How many Christians Celebrate Halloween?

Question

you should not celebrate such as pagan and evil celebration

in my church we are having spiritual warfare Today! to cancel satan's party!

Answer 1

Halloween is not a pagan and evil celebration but rather it is a secular holiday.

Answer 2

Unlike actual pagan celebrations, people who get dressed up and go trick-or-treating do not actually BELIEVE in ghosts or witches, and they are not actually "celebrating" as in a religious sort of way. I think that Halloween is just a secular celebration, and it is harmless.
Now, if you are doing fortunetelling, or oijia, or some other sort of thing like that, you should not participate, even in jest. However, dressing up and getting candy is not satanic.
A Christian should not participate in "idol feasts" which are ritualistic worship of a pagan nature. However, a Christian is perfectly free to eat the meat sacrificed to idols, unless someone else in his presence would be offended, as the weaker brother. I think this is the analogy here to scripture. Now if you know someone who is a "weaker brother" such as someone who used to be a spiritist or a wiccan, you should avoid the activities to avoid tempting this person to return to that lifestyle. However, I do not know any ex-witches.
Hope that helps

Answer 3

A lot of them do. In fact a lot of churches around here have safe Halloween activities for kids sponsored by the church. Mine for instance had a Trunk or Treat. Where members fill their car trunks with candy and kids come to the parking lot to get candy from trustworthy people.

It started out as pagan and evil, but now it is all about having fun and pretending you are who you're not. It should be a time of innocent fun.

Answer 4

Cool. More candy for us.
For the record I'm pagan and I don't "celebrate" Halloween. Winter nights sure, but that ain't Halloween.

Answer 5

It may have once been a pagan holiday, but now people just celebrate it FOR FUN. It's just a fun day to dress up, be silly, try to scare people, get candy, have parties.

I think we defeat Satan and his evil ways by turning a holiday that's supposed to be all about him into a fun, family togetherness activity, and having a good time instead of being miserable as he wants us all to be.

Answer 6

Some people make it into something much more than it really is. Do you think any kid or parent actually thinks when they are decorating their house, or dressing up or passing out candy that they are celebrating satan??? Come on!!! It is just a day for silly costumes, and candy! Take it for what it really is instead of trying to make something evil out of it!

Answer 7

Halloween has nothing to do with satan or pagans. It is all about capitolism. It is a reason to sell costumes, candy and decorations.

Answer 8

Eight million , nine hundred and fourty-seven thousand , six hundred and ninty-nine .
Your church is goofy . Halloween is just a fun day , of course Holies make something out of everything .
The kill-joy churches are doing a good job of killing themselves .

Answer 9

You are a remarkably ignorant person. Why do you wallow in such ignorance. Here, let me enlighten you just a bit. Hallowe'en is upon us, we are accosted (in writing, at least not face-to-face) by ill-meaning and ignorant non-Christians and well-meaning but ignorant Christians who both tell us the same sad, hoary old nonsense. Specifically, they repeat the 19th-century fable that Hallowe'en's only origins are as a co-option of some ancient Irish pagan autumn festival. This is about as tiresome as the silly old "Easter is a pagan festival" (silly me, I never thought of Passover as "pagan") rubbish. Anyway, since the upcoming holiday is Hallowe'en, I'll address it. Actually, I'll let a professional historian address it:

At the end of the nineteenth century, two distinguished academics, one at Oxford and the other at Cambridge, made enduring contributions to the popular conception of Samhain. The former was the philologist Sir John Rhys, who suggested that it had been the 'Celtic' New Year.... Rhys's theory was further popularized by the Cambridge scholar, Sir James Frazer. At times the latter did admit that the evidence for it was inconclusive, but at others he threw this caution overboard and employed it to support an idea of his own: that Samhain had been the pagan Celtic feast of the dead. He reached this belief by the simple process of arguing back from a fact, that 1 and 2 November had been dedicated to that purpose by the medieval Christian Church, from which it could be surmised that this was been a Christianization of a preexisting festival. He admitted, by implication, that there was in fact no actual record of such a festival, but inferred the former existence of one from a number of different propositions: that the Church had taken over other pagan holy days, that 'many' cultures have annual ceremonies to honour their dead, 'commonly' at the opening of the year, and that (of course) 1 November had been the Celtic New Year. He pointed out that although the feast of All Saints or All Hallows had been formally instituted across most of northwest Europe by the emperor Louis the Pius in 835, on the prompting of Pope Gregory IV, it had already existed, on its later date of 1 November, in England at the time of Bede. He suggested that the pope and emperor had, therefore, merely ratified an existing religious practice based upon that of the ancient Celts.

The story is, in fact, more complicated. By the mid fourth century Christians in the Mediterranean world were keeping a feast in honour of all those who had been martyred under the pagan emperors; it is mentioned in the Carmina Nisibena of St Ephraem, who died in about 373, as being held on 13 May. During the fifth century divergent practices sprang up, the Syrian churches holding the festival in Easter Week, and those of the Greek world preferring the Sunday after Pentecost. That of Rome, however, preferred to keep the May date, and Pope Boniface IV formally endorsed it in the year 609. By 800 churches in England and Germany, which were in touch with each other, were celebrating a festival dedicated to all saints upon 1 November instead. The oldest text of Bede's Martyrology, from the eighth century, does not include it, but the recensions at the end of the century do. Charlemagne's favourite churchman Alcuin was keeping it by then, as were also his friend Arno, bishop of Salzburg, and a church in Bavaria. Pope Gregory, therefore, was endorsing and adopting a practice which had begun in northern Europe. It had not, however, started in Ireland, where the Felire of Oengus and the Martyrology of Tallaght prove that the early medieval churches celebrated the feast of All Saints upon 20 April. This makes nonsense of Frazer's notion that the November date was chosen because of 'Celtic' influence: rather, both 'Celtic' Europe and Rome followed a Germanic idea....

The preceding is from the book Stations of the Sun by Ronald Hutton, a well-respected academic historian who is certainly not the darling of the "Religious Right"--who, themselves, also despise Hallowe'en and insist that it is "really a pagan festival".

Of course, I have no illusions. Narrow-minded Christians and narrow-minded non-Christians, alike (and they are both very much alike) will insist that I am magically "wrong" and continue to cling to their dogmas regarding Hallowe'en, but I felt that the world wouldn't be hurt by injecting a little bit of actual history into the question.

The real truth about the matter is that Hallowe'en, today, is a commercial event. It's about candy. Lots of candy. Lots of tooth-rotting, diabetes-exacerbating candy. Buckets and bags and bowls of candy. Candy corn, chocolate ghosts, pumpkin-shaped sugar bombs are the real meaning of Hallowe'en.

Answer 10

Any day is what you make it. I would never deny my children the FUN of trick or treating. We are not out there worshiping satan or trees or anything. Just good, clean fun. It's what memories are made of.