Ask Thugfang... Or maybe not?

Well! This is a bit of development.It appears that the Obfuscator replied to Thugfang's advice column on confession. After doing a little digging, it appears that Thugfang actually replied to the Obfuscator's comment. Of course he would. Someone that arrogant couldn't resist. Naturally he wouldn't reply in his regular column, but I managed to get my hands on the correspondence and am sharing it with you, because I think the question was quite good and really did see something the old devil missed. Might have been wiser not to point it out, though. So here it is, the correspondence of the unfortunate Obfuscator.


Dear Master Thugfang, Your well thought out tricks and traps will definitely be reread over the next while. There is much there to be applied with my Catholic patient, and I am beginning immediately. I am also looking forward to your additional column on post-confesson attacks.

However, through analyzing my patient before and after he goes to confession I have begun to realize why I have been having difficulty. It is due to the one question that you touched on briefly at the beginning of you letter, "How does confession work?" As you said, it is total nonsense to us, completely irrational. Yet, this man believes that it is powerful! So, would it not be better to show him how ineffective confession actually is? Why could we not attack the sacrament itself? I realize that the confessional is a no fly zone we cannot access. However, we could attack his faith in confession indirectly, by playing on his fears that he is revealing himself in a way that makes him vulnerable! Pride is the downfall of many men, as you yourself mentioned, so why don't we help him to realize that he is telling his sins to a mere man... one who might use that information for his own benefit. His pride would then guide him away from saying anything that would make him appear lesser or weak, for no man wishes to be judged by another. I will be considering all these issues critically as I continue to seriously practice your advice.

Sincerely, the Obfuscator



My Dearest, Darling Obfuscator,

So wise we are, suddenly! So perspicacious! You grasp things so quickly and even come to conclusions the master had not reached! Well, a gold star for the star pupil.

Certainly, if you can attack the patient's awareness of the priest's humanity, by all means do so. I have known it to work, but not, usually, in a patient with a well established habit of confessing. That sort of thing is better suited to the lapsed Catholic who is half-considering going back to the Church. That's when you want to trot out a parade of priest scandal stories and bad jokes about altar boys and confessions. Better still if he knew a priest who was an alcoholic, or a glutton, or even simply a bore. Anything to render ludicrous (in his mind as it is in ours) the idea that the Enemy could possibly use such a weak, pathetic sinner to affect His work. Even a cursory reading of the gospels would convince the dullest human that not only is that not unusual, it is precisely the Enemy's usual mode of operation, but most humans don't read the gospels. That is where you make mileage on the priest's sins.

In the case of a patient who has been confessing regularly for years, particularly if he confesses to several priests, his faith is in the sacrament, not the priest. As you pointed out, he believes the sacrament is powerful, and that is why he goes. He probably doesn't seriously attach that power to the priest himself.

On the other claw, if you do know anything about the priest, it wouldn't hurt to ensure the patient becomes aware of it. The juicier the better. What if the priest doesn't have any serious faults? Well, you're a demon, aren't you? Gossip, suspicion and lies are as good as a conviction in your patient's culture. Maybe he will stop going to confession altogether, or maybe he will simply decide to quit going to that priest. Either way, the distrust is certainly worth it, if you can make it happen.

Another thought. I once got a patient to stop going to confession to her regular confessor, who was a very wise and holy man, because I convinced her that every time he preached a homily on gossip he was thinking about her latest confession. I had forgotten that little anecdote. One of my more humorous escapades, if I do say so. In fact, the truth of the matter was that that abominable little prig spent so many hours in the confessional per week he was guaranteed to hear every sin in the book by four-o-clock wednesday afternoon. Make fun of her? Ha! He couldn't for the life of him remember which parishoner had told him what sins, except for one or two of the more colorful local characters. I strongly suspect he had heard a murder confessed once or twice (a few of my colleagues were assigned to local gang members) but given the fate of the priest's handler, I doubt he ever broke the seal of the confessional.

Which reminds me, I really ought to look you up some time. I have taken a special interest in your career, and we might be meeting far sooner than you ever expected.

Cheers!

Thugfang

Ask Thugfang: Confession Part II

His Right Dishonourable Loathsomeness, Master Thugfang, is a demon of great infamy among academic circles. He is a frequent columnist for “Tempter’s Times”, an assistant editor for “Wickedness Weekly” and current chair of Tempter’s Training College’s Department of Defense Against the White Arts, after the sudden disappearance of the most recent head under mysterious circumstances. Now, His Right Dishonourable Loathsomeness takes your questions. Having problems with a particularly troublesome patient? Meddlesome enemy agents stymieing you at every turn? Don’t wait, write immediately to “Ask Thugfang” C/O “Underworld Magazine.”

