is the unwilling contribution of English Catholics.
During the penal period of the 1500s to the 1700s in England, Catholics had no legal rights. They could not hold office and were subject to fines, jail and heavy taxes. It was a capital offense to say Mass, and hundreds of priests were martyred.
Occasionally, English Catholics resisted, sometimes foolishly. One of the most foolish acts of resistance was a plot to blow up the Protestant King James I and his Parliament with gunpowder. This was supposed to trigger a Catholic uprising against the oppressors. The ill-conceived Gunpowder Plot was foiled on November 5, 1605, when the man guarding the gunpowder, a reckless convert named Guy Fawkes, was captured and arrested. He was hanged; the plot fizzled.
November 5, Guy Fawkes Day, became a great celebration in England, and so it remains. During the penal periods, bands of revelers would put on masks and visit local Catholics in the dead of night, demanding beer and cakes for their celebration: trick or treat!
Guy Fawkes Day arrived in the American colonies with the first English settlers. But by the time of the American Revolution, old King James and Guy Fawkes had pretty much been forgotten. Trick or treat, though, was too much fun to give up, so eventually it moved to October 31, the day of the Irish-French masquerade. And in America, trick or treat wasn’t limited to Catholics.
I'm a bit of a Guy Fawkes Day junkie, probably because of this guy.
Happy All Saints Day! Here's the Pope:
The indissoluble link between the Church and sainthood was remembered today by Benedict XVI in a quotation by Alessandro Manzoni. "Today," said the pope in the words of the author of the novel 'The Betrothed', "the Church is celebrating its dignity as mother of saints, the image of the supernal city," and added: "it manifests its beauty as the immaculate spouse of Christ, source and model of every saintliness." To explain the meaning underlying All Saints Day, celebrated this morning in the Vatican with a solemn mass, the pope chose to quote St Bernard. "Our saints," he said, using the words of the saint, "do not need our honours and nothing is granted them by our worship. I must confess that, when I think of the saints, I burn with grand desires." For the pope, this means looking "at the luminous example of the saints," to "reawaken in ourselves the grand desire for sainthood." "We are all called upon to follow a life as saints," said Pope Ratzinger, stressing that "to be a saint does not necessarily mean carrying out extraordinary actions and deeds, nor having some type of special charisma." But, he went on, "it is only necessary to serve Jesus, to listen to him and follow him without losing hear when faced with difficulties." .
John Derbyshire offers some provocative reflections on his own journey away from Christianity. (HT: Volokh) Many of his points are great conversation-starters. Here's one:
I can report that the Creationists are absolutely correct to hate and fear modern biology. Learning this stuff works against your faith. To take a single point at random: The idea that we are made in God’s image implies we are a finished product. We are not, though. It is now indisputable that natural selection has been going on not just through human prehistory, but through recorded history too, and is still going on today, and will go on into the future, presumably to speciation, either natural or artificial. So which human being was made in God’s image: the one of 100,000 years ago? 10,000 years ago? 1,000 years ago? The one of today? The species that will descend from us? All of those future post-human species, or just some of them? And so on. The genomes are all different. They are not the same creature. And if they are all made in God’s image somehow, then presumably so are all the other species, and there’s nothing special about us at all.
Now of course there are ways to finesse that point — intellectuals can cook up an argument for anything, and religious intellectuals, who cut their teeth on justifying some wildly improbable stuff, are especially ingenious — but the cumulative effect of dozens of factlets like this is devastating to the notion that human beings are a special creation. And without that notion, traditional religious belief is holed below the water line.
I've often wrestled with a similar question: at what point of human evolution did our fallen nature kick in? Was the first human ancestor who was capable of deliberate decision-making sinful in that decision-making? Or is sin such a uniquely "human" endeavor that it only arose among creatures who looked pretty much like we do? If so, is it sensible to think of "the Fall" as occurring at a particular point in time or is it more properly considered as a disposition that unfolded gradually across the evolutionary landscape? Can anyone recommend any resources on these questions?
Rob
