Oct 15, 2012

This Halloween, Christian leaders challenged to take a stand, or stand down

Last year some 300 exorcists flocked to Poland for a week-long congress to examine the current fashion for vampirism the world-over and the apparent connection between this fascination and a surge in demonic possession.

According to a group of Christian scholars, this reflected how the world is experiencing an explosion of ancient occultism combined with wicked fascination for ghosts and all things paranormal. In the United States alone, there are now more than two hundred thousand registered witches, this group claims, and as many as 8 million unregistered practitioners of “the craft.” On college and high school campuses, vampires, werewolves, and other “creatures of the night” are esteemed as objects of desire and idolized by young men and women who view them as cult icons of envious mystical power. Evidently, church goers are enchanted by the darkness as well. An April 13, 2011 article “Mysticism Infecting Nazarene Beliefs” was preceded only a few days before by a Telegraph article describing how a “surge in Satanism” inside the church has sparked a “rise in demand for exorcists” within traditional religious settings.

And then there is the recent spate of killings and Zombie-like attacks on people and animals as well as by individuals claiming to be vampires and werewolves. The arrest of a Texas man who broke into a woman's house, threw her against a wall and tried to suck her blood is one example. Another case involved a Florida teenager who was later charged together with four other people of beating a 16-year-old boy to death. The teenage girl claims to be a vampire/werewolf hybrid and investigators acknowledge that she and the other suspects appear to be part of a vampire cult.

Rise in this activity is documented in the 2011 book God's Ghostbusters, (Defender Publishing, October 2011) whose publisher believes it is time for Christian leaders to take a stand and to speak out on this issue, perhaps even using the month of October and the season of Halloween as opportunity to address congregations on the dangers of occult activity.

"Psychologists have long understood how women in general desire strength in men, but few could have imagined how this natural and overriding need by young ladies would be used in modern times to seduce them of their innocence using mysteriously strong yet everlastingly damned creatures depicted in popular books and films like Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse," says publisher Thomas Horn. "Listing all of the related fan sites, music videos, magazines, television shows, and movies currently dedicated to sexual [or romantic] obsession with alluring demons-in-flesh would be daunting. But these would have to include television shows like Being Human, The Gates, Underworld, The Vampire Diaries, and True Blood, not to mention the hedonistic gay-themed program The Lair, a series that plays nationwide on all major cable systems based on a vampire-run sex club."

Horn further admonishes that, "If parents, pastors and youth pastors haven't been paying attention, they need to spend a little time looking into what their children are mentally and spiritually feeding on, because we are losing a generation to darkness. Consider as an example popular youth-oriented magazines like Rolling Stone and their article The Joy of Vampire Sex. Look at the Ménage à Trois on the magazine's cover of three nudes bathed in blood with the promise to readers that vampires are 'Hot. They're Sexy. They're Undead.'"