 

Dear Master Thugfang, I am writing to you from a special assignment. My patient is a Catholic. His erstwhile handler was reassigned on short notice because of the patient’s troubling habit of weekly confession, and I have been placed in charge of the case since I have had some success with this in the past. I even wrote an article for Wickedness Weekly entitled, “How to Keep your Patient from Going to Confession.” Unfortunately, all the tricks and tactics I have used before seem to have no effect on this particular patient. It persists in its stubborn adherence to this habit, so I am writing to you to ask if there is any other technique you know of which I can use?

Sincerely, the Obfuscator

My Dear Demonic readers, in my last column which you may read here, I addressed the unfortunate Obfuscator’s question with advice on how to meddle with a patient’s confession before the patient enters that little white box. It appears, however, that he asked for my advice too late. Apparently someone must have hinted to the lowerarchy that the Obfuscator’s skills were not what he had led them to believe, and he has been sent for retraining to bring them up to an acceptable level. Very sad I am sure, but a salutary lesson for all of us on the dangers of pride.

So now I shall enlighten my general audience, and particularly our dear Obfuscator’s successor, on how to make best work of the patient’s post confessional period. Remember, the Enemy has just effected a reversal of your work in the first spiritual order. Your natural reaction is discouragement and despair, but you must fight through that. You must be waiting at the door, so to speak, so as soon as your patient walks out you are there, braving the toxic illumination of Grace to begin your work all over again.

Obviously, our first tactic is distraction. That should go without saying, but I am amazed at how many young demons try the most subtle and complex approaches on patients who clearly do not need it. Keep it simple for Hell’s sake! Once the patient comes out of confession, the less time he spends thinking about it the better. Distraction, distraction, distraction. The sooner you can get him to put the whole thing out of his mind and forget about the Enemy and what He has done for him, the sooner you will be able to get back to the business of stealing his soul.

Never forget, my dear Obfuscator, the patient is half animal. He can no more see his own soul than he can see the inside of his head by rolling his eyes back into his skull. He was never meant to spend his life staring at his own soul. He was meant to stare at the Enemy with his whole soul and everything attached to it, so naturally, it is impossible for a human really to see himself. The most advanced ones have long since ceased to try. They are too busy staring at the Enemy, blast them. But the patient’s inability to see his soul means that he cannot see what was done in his soul.

You see, confession, while it does admittedly destroy every vestige of our work at the very deepest level of the human, it does not (usually) destroy all our work at shallower levels. Think of your human as a series of concentric circles. The very center is the soul, the actual patient, what we want to feed upon. Then around that is the will, which is the gateway to the soul. Outside of that are your patient’s subconscious thoughts and feelings, his conscious thoughts and feelings, and all the ephemera of phenomena that he generally refers to when he says, “myself.” The center is what we want to control, but we have to go through all the other layers. Confession does whatever it does at the center, and the effects spread outwards from there. How far they spread is determined by how closely those outward areas are aligned with the soul. For most average humans, especially young ones, the alignment is not that close. As a result, while the soul is cleansed, and perhaps the will is slightly re-oriented, the imagination, emotions, thoughts, and especially the fears, remain largely untouched. We must keep it that way. That is our only foothold. Distracting the patient from thinking about the work of forgiveness prevents him from trying to bring his outer circles in line with the inner reality. It stops him from becoming an integrated whole, disrupts the flow of grace, and keeps our foothold secure.

You and I must face the unfortunate fact that the Enemy’s Son Himself is active in that little wooden box, in a mode of such presence and power that it scorches my mind even to think about it. Your patient is spared such awareness. Why? I don’t know. Probably some nonsense about “freedom” and such claptrap. Who cares why? That is our opening. The patient can be quite ignorant of the fact that He is present, actively doing something of cosmic spiritual magnitude. To the patient it is a vending machine, and eventually just a habit. Soon he won’t even think too closely about what precisely that machine is vending. Isolated from the majority of his life, the sacrament’s transforming power dwindles to nothing.

That foothold then becomes the starting point for our counter-attack. As long as the human is ignorant of how little of himself is truly surrendered to the enemy, we can use the un-surrendered bits to draw his will back to what his body, mind and emotions have been conditioned to desire. Retaking the same ground over and over and over again is tedious, I know, but that is simply another result of the Enemy’s obscene love for matter and insistence on creating temporal creatures with souls.

The battle changes slightly when the patient does start to think about forgiveness. Obviously we still want the patient to labor under as much delusion as possible, so keep him ignorant of the real nature of forgiveness. Encourage him to expect the sacrament to erase all the effects of sin on the surface level, which is all he can see. Let him expect that all his addictions, habits and sinful inclinations which he has so carefully conditioned into himself over the years are going to be wiped away by the sacrament. Odds are that it won’t happen (the Enemy rarely interferes on such a superficial level) and then he will fall into sin again, and be disappointed and discouraged. Keep this lie up as long as you can. If you can keep the patient expecting what was never promised for long enough, he will eventually give up trusting the Enemy’s promises, and therefore the Enemy, never realizing that it was never the promise that was untrustworthy, but only his private mental vision of it. No matter which, for us, as long as it drives the patient into apathy and despair.

