Tomorrow is October 31st. Most people know it as “Halloween” but it also has long been known as The Festival of the Dead. The Celtic tribes and their priests, the Druids, celebrated this day as a marker for the change from life to death. November 1 was the beginning of the New Year, so Halloween or “Samhain,” was like New Year’s Eve. It was both a time of death and new beginnings.

The young would wander the countryside disguised in scary masks, carrying turnips carved into scary jack-o’-lanterns to frighten off ghosts and goblins. They believed that the veil between the living and the dead was the thinnest at this time, and therefore one could most readily communicate with loved ones in spirit. Deuteronomy 18 warns us not to be involved in any activity that includes divination.

The term Halloween is shortened from All-hallow-even, as it is the evening before “All Hallows’ Day” also known as “All Saints’ Day.” Pope Gregory moved the day from May 13 to November 1. This made Halloween the eve of this celebration. November 1 became “All Hallow Mass,” and October 31, became “All Hallow’s Even.”

Today, Halloween has become one of the more celebrated holidays. We are told that people spend more on decorations at Halloween than any other holiday except Christmas. And often the Halloween celebrations have included more and more occultic activity. Christians have two options: to ignore Halloween or to provide an alternative. Many churches now provide a Fall Fun Festival.

I hope you have thought about what you will do tomorrow. Don’t just go with the flow. Make an informed decision about what you will do on Halloween.

Numerous surveys suggest that the millennial generation is quite willing to reject the Bible and Christian faith. In the past, it was seen as a roadmap for life. Now, if it is considered at all, is often seen as merely a book of suggestions. Ken Ham’s latest book. Ready to Return, documents this secular trend and provides recommendations on how to reverse this trend.

The book is the third book in a trilogy. The first book, Already Gone, showed how many young people have already checked out from Christianity while still in middle school. The second book, Already Compromised, documented how many Christian schools have compromised on the Christian faith. This book focuses on those young people who have views at odds with biblical truth.

They found that 30 percent of church-attending millennials believe that there are other books (such as the Qur’an) that are inspired by God. Two-thirds (65%) believe that you will go to heaven if you are a good person. And a third (35%) of them believe that Bible contains errors.

When Ken Ham was on my radio program, we also discussed how these incorrect views about the Bible and salvation also translated into false views about various social issues. For example, half (50%) of all millennials would never speak out against same sex marriage. Nearly a third (30%) believe that abortion should remain legal in most instances.

It should be obvious from these percentages that parents and churches have not done enough to train Christian young people for the secular world. Half (50%) of the church-attending millennials who were surveyed said they were not taught to defend their faith in Sunday school. We need to equip young people. They need to know what the Bible teaches, and they need to know how to defend what the Bible teaches to a secular world that is either hostile or indifferent to biblical truth.

Ken Ham’s new book is a reminder that we need to equip the next generation so that they know what they believe and why they believe it.

Dr. Ben Carson has a new book out that should be required reading not only for U.S. citizens but also for many of the presidential candidates. In his book, A More Perfect Union, he provides a detailed introduction and overview of the U.S. Constitution. He was on my radio program recently to talk about the book and some of the things he is hearing as he travels the country in his presidential campaign.

Dr. Carson says that understanding government and the Constitution “isn’t brain surgery.” He argues that the Constitution was written so the average American could understand it and see if it was properly applied. The founders wanted a republic that, in Lincoln’s words, was a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” That is why the subtitle of Dr. Carson’s book is “What we the people can do to reclaim our constitutional liberties.”

He acknowledges that the “founders gave Congress a great deal of latitude when it came to taxes. Unfortunately, this vagueness has been abused by our government in a way that would horrify the founders.” He also believes that issues ranging from Obamacare to same sex marriage are outside of the federal government’s purview. “The framers of our Constitution intended that these kinds of issues be handled by the states. Judges should not be able to overturn the decisions made by the citizens of each state.”

We talked about the Second Amendment. He says that this right cannot be violated, and “any attempt to erode it should be vigorously resisted. Those who insist that tyranny could never come to America should read about how it came to so many other places that also felt safe.”

Article 2 in the Constitution states that the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Dr. Carson says: “it does not say that the laws with which he agrees be faithfully executed. The executive branch cannot pick and choose.”

Dr. Carson provides us with a short course in Constitution 101. It is a book we all need to read.

What religious rights do Christians have in the workplace? A court case in Atlanta may begin to restrict those rights in ways that should concern us. The case involves former Atlanta Fire Chief Kelvin Cochran. As I discussed in the previous commentary, he was fired from his job because of a devotional book he wrote that addressed sexual issues from a biblical perspective.

Cochran has been a firefighter since the early 1980s. He was even appointed by President Obama as the U.S. Fire Administrator for the United States. He had been the fire chief of Atlanta from 2008 until the beginning of this year.

A lawyer for Alliance Defending Freedom said that the city of Atlanta “actually argued that you’re entitled to have beliefs and opinions, but you have to keep them to yourself, inside the four walls of your house or your church—that you shouldn’t bring them out into the public, and you shouldn’t bring them out if you’re employed by a government agency.”

It is worth remembering that Cochran gave his book to some fellow employees but did not talk about these issues while on the force. There was not problem until a copy of the book made it to a city councilman who is openly homosexual. The councilman in a statement to the Atlanta Journal Constitution said: “I respect each individual’s right to have their own thoughts, beliefs and opinions, but when you’re a city employee, and those thoughts, beliefs and opinions are different from the city’s you have to check them at the door.” Atlanta’s mayor said he felt that the book would be disturbing to the LGBT community.

