John Dickson, and get to it secularists and pagans, you have everything to lose, including your festivals ...

And so, since it's the season, and writing about the commentariat can be dull, we move to news of the local Anglican church, and their bid to 'reclaim Halloween' 'with Gothick Style'.

What monstrous infamy.

Sorry, but when you read the conservative chattering classes, you soon learn in a declamatory way that we're all ruined, about to be ruined, or shortly thereafter likely to encounter a catastrophic cataclysm or perhaps even the rapture.

It's not really monstrous, it's rather funny, in an unhep, unhip, uncool kind of Christian way, but what the heck.

But the plaintive sign on the fence did remind me of John Dickson punching on at The Punch with Is Halloween evil?

As usual, it turns out that the truth is that Christians are the ones inclined to evil. Let's review the good book:

Commandment 8:

Thou shalt not steal.

Yep, there it is, but as Dickson himself admits, Christians have been in the business of stealing from pagans for centuries. There's the matter of Christmas:

No one was suggesting Jesus was actually born on that date. This was just an attempt to Christianise culture. Personally, I love that spirit—sanctifying the secular instead of running away from it or trying to ban it! It speaks of an open, confident and generous version of faith. More of that, please!

Oh yes, it's dressed up in fancy words - Christianising culture - but it's all about theft. Poor bloody pagans diddled by Christians wanting to celebrate the absent lord rather than the ever present and rather helpful Sun.

And of course, since the intertubes is home to all kinds of loonacy, you can find any number of people ready to swear on a bible that Christ was born on December 25th, in much the same way that the splendid James Ussher, Anglican Archbishop of Armagh conclusively dated the start of the world to 4004BC.

So we come to Halloween, which is another rip of pagan culture, and we can cite Dickson again:

Halloween is much less significant, in both its pagan and Christian forms, but it has a similar history to Christmas. Originally, November 1 marked the end of the Summer months, and the pre-Christian Celts believed that the spirits of the departed returned to their homes at that time to visit loved ones. Masks and other disguises were worn to frighten off evil spirits who were trying to cut in on the action.

Around AD 610 Pope Boniface IV decided to ‘claim’ this festival for Jesus.

Claim? It's intellectual property theft of the most outrageous kind. Why aren't the studios on to this? Did the music industry get destroyed by pirates imitating Christian attitudes to copyright?

Meanwhile, Dickson tries to settle nervous nelly Ned Flanders Christians:

So, is Halloween today ‘evil’? Sure it is, if it involves the glorification (or, worse, the trivialization) of things satanic, and playing nasty pranks on neighbours who simply forgot to pick up a bag of sweets earlier in the day.

Uh huh. What about the evil doing of the people who filch, and purloin and make over? Why the Christians doing the dirty on the pagans is way worse than bloody sampling, and see how long you'd last infringing that way in the music world ... without fronting up cash.

Come to think of it, what's needed is a giant class action by pagans demanding compensation for the theft of their festivals.

Which brings us back to that Anglican sign about "reclaiming Halloween". It was never the Anglicans' festival in the first place. There's nothing to claim you doofuses, you stole it, thieved it pure and simple, and so it's the secularists and satanists who need to reclaim it from you.

Sheesh, talk about thieves in the night.

Commandment 10:

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.

Okay, okay, it just scrapes into the top ten - there are plenty more about shellfish and fabric mixing to bone up on - but hey, it's on the money.

Let's spell it out:

Nor anything that is thy neighbour's, including his bloody pagan festivals ...

Bloody coveting, thieving Christians, with their devious and fraudulent misrepresentation of entitlement to said intellectual property rights.

Dickson of course purports to be mild mannered, and open and forgiving and prayerful and decides that on a scale of sins, Christmas shopping is more satanic than goblins. What is a goblin anyway, he asks, not seeming to realise that these days he's likely to get a more sensible answer in the wiki here than in the bible.

And one more thing. The next time I hear someone rant about Halloween as a part of American imperialism, I'm going to shove the nordic imperialism of a pine tree down their anti-pagan throats and send them to the mountains of Korvatunturi in Lapland province, Finland.

Outside the dreaming, this country is full of cultural imperialism ...

But it all comes together and reminds me why I never had a go at Naomi Tsvirko's Easy laughs: why Hollywood loves mocking Christians. Could it simply be that Christians don't get and never will get it, and so when in need of a laugh, call in a Christian if you can't find a ghostbuster ...

Christians reclaiming Halloween. You never owned it in the first place you gherkins ...

Onward secularists and reclaim the night. And so we're off to certain festivities, and the more satanic the better ...

(Below: goth paraphernalia and goths out early in the streets of Newtown. Never mind that it was a sunny day, the real goths will be out in the evening, when the Sydney period double decker bus is safely tucked away in the museum. Take that Christians).