An observant human, on the other hand, will not be fooled by that delusion forever. Eventually he will learn that, even though the sacrament forgives, it is up to him to live up to that forgiveness and overcome his remaining habits. This is a very dangerous level of awareness, for us, because it guards against false expectations, and is dangerously close to humility. There is, however, one last little trick that I have used successfully on a patient at this juncture. This patient was a very successful middle-aged businessman who was a weekly penitent. He was well aware that the sacrament forgave, but did not erase his compulsion, and that might have caused him to seek out the Enemy’s grace, both in prayer and in the form of professional counseling. He was very nearly lost to us (unbeknownst to him.) While he was seriously considering going into therapy his old caretaker was reassigned and I was brought onto the case, which I successfully turned around in short order. I was able to convince the patient that his continuing life of sin after every confession was simply his “old habits” and that he was “working on them.” There was no need to go to any extremes to root out this habit. All that was necessary was that he “try his best”. In reality he maintained a quite lovely double-life for years, without ever realizing it. He would confess every Saturday afternoon, go to Mass on Sunday and stay clean and sober for the week. Then on Friday evening he would quite matter-of-factly stop by the strip club and have a few drinks while ogling the female humans. This was to “get it out of his system.” Just in time for confession on Saturday. How convenient! “Trying his best!” Such an elegant euphemism. It really only meant that he would grit his teeth a few times before walking in the strip club door, when any half competent priest would have told him that it ought to mean taking measures to make himself unable to drive there in the first place. “Working on it,” consisted of a few manufactured tears in the confessional every now and then, some eloquent promises to his wife, and the occasional orgy of self-loathing, all the while casually feeding the habit which ultimately devoured him. Fool! Just sorry enough to be miserable, not sorry enough to make any real attempt to stop.

Oh the exhilaration of that battle! My career was at stake, a soul was on the line! Enemy agents waited at every juncture, ready to leap into action at the first sign of real intention to reform. I was positively surrounded by some pretty fearsome characters, let me tell you, and they meant business. All he had to do was open his mouth and talk to his brother, or get someone to give him a ride instead of driving. Anything, the slightest action, would have called forth a perfectly terrifying firestorm of grace and I would have been lost. But I kept my head, and whispered soft lies, and he slept through it all. First he robbed the sacrament of its transformative power, and then he closed himself off to its forgiveness as well. He is now safely residing in one of our more bland and uninteresting summer residences. Presumption is another of my favorites, and a very secure sin, because generally the patient has no idea he is committing it.

In summary, my Dear Demons, confession is a most terrible weapon of the enemy, and one that we must never underestimate. The habit of going to confession is almost the worst habit a human can have. You may look at my medals and awards and think that you too can snatch a patient’s soul from the very jaws of the confessional, but I warn you, do not risk it. For every daringly successful attack like mine, there are a thousand failures. We here in the lower circles of Hell are not the least bit interested in vainglory. All we want are souls, as many as possible, by the surest and safest routes possible, as fast as possible. If you lose us a soul by your idiotic presumption, be warned!

We grow hungry!

Cheers!

Thugfang

 

 

Ask Thugfang: Confession Part I

His Right Dishonourable Loathsomeness, Master Thugfang, is a demon of great infamy among academic circles. He is a frequent columnist for “Tempter’s Times”, an assistant editor for “Wickedness Weekly” and current chair of Tempter’s Training College’s Department of Defense Against the White Arts, after the sudden disappearance of the most recent head under mysterious circumstances. Now, His Right Dishonourable Loathsomeness takes your questions. Having problems with a particularly troublesome patient? Meddlesome enemy agents stymieing you at every turn? Don’t wait, write immediately to “Ask Thugfang” C/O “Underworld Magazine.”

Dear Master Thugfang, I am writing to you from a special assignment. My patient is a Catholic. His erstwhile handler was reassigned on short notice because of the patient’s troubling habit of weekly confession, and I have been placed in charge of the case since I have had some success with this in the past. I even wrote an article for Wickedness Weekly entitled, “How to Keep your Patient from Going to Confession.” Unfortunately, all the tricks and tactics I have used before seem to have no effect on this particular patient. It persists in its stubborn adherence to this habit, so I am writing to you to ask if there is any other technique you know of which I can use?

Sincerely, the Obfuscator

My Dear Obfuscator,

You poor dear idiot. You allowed your ambition to control you, you opened your mouth among your betters, and now look where it has gotten you. You are in up to your horns, and about to go under. Yes, I read that article. Amateurish at best. The sort of thing I would have given a barely passing grade when I was teaching. No originality, no imagination, just a list of techniques gleaned from the standard textbooks. But you had to go and set yourself up as an anti-confession expert, and your controllers took you at your boast.

