You have to realise; Hallowe’en is new in Australia, and no one knows what’s going on or how to do it properly.

Twenty years ago, a normal Trick or Treat incident would go like this:

Kid: Trick or treat!
Australian: What?
Kid: Trick or treat!
Australian: What’s that mean?
Kid: It means you’re supposed to give me candy.
Australian: Why?
Kid: It’s Hallowe’en!
Australian: Oh, okay. Well, do a trick first.
Kid: What?
Australian: You said ‘trick or treat’. Do a trick and I’ll give you a treat.
Kid: That’s not how it works! You’re supposed to give me a treat or I play a trick on you!
Australian: (utterly mystified) Are you sure you’ve got this right?
Kid: I think so.
Australian: Go on, do a trick.
Kid: Oh, all right. (Does unconvincing little dance.)
Australian: Not bad. Here’s some candy.

That’s the way it was; you had to explain the concept to every house you visited.

I still keep some Hallowe’en candy at the ready, though. If no one comes, I eat it all.

No chance of that last night, though; Hallowe’en and trick or treating are catching on. About twenty kids in costume showed up (in one big group). So I said to my two boys, “How about it?” They were in costume in seconds. Youngest boy was a Native American, and Oldest Boy was…

“What are you?” I asked. He had his hoodie on, and was wielding a hammer he found in the shed.

“I’m a hammer murderer,” he said.

“That’s awfully strange. I don’t know if that’s on the list.” I said. “But it’ll do. Let’s roll.”

And would you believe, every house we stopped at had candy. Even more unbelievably, people were dishing out candy to the boys by handfuls. Good stuff, too. None of the chalky rolls of ‘Smarties’ that I remembered from my youth; this was fun size candy bars and Easter eggs. Could it be that Australians are overdoing it because they’re new at this?

If so, we must never tell them.

There was an opening hymn, which everyone sang, including the new convert, Sister Z, just in front of me. But it soon became apparent that she wasn’t singing the same hymn as everyone else. She was singing some kind of high-pitched melody that only she could hear. Rather loudly, too. And she didn’t stop singing at the end of the verse, she just kept on singing with her head pointed to the ceiling. Something was wrong.

“Dad, what’s she doing?” asked Youngest Boy.

“She’s having a problem in her mind,” I said, wondering what to do. “Just stay calm.”

The hymn ended, but her strange singing continued. The congregation stayed awkwardly silent. Then she started hitting herself in the chest. The person next to her tried to talk her down, but it wasn’t working. Sister Z got up and began shouting at the silent congregation.

“This is an adulterous church!” she shouted in the aisle. “You can’t tell me to be quiet! I will burn your skin.” And so on for about a minute.

It was then that she approached the stand and tried to go for the mike, but the bishop refused to yield. Instead he said, “Brothers and sisters, could I just ask you to quietly leave the chapel and go into the cultural hall.” Which everyone did.

An emergency team soon arrived. They’d seen Sister Z before; apparently this wasn’t a new thing for her.

People were confused and concerned. Fortunately we had some mental health professionals in the ward. Brother B had a brief chat to the adults, and Sister C spoke to the Primary children. All in all, the incident was handled very well.

For me, the notable thing about the incident was the practical way in which everyone handled it. Mormons do believe in the devil, and anecdotes about satanic possession do exist, but they’re not common. I think loads of Latter-day Saints would argue that devils could be cast out using the Priesthood. But how did the people of the Church handle the affair? They called in people who were trained and had experience in that area, like any sensible person would.

If this had happened in a born-again church, it would have been handled totally differently. Demonic possession? No problem! Some of the brethren grab her, the bishop commands Satan to leave, she barfs, end of story. Great meeting! Until next time she has a psychotic episode because the problem hasn’t been solved.

No, they handled it the right way — the non-spiritual, material way. Sensible people know that when you need something done, you don’t rely on spirits. You do what works. You don’t pray to get your sink fixed. You call a plumber. Of course, you could try and sneak God in somewhere, perhaps by praying that the plumber will know what he or she’s doing. The idea has worked its way into proverb: “God helps those who help themselves.” Or this modern homily: “Pray as if everything depended on the Lord, and then work as if everything depended on you.” Or as Voltaire put it: “It is unquestionable that certain words and ceremonies will effectually destroy a flock of sheep, if administered with a sufficient portion of arsenic.”

That which we call ‘spiritual’ is actually just made up. Therefore it’s only good in situations where
a) you can’t do anything about the problem (it makes you feel better)
b) you’re already doing something practical about the problem (and then when it works, you credit God instead)
c) it’s not a very serious problem that you don’t need solved, or
d) the problem relates only to ‘spiritual things’ and not the physical world in any way.

And these are in fact the situations in which people seek spiritual guidance. But when they need to do something real, even believers know that it’s the non-spiritual methods that work.

Has it really been almost a week without a blogpost? You know what that means: I’m out of the running for the Bloggy McBlog Award for Most Pathologically Prolific Self-Expression Despite Deadlines and Actual Work. Drat.

But this page inspired me. It’s an essay by Richard Dawkins to his 10-year-old daughter.

The way scientists use evidence to learn about the world is much cleverer and more complicated than I can say in a short letter. But now I want to move on from evidence, which is a good reason for believing something , and warn you against three bad reasons for believing anything. They are called “tradition,” “authority,” and “revelation.”

I like that he’s mentioned ‘revelation’ specifically. Let’s skip to that.

If you had asked the pope in 1950 how he knew that Mary’s body disappeared into Heaven, he would probably have said that it had been “revealed” to him. He shut himself in his room and prayed for guidance. He thought and thought, all by himself, and he became more and more sure inside himself. When religious people just have a feeling inside themselves that something must be true, even though there is no evidence that it is true, they call their feeling “revelation.”

That description is not a straw man. It is part and parcel of what Latter-day Saints expect to get out of the religious experience, and it is a key reason for believing people to hold the beliefs they do. It’s also the hardest to counter. People have a natural tendency to believe their own experiences, and it’s very difficult to disbelieve your experience when it runs counter to fact. This tendency kept me believing in counterfactual things for absolutely years.

The essay is everything I wanted to say to my kids about evidence (and some things I already have).