Mockery Works, Apparently
According to several sources, Kimberly Daniels wrote an article for Pat Robertson’s site entitled The Danger of Celebrating Halloween, with such tidbits as:
The danger of Halloween is not in the scary things we see but in the secret, wicked, cruel activities that go on behind the scenes. These activities include:
- Sex with demons
- Orgies between animals and humans
- Animal and human sacrifices
- Sacrificing babies to shed innocent blood
- Rape and molestation of adults, children and babies
- Revel nights
- Conjuring of demons and casting of spells
- Release of “time-released” curses against the innocent and the ignorant.
To quote Mike Argento, “Man, we never get invited to the good Halloween parties.” And a friend of mine added, “How come we never see those jobs advertised? I could do that. I even got a new costume and hat this year”.
And now it appears that the article has been pulled. If you want to read it, you’ll have to retrieve it from Google’s cache while you can.
So does this mean that CBN sought divine guidance from Pat and determined that Daniels’s views were not factually true? Perhaps. But I prefer to think that the article was originally put up because Pat & Pals agree with Daniels, but once everyone started pointing at them and laughing, they were embarrassed; and rather than defend their views, CBN preferred to just yank the article and pretend it never happened.
In short, mockery works.
People like Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and countless others have done a sterling job presenting the intellectual arguments against religion. But the fact is that people aren’t religious for rational reasons; they’re not convinced by rational arguments, any more than people are convinced of Santa Claus’s existence by rational arguments. But a lot of people stay religious because it’s comfortable.
And just as a lot of kids start doubting Santa Claus when the older kids make fun of their beliefs, it’s likely that a lot of people would doubt their god-beliefs if they were widely perceived as uncool or ridiculous. That’s what people like George Carlin and Tim Minchin are good at. But every little bit helps.