Well, well, well, looks like it falls to poor old me to get you out of this mess. Pay attention because this may well be too advanced for you.

Obviously, the best place for confession, or any sacrament at all, is on the other side of the universe. We want our patients not to know that they exist. No slightest whisper of the hope that has been placed in front of them should ever reach their ears from a fellow human, and we have largely been successful in that regard.

But some do hear about these weapons, and then we have to scramble to keep them from making use of them. That is what you have been trying to do and it is undoubtedly the right answer. Horrible things happen in the confessional. For one thing, it is typically a no fly zone for us. The only way we can even be present in any useful capacity is if we are invited by one of the humans, and even then we usually cannot bring any real influence to bear unless the human has already come pretty much under our power. These are rare cases. For the average Catholic the power of that sacrament is such that even our most skilled agents are blinded and choked by the atmosphere. Hence, we have no chance to observe and document what really happens. We see only what goes in and what comes out. What goes in is a human soul with our little foothold well established, or even a large foothold, even almost total control. What comes out is a soul completely freed from our work. Every single vestige of our presence and influence has been wiped away, and we must begin all that tiresome work over again. Worse, the soul that has confessed reflects some of the light of the Enemy Himself, and that is a toxic work environment.

How does it work? I don’t know, and I don’t care. Probably the only reason we cannot see or understand it is because it is really total nonsense. The whole concept of “forgiveness” is utterly irrational, the sort of sentimental twaddle the Enemy constantly pontificates about. We in Hell do not believe in forgiveness, do not want it and do not need it. It does not exist. There is no such thing. There is only some (currently) poorly understood mechanism by which the Enemy regains some lost territory.

So, let us just say you cannot keep your patient from confessing regularly. The question then becomes, how can you use confession to your advantage. You cannot prevent it so you must corrupt it.

As I said, you won’t be able to get into the confession itself uninvited, so your work must be done entirely in the time outside of the confessional. You cannot attack the sacrament directly (although research is underway as of this writing) so you must attack the patient’s use of it.

The easiest way to do this is to encourage a “vending machine” mentality towards confession. Encourage your patient to think of the confessional as a forgiveness machine, a process. He walks in and rattles off the major sins he happens to be able to call to mind, (not the really serious ones, just the ones that most struck his fancy as being really sins. As a rule a patient should be utterly unconscious of his most sinful tendencies.) He sits impatiently through thirty seconds or so of platitudinous advice he has heard a hundred times before, says a few Our Father’s and Hail Mary’s and “Cha ching!” Forgiven.

Once the vending machine approach is well established all sorts of doors are opened. The first and most obvious is to undermine real sorrow for sin. Since it is just a machine, and not a person he is encountering in the confessional he can sin as much as he likes, go to confession and be on his merry way. That is almost the perfect attitude towards confession, second only to complete avoidance. The presumption and lack of a purpose of amendment not only completely negate the spiritual effects of the sacrament, they are also sins in their own right, and wherever sin is committed, we are invited in. That’s how you get into the confessional. You get your patient to invite you in. I have had a patient so firmly in my claw that he and I were merrily occupied planning next Friday’s debauchery while he listening to the words of absolution on Saturday afternoon.

Failing that, I advise you to discourage the use of a regular confessor (unless you can find one of our priests). Instead, send him around to whatever priest is convenient for him at the moment. Do this by working on his subconscious shame of someone seeing him fall into the same sins every week, and by reminding him of the truth that any valid confession will have the same sacramental effect. This will open up more opportunities for you. You can make your patient a connoisseur of confessors by encouraging him to critique every priest who hears his confession (pride). It protects him from the nasty habit of developing a relationship with his confessor. In a really good confessor/penitent relationship, the confessor will do a lot of extra-curricular work on those shallower areas that the sacrament itself is not necessarily touching. The priest might start digging into the patient’s subconscious fears, his hidden assumptions, his attitudes, his imagination. These shallow areas are our territory. We don’t need any holy priest who really knows and cares about the patient to be meddling in those areas. Bad enough he is the agent of a supernatural spiritual healing. So get busy and send your patient to a different priest every week. The less his confessor knows his penitent, the more generic his advice will be, and the more patient will come to despise that advice. He will blame the priest, “That priest just doesn’t know me and my situation.” Instead of sticking with that priest and explaining his situation, he will just toddle on off to look for another one.

This also discourages real self-knowledge. A wise priest will get to know his penitent pretty well, and will pass on that knowledge to the penitent himself. A different priest every week will not have that opportunity, and consequently the patient may go through years of confessions without ever really coming to know himself.

