In Europe there was once and still is a beautiful religion based on respect for nature and on creating safe loving social structures, and on worshipping the spirit through ritual celebration. Its followers did not believe mankind was evil, or born in debt to God, or had to shed anybody’s blood to please God. Therefore, they did not wish to join the cult of guilt, fear, and blood sacrifice which swept their land with armed priests, and flaming stakes. They called their religion Wicca, from which we get the words "wise"...and "witch".

They refused to bow down to the idols the Church of Rome had made of an ancient diety and a martyred prophet of the Jews. For refusing the yoke of Christ’s self-proclaimed agents, that predatory cult declared that "witches" were Satanic and deserved to be piously put to the torch...though Satan is a Christian mythical character the Wiccans had never heard of.

Wiccans still have a celebration about the same time as Halloween, called Samain, and it is devoted not to Satan, but in thanks to The Goddess for the goodness of plentiful earth. (The Wiccan notion that femininity is a divine quality is definitely non-Christian, but hardly Satanic.) After persecution drove Wiccans into hiding, Christian folk created a day of "giving the Devil his due", the shtick being to dress up in images of death and evil: corpses, devils, and "witches". Halloween is a mockery in which the young are taught that witches are sadistic warty old hunchback women who make bat soup, eat Christian children, and presumedly consort with the Devil.

Halloween tradition identifies other symbols with nasty old Satan as "occult", along with evil pointed black hats, and those mysterious evil wraiths, ghosts. (Is St. Jude a ghost?) There is no evil in black cats, bats, skeletons, pentagrams, astrological symbols, Hebrew letters, out-thrust tongues, and the like except the evil which people insist on putting there. How unjust that they thereby accuse the wearers of their own sinister interpretations of the symbols.

The fact that young people stretching the limitations of their elders’ social conventions choose to use the number 666 or the inverted star as symbols of independence hardly means they have become slathering puppets of the One and Only Real Satan.

Putting a star on my hat would not make me a Communist; putting a star on my shoulder would not make me a General; nor would one on my chest make me the Sheriff; and even carving one on my arm would not of itself make me a Satanist. If Happy Meals for a trio of Cub Scouts costs $6.66, that does not mean Ronald McDonald -- or one of the Cubs -- is the Anti-Christ.

A time of Christian paranoia and bigotry created the absurd (but fun!) spectacle of Halloween to teach the children that certain non-Christians were evil. The symbols used are as far from the truth about The Craeft of Wicca -- witchcraft -- as the rabbit with the technicolor eggs is from the truth about Christ.

Christians who believe in Satan and fear Satan’s insidious influence in their lives are not really paranoid. Satan is everywhere, ready to poison their minds. The pervasiveness of the Devil’s influence is always a new surprise. Consider that even our days of the week (taught to our children in public schools from kindergarten on) are named for Christless pagan gods.

Sunday, and Mon(moon)day are taken right straight from Astrology, which is practiced by Satanists, promiscuous hippie LSD-heads, and supermarket-tabloid false prophets. Saturday (Saturn’s day) is not only Astrological, it is also named after a false god worshipped by the Rome of Pontius Pilate. Wednesday is Wotan’s day, after the pagan diety worshipped by the bloodthirsty Vikings, as is Thursday (Thor’s day) -- Thor is not God’s son, but Wotan’s. Friday is Frigga’s day, also taken from the same Norse mythology that produced Druids and witchcraft. Tuesday is Tiu’s day. Tiu, or Tyr, was the Norse or Teutonic god of war. These are the same Germanic mythological gods that Adolf Hitler believed in when he said Germans were the master race, diabolically giving "White ethnic pride" a very bad name.

Why can’t we give the days of the week names which are more in character with our role as a nation "under God", a Christian nation so tolerant as to legally harbor every doctrine no matter how false good Christian reasoning reveals it to be. For Monday, let us have Lukes (this will be good for Spanish speaking people accustomed to Lunes). For Tuesday, Markes, which mirrors Spanish Martes. For Wednesday, Matthes. For Thursday, Johnnes. For Friday, not Thor’s mother, but God’s, and so, Maryday. Following the Spanish tradition again, Saturday is simply Sabbaday, and Sunday...is obviously Sonday.

Satan would like us to keep the names of ancient false gods alive, along with a lot of other diabolical secular notions like evolution, reincarnation, geophysics, and water-witching. If Christ is to triumph in America, we must stop using the power of society to promote the opponents of God. How can individuals be expected to serve the cause of Jesus when the organs of society -- the laws, customs, morals, schools, and the media -- do not? If we cannot change the law that forbids the government from giving due public recognition to Jesus Christ as The Ultimate Eternal and Undeniable One Ruler of America, then how about at least eliminating the horde of Satan’s demigods whose names we are forced to honor weekly in favor of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Reagan, and...Robertson?