It is also worth mention that no one has ever accused Cochran of discrimination against anyone based upon his or her sexual orientation or any other characteristic. I think this is merely about the biblical perspective in his book. That may be why the city is now trying to say he was terminated for other reasons than the religious nature of the book.

This case, and a number of others, will determine whether we have true religious freedom in the workplace.

Every four years, presidential candidates talk about giving away lots of free stuff in order to get elected. Tim Wildmon, in a recent column, explains the “promise and peril of free stuff.” He believes that Republicans will have to deal with a major challenge. Democratic candidates are offering lots of free stuff. “It’s hard to out free-stuff the Democrats.”

Leading the way in giving out free stuff is Senator Bernie Sanders. One article in the Wall Street Journal estimated that the cost of all his proposals (so far) would be on the order of $18 trillion. The largest amount of that would be for the conversion and full funding of a single-payer Medicare-type health care plan.

Other big-ticket items would be his desire to increase Social Security benefits and to provide free college tuition and better student loan financing. The latter would cost at least $750 billion each year. And I might mention that he not only wants to provide “free” college education for all Americans but even for students who are in this country illegally.

You might wonder how he thinks we will be able to pay for this. His answer is simple: tax the rich. But that won’t work. A few years ago I did a commentary on how much revenue you could raise if you confiscated all the money earned by billionaires and millionaires. The numbers might be a bit different now, but I am sure they are at least the right order of magnitude.

For example, if you confiscated every dime from people with annual incomes of $10 million or more, you would only have a total of $240 billion. Of course you couldn’t actually get away with confiscating the annual incomes of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and others.

This election season we will be hearing about government giving away free stuff, but we desperately need to inject some common sense into these campaign pledges.

When a cold-case detective decides to use his analytical skills to evaluate the Bible or the evidence for God, it can be a fascinating journey. In his previous book, Cold Case Christianity, J. Warner Wallace applied time-tested investigative tools and techniques to evaluate the claims of the gospels. This time his book, God’s Crime Scene, applies those same techniques to examine the universe as a crime scene.

He invites the reader to sit on a jury as he makes a compelling case for God’s existence. He sifts through the clues and develops a profile of the suspect. That would be an uncaused, intelligent designer who is all-powerful, non-spatial and non-material. Eight chapters investigate various clues while building a profile.

Some of the important questions raised and answered are: Did the universe have a beginning? Is the universe really fine-tuned for life? What about the origin of life? What about consciousness and free will? And how can we explain the existence of God if evil is in the world?

Key to his investigation is the question of whether we have enough evidence inside the room or whether we need to go outside the room. If a person is found dead in a room, can we explain it inside the room? There is a suicide note. The gun belonged to the victim. There was no forced entry. But you must look outside the room if there are muddy footprints, foreign fingerprints, and DNA that does not belong to the victim.

When we investigate the universe, can we explain it “inside the room” or do we need to go “outside the room” to find a cause of the universe? Can we explain what looks like design “inside the room” or do we need a designer? J. Warner Wallace does an outstanding job addressing these sorts of questions.

Do we have evidence for a divinely created universe? This detective makes a compelling case.

How bad is the economy? Many people believe it is still in bad shape. Others don’t see any problem. They will point to a low unemployment rate, record corporate profits, and a booming stock market.

The difference in perspective is explained in a recent column on “Why This Feels Like a Depression for Most People.” It begins with this simple observation. “Everyone has seen the pictures of the unemployed waiting in soup lines during the Great Depression. When you try to tell a propaganda believing, willfully ignorant, mainstream media watching, math challenged consumer we are in the midst of a Greater Depression, they act as if you’ve lost your mind.”

During the Great Depression, there were as many as 12 million Americans unemployed. These were the men pictured in the soup lines. Today, they are essentially invisible. “There are 46 million Americans in an electronic soup kitchen.” The 46 million on food stamps are hidden from our view.

Let’s look at it another way. There are 251 million Americans of working age and only 149 million are employed. That means that only 59 percent of Americans of working-age actually work. That is a much lower percentage than it was during the Great Depression.

The author concludes that for “the average American family, the US economy has been in recession since 2000, with the Greater Depression arriving in 2008.” Although the working age population has grown by 40 million since 2000, only 12 million jobs were added during that time. Most of those new jobs are in the government-controlled health, education, social services sectors. Millions of good paying manufacturing jobs disappeared during that same time period. That’s why this feels like a depression to so many people.

A week ago I had a discussion on radio about guns that I wish the nation were having right now. Frank Miniter is the author of a new book, The Future of the Gun. In one of the chapters he talked about technology that can alleviate some of the legitimate concerns raised by parents and law enforcement.

For example, we can put biometric scanners on guns that can see through sweat and even blood. It would only allow certain people to fire the gun. You may have seen this in the 2012 James Bond movie, Skyfall, or in the earlier 1989 Bond film, License to Kill. Parents who would like to have a handgun for protection are always afraid that their children might find someway to get their hands on their gun. This technology would only allow a parent to fire the gun.

In this case, the technology is not the problem. Politics is the problem. We can put this on guns right now, but gun opponents want this technology on all guns and would want to confiscate older guns that do not have this smart technology.

Another example is the ability we have to create a smart gun for law enforcement that would use a time stamp to record when a gun is fired and could even access GPS technology to keep track of the officer’s gun. We might even be able to put a small camera on a polymer gun to record what the officer saw before he or she fired the gun.

Smart gun technology would be helpful in trials and police investigations. This would be even more effective than body cameras. Police unions, however, generally are against implementing this technology and fear the impact this might have on police actions in the field.

Nevertheless, smart gun technology might resolve some of the questions and concerns that surface in the gun debate. This is the discussion we should be having right now.