It is also wise to make the patient’s preparation for confession sloppy and haphazard as possible. In this you are aided by the natural human reluctance to think about its own sins. Your work should be fairly simple. He will confess only the one or two items that are really burning on his mind, completely unaware of the serious habits and trends forming in other areas. This will not, at first, negate the power of the sacrament to forgive, but it will hamper its power to transform, since the Enemy wishes these humans to be free agents in their own transformation. He cannot transform what they will not allow Him to, they cannot allow what they cannot see, and they cannot see what they will not look for. This is the biggest reason why we have invested so much energy in giving the “Examination of Conscience” a bad name.

If you cannot keep your patient from examining try the opposite tack. Scrupulosity is a useful sin and, in my humble opinion, one of the most entertaining. A human who thinks that every one of his actions is sinful is in the grip of a very profound lack of trust. From there it is a simple matter to attack the patient’s trust in the Enemy, His mercy, and His sacrament. Paired with the right priest, there is no better way to chase a patient away from confession for life, or to make all their confessions worthless. Despair is, perhaps, the most secure sin.

Unfortunately this column has already grown too long, so I will have to address proper post-confession attacks in my next column. I do advise you to read that column, and in the meanwhile to reread and seriously practice what you have read in this one. I am sure I don’t need to point out what Hell thinks of demons who over-represent their own abilities and lose patients because of it.

Cheers!

Thugfang

 

Ask Thugfang: Questions

His Right Dishonourable Loathsomeness, Master Thugfang, is a demon of great infamy among academic circles. He is a frequent columnist for “Tempter’s Times”, an assistant editor for “Wickedness Weekly” and current chair of Tempter’s Training College’s Department of Defense Against the White Arts, after the sudden disappearance of the most recent head under mysterious circumstances. Now, His Right Dishonourable Loathsomeness takes your questions. Having problems with a particularly troublesome patient? Meddlesome enemy agents stymieing you at every turn? Don’t wait, write immediately to “Ask Thugfang” C/O “Underworld Magazine."

Dear Master Thugfang, I have just been assigned to young patient, the youngest of a very large Catholic family. The previous custodians of all of the patients have just been reassigned, presumably to much warmer jobs, because the Subvisor felt that their progress was inadequate. Naturally I am anxious to avoid a similar fate. Simply put, all of these human siblings are on the receiving end of a focused, detailed, incessant catechesis by their parents day in and day out. This whole house practically reeks of the White Arts. Some of the big ones are practiced on a daily basis. My patient is too young to begin learning such things at the moment, but the older siblings are not promising. They all accept the Catholic teachings without question. How do I keep my patient from ending up like that?

Sincerely, Ready to Get to Work.

My Dear Ready,

Ooh! That tingle of fear that shivers your existential core! Don’t you just love it? No better motivator for an up-and-coming young tempter like yourself than the knowledge of a predecessor’s fate. You should think about it regularly to make sure that this present salutary terror does not pass away. Fear and hunger, my young friend. They are the source of our strength, the mainspring of all our success. Embrace them both with open arms.

Now, as to this problem of yours, it does sound a bit grim, doesn’t it? All those lily-white souls just trembling on the brink of life, just on the cusp of the great struggle; will they hang on to what they were given, or will we be able to cajole, trick or intimidate them into letting go. I am positively licking my lips just at the thought of so much innocence, practically mine for the taking! But your patient is not there yet. You are trying to prevent the damage from being done, which is very wise of you. As much fun as it is to snatch a soul right from the very jaws of life, it is always better not to let that life get its teeth well sunk in in the first place.

Unbeknownst to you, you mentioned the answer to your own dilemma in your letter. I wonder you didn’t see it? But that is why I am the Master and you are just a lowly tempter. Never fear. You may yet learn.

So the older siblings accept the Faith “without question” do they? That is very interesting. Very interesting indeed. You see, the natural response of a human being, especially a young one, to something as stupendous as the Enemy’s Church is to ask questions. A human who really meets that Church usually spends his entire life asking questions, learning and growing ever further and further from us. Every new truth (faugh!) learned only wets their appetite for more. I don’t understand how the little rats can consume so much of the stuff. I personally find it nauseating and overrated. But that is what happens when a human really encounters “Truth.” They start wanting more and more of it. A human who is not asking questions is still open to us. All we need to do is stall them, keep them from really encountering this “Truth” until over time the sound of His voice dies away and is buried under layers and layers of business.

Now then, what you need to do is scurry round that homey little nest of theirs and sniff out the reason why these wholesome young lads and lasses are not questioning. Ten to one you’ll find it’s because the parents are not questioning, and there you will find the chink in the armor. You have practiced squeezing through smaller cracks in school, I hope. Now is your chance to slip through a real crack under fire (you didn’t think the enemy agents were going to let you have it all your way, did you?)

