Halloween

October 30, 1998 Tomorrow is Halloween. And you know, most people see Halloween as nothing more than a harmless festival that allows kids to collect candy. Yet Halloween is much more than a harvest festival. Its origins are deeply rooted in the occult, and the various practitioners of the black arts identify Halloween as a significant event in the pagan calendar.

The date, October 31st, has long been known as "The Festival of the Dead." The Celtic tribes and their priests, the Druids, celebrated this day as a marker for the change from life to death. Today, the modern celebration of Halloween is performed usually by adherents of witchcraft who use the day (and especially the night) for their rituals.

Witches celebrate Halloween as the "Feast of Samhain" — the first feast of the witchcraft year. Being a festival of the dead, Halloween is a time when witches attempt to communicate with the dead through various forms of divination.

Witches believe that this day marks the time when the Mother Goddess (also known as Mother Nature or Goddess of the Earth) returns to the underworld to sleep under a blanket of snow. In her place comes another god — the Horned God — who emerges to begin his reign of death. Witches believe this is a time when the life of summer is replaced by the death of winter. Halloween is a high feast day to celebrate the end of summer and the coming of winter.

Christians always struggle with what to do: ignore it, plan alternative parties, use it for a witnessing opportunity. Any or all of those suggestions are valid. But most of all we should teach our children that Halloween is not a Christian holiday but an occult celebration we should stay away from.

I'm Kerby Anderson of Probe Ministries, and that's my opinion