Young humans are born with question marks in their brains. Every word out of their filthy, slimy little mouths, once they learn to use them for anything other than stuffing their bodies with matter, is “Why.” Curiosity, my Dear Ready, is a truly nauseating trait in either man or angel. I hope you never indulge in it. Almost the most important use for an older human in charge of a young human is to stifle that curiosity. This can be done by parents, teachers, peers, priests, nearly anyone, but it is most effective if it is done by parents. Parents can get started so much earlier than anyone else, and they have so many more options. Take a good long look at how these adult humans respond to the questions of their younger offspring. In the natural order of things the adult humans would positively delight to be asked questions. They would listen honestly with attention and humor and answer clearly and straightforwardly, or admit it if they didn’t know the answer. In the order of what the Enemy calls “Grace” the results can be truly horrifying. Adults can actually use the questions of an ignorant, stupid child as opportunities to grow and learn themselves. Some of the more clear-headed humans go on to great lengths about simplicity and “fresh perspective” and such rot.  The curiosity of a child has been known to reawaken real curiosity in adults of even very advanced age, and curiosity is only one step removed from humility. Without upsetting your young head with further obscene details, suffice it to say that we categorically do not want this reaction to the child’s curiosity.

Fortunately hardly any humans are that natural all the time, and most humans are never that natural. We have many ways of twisting this dangerous dynamic to our ends.

The oldest and easiest standby is simple impatience. The human child is a creature of infinite repetition. It does not get tired of asking questions, but the adult is not so energetic. Adults get tired of answering questions. This is our opening. You need to keep the adult busy. It doesn’t matter what it is working on, so long as it feels pressured to finish that task, and snubs the young one’s question. As one rather insightful human put it, “Can’t you see that the paint on the walls is more important than the joy in your heart?”

Or, if the adult tends in the opposite direction, you can make it a slave to its offspring’s questions. Not as common or as useful, but I have seen it work.

But I think your particular situation is going to call for something a little more subtle. You say the parents actively catechize, which means they are answering questions at the very least when the children are younger. It means that they are trying to stuff those little heads with truth, so any intimation that the children are interested will no doubt fill their hearts with parental happiness. The parents have too much committed, and you are not going to be able to stop that process, but can you twist it?

Given that the older offspring are simply accepting everything the parent’s say without question, I am guessing one of two things is going on: either they have never been exposed to anything that could challenge their parents’ teachings, or they have learned that their parents do not want them to challenge it. If they have never been exposed to a challenge you have a decision to make. Do you want to bring in a little outside influence, or do you want to keep them sheltered.

Do not underestimate the effectiveness of the start they have been given. Culture shock and infatuation with the world may draw college kids away from the practice of their faith for a time, but in my mind it is rather a dangerous game. Some few of those who go hog wild never come back to the faith, but most of them do, and when they do it is a much more mature and balanced faith. Having sinned greatly they are more likely to be patient and understanding with the sins of others. The infamous dictum “There but for the grace of You-Know-Who,” has a powerful reality for them. The enemy is such a vilely unfair opportunist. Instead of blasting them for their first willful insult to His dignity, He patiently allows them to come back and then uses even their worst sins as opportunities to bind them to Him more powerfully than ever.

So the world that the parents fear is, in my opinion at least, not the most effective means of stealing the souls of the children. The parents fear it because it is visibly and measurably evil but we, as pure spirits, are not fooled by all the flim-flam.

If you can, I suggest you continue the isolationist trend. The faith that the children have been given thus far is very unlikely to be the real thing. Not that it is totally false, or that it won’t become the real thing, but they have not invested themselves totally in it, because they are teenagers. We want to delay that investment. In one sense it doesn’t matter how many of the externals of the faith they follow, so long as they follow them by mere habit. Going to Mass because their parents require it is perfectly acceptable to the Enemy when the human is eight years old. When the human is twenty-eight years old and still following the rules out of shear apathy or human respect, well, that, my dear demons, is a blighted human soul.

Now, even if the children do see or hear things that cause them to question, we can largely neutralize this if we keep the parents subtly under our control. Very few parents ever actively and deliberately punish their children for asking questions, but even the best parents can be made to discourage such questions. There are two ways a human can ask a question. One is to ask quite honestly for information. The second is to ask in a rhetorical fashion. For example, “Dad, Bobby said there is no such thing as heaven. Is that true?” is a legitimate request for information. The mind is open, and a wise human will take the opportunity to fill it with truth. “Why can’t I go to that movie with my friends? Who gave you the right to run my life?” is not a request for information it is a challenge. The child’s mind is closed. A wise parent may still answer this, or may choose to respond some other way, but we want parents to treat this as an affront to their dignity and blast the children into oblivion. In a sense we want them to do to the children exactly what the enemy hasn’t done to them.

The next step is to get the parent to treat every question as the challenging kind of question, and then voila! Our work is done. Whether it is a harsh response: “Young Lady, you will not see those friends any more, and I want you to forget what they said and never repeat it again.” Or a seemingly kind and loving response, “Don’t worry your head about it, dear, they were just being silly and they don’t know any better because they weren’t raised like you are.” The end result is that the child’s question is not answered and he learns that that sort of question is not welcome. Very soon he will either stop asking them altogether in an effort to please his parents, or he will rebel against his parents and ask all the questions he wants, but he will be biased against anything that sounds like what his parents would say, and will ask them of the world. At that point you will have to coordinate with our networking department. We have ways of ensuring that the answers he gets are our answers.

This is not foolproof, of course. The enemy did say that any who seek will find eventually, so on the whole I prefer the little vermin do not ask questions at all. Kill that instinct as quickly as you can and get the parents to do it for you. We have done a great deal of work with the current education system, and it also does an excellent job of stifling that unfortunate tendency. A human who does not seek will never find, and he is as good as ours.

Not that you can let up on the disgusting creatures, though. You never can tell with humans, and you wouldn’t want to let one slip away at the last minute. It would rather dull your prospects, I should think.

Cheers

Thugfang

Ask Thugfang: Theology of the Body, Part II

His Right Dishonourable Loathsomeness, Master Thugfang, is a demon of great infamy among academic circles. He is a frequent columnist for “Tempter’s Times”, an assistant editor for “Wickedness Weekly” and current chair of Tempter’s Training College’s Department of Defense Against the White Arts, after the sudden disappearance of the most recent head under mysterious circumstances. Now, His Right Dishonourable Loathsomeness takes your questions. Having problems with a particularly troublesome patient? Meddlesome enemy agents stymieing you at every turn? Don’t wait, write immediately to “Ask Thugfang” C/O “Underworld Magazine."

Dear Master Thugfang: My patient has recently read The Polish Pope’s Theology of the Body, and now he is less accessible to porn temptations. What do I do? Sincerely, Needs Options.

My Dear Readers,

Since this particular questioner has thoughtlessly neglected to mention whether his patient is married or unmarried, I am forced to answer with a two part column, thus taking valuable time away from all of your other questions, of which there are many good ones. However, this issue is important enough that I think it better I address it thoroughly.

As you all know, my specialty is Defense Against the White Arts. Well, the Polish Pope’s Theology of the Body is undoubtedly a White Art, among the more dangerous I’ve seen. However, its very whiteness can be turned to our advantage. The Polish Pope presents a sublime and spiritual vision of what most humans have recently been considering something strictly physical, and also an earthy and physical vision of something that most humans consider very spiritual. Most humans think of things in two separate categories, material and spiritual. On the one hand they have food, money, clothing, bills, medicine, cars, traffic, and sex. On the other they have prayer, sacrifice, philosophy, theology, the sacraments and the virtues. If we do our job right, the two categories remain separated by an unbridgeable chasm in the human mind. Not only do they not intermingle, they don’t even exist in the same mind. Our job is to fracture the human person and disintegrate it. Spiritual schizophrenia, that’s what we want. Then it doesn’t much matter whether we make the human a materialist, or a spiritualist; a hedonist or an ascetic; an atheist or a pantheist. As long as he loves the one category and hates the other, it will do.

This, of course, is the danger of the Polish Pope’s work, not that it unites the two, exactly. Even a casual reading of the Enemy’s Book would have done that. No, the danger is that it unites the two particularly where we have been most successful in dividing them, i.e. the realm of human sexuality.

This is its greatest strength, but also our opportunity, because we can use that perception, that TOB is all about sex, to isolate it from the rest of the human’s life. This is especially easy with male humans, whose sex drives are already so thoroughly isolated from the rest of their lives thanks to the male habit of compartmentalization and the cultural work we’ve done in shaping that ability.

I wrote earlier that the way to pull the teeth of TOB for the married patient is to confine it to the bedroom. The principle is the same for the unmarried human, except that it is easier. Since our questioner’s patient was undergoing the standard pornography treatment and is now not responding to it, this tells me that he is at least aware that he is in trouble and on some level wants to change. Well, let him change. If he’s thoroughly addicted that’s easier said than done, but in any event, the TOB that he’s filling his mind with should be connected in his head only with his porn habit. I should encourage the connection if I were you. Hammer it home to him. Every time he tries to resist a specific temptation muddle his mind with trying to remember specific passages or quotes. (You’ll recognize a fairly standard approach here, that of encouraging the patient to try to resist by sheer will power alone. The more he focuses on his own efforts, the less likely he is to cry for help.) If he fails you now have reams and reams of new truths to bash him over the head with. He has, after all, failed again, even with this brave new strength in his heart. He must, therefore, be hopeless, beyond any help, if even TOB couldn’t save him. Remorse and self-condemnation are virtually assured, rather than sorrow and contrition.

 If he succeeds in resisting once or twice, well, that’s always disappointing, but you mustn’t waste time with disappointment. You need to start exploiting it right away. Pride, self-congratulation, confidence in his “new strength.” Encourage him to expect that victory to be a permanent one. Not on any conscious level of course, but subconsciously he ought to be surprised by the next temptation five minutes later. If he were paying attention he would be expecting it, but if all he is thinking about is his own “success”, it will catch him off guard.

Encourage TOB? Yes, my darling demons, yes. Take it from an expert, the White Arts are best kept light-years away, but second best, pull them in close and keep them close. Manipulate the patient’s use of them. By encouraging him to think about it in connection with his porn habit only, you are subtly drawing him away from the real issues. Ironically, these issues are plain as a pikestaff to anyone who takes the TOB as a whole, but you are picking and choosing what he pays attention to, and in the grand scheme of things, his porn use is not the most important thing we have going on with him. It does us little good for him to struggle constantly with lust, if it is going to be a recurring occasion for repentance, a window of humility, an incentive to charity, and a constant reminder of his own helplessness. The TOB should have told him that his real issue here is the fact that he is longing for relationship, but is too frightened and cowardly and selfish for relationship. Porn is easier. If he thinks of porn as the root problem and wastes his energy fighting that, he will never seek out that so called “Communion of Persons” which would be his salvation. Friendships, an honest open relationship with a spiritual director, or (Hell forbid) a holy and happy marriage, all of these are death to us. In his mind, he is trying to overcome his “besetting sin” so that he can be worthy of these things. Not that he would put that into words, because then it would be too ridiculous to be believed, but it is there in his head and it is keeping him from the strongest natural medicine that might heal him. So let him hack away at the branches all he wants. We control the root and it will bear its rotten fruit in due season.

The other issue is that, if he paid attention, he would see that TOB has to do with everything, from the food he puts in his body, to the care he takes of it, to the woman he marries, the hands he shakes, the things he looks at and the books he reads. If he really took that message to heart he would start integrating his entire life into a single spiritual whole, enlightened by The Enemy and his “graces”. That is what we don’t want. We want him splintered and impotent. It is worth giving a little ground in one area to keep him that way. Trust me, if you can keep the rest of his life from being influenced by this new fad, any success he sees from it in this one area will be short lived, the relapse will be accompanied by even greater despair, and he will descend further into the pit than ever, with less desire of breaking free.

Just keep at it. Never slack off for an instant, because that will be the instant that “grace” will come flooding through and all your work will be undone. Damnation doesn’t just happen on its own.

Cheers,

Thugfang

Theology of the Body Part I

His Right Dishonourable Loathsomeness, Master Thugfang, is a demon of great infamy among academic circles. He is a frequent columnist for “Tempter’s Times”, an assistant editor for “Wickedness Weekly” and current chair of Tempter’s Training College’s Department of Defense Against the White Arts, after the sudden disappearance of the most recent head under mysterious circumstances. Now, His Right Dishonourable Loathsomeness takes your questions. Having problems with a particularly troublesome patient? Meddlesome enemy agents stymieing you at every turn? Don’t wait, write immediately to “Ask Thugfang” C/O “Underworld Magazine.”

Dear Master Thugfang: My patient has recently read The Polish Pope’s Theology of the Body, and now he is less accessible to porn temptations. What do I do? Sincerely, Needs Options.

My Dear Needs Options,

Ah yes, The Polish Pope: I have never been able to decide whether he or that Albanian Nun have been the worst disasters of the human’s twentieth century. You’d better hope your patient doesn’t discover her. Between the two of them you could find yourself in a pretty tight place. As it is, you have probably already lost a good deal of ground. Do not think for a second that this is not a serious error on your part. It must be dealt with. However, since you sign yourself “Needs Options,” it seems you are already looking about for new avenues. At least you have the principle, what you need now is experience to show you how to make use of this setback.

First of all, you have neglected to mention whether or not your patient is married. It doesn’t change the principle, only the application, but it would help to make my advice more relevant. It is lack of attention to detail like that which is going to be your ruin. Sheer laziness, is what it is, so I will write as if he were married in this column. In a later column I will address the single humans.

Now, the fact that he is becoming “less accessible” to your rather routine pornography strategy could mean one of several things. It could mean that what he has read has penetrated to some level of his will and he is now really trying to live what he has come to believe. Or it could mean nothing more than that the patient is so entranced by the poetic appeal of that theology, what the enemy’s agents would term its “beauty”, that he is temporarily infatuated with it and so he momentarily sees how humdrum and boring pornography really is. Or it could mean that The Enemy is using that book as an occasion of what He calls “Grace” to overcome your strategy once and for all, and the patient is at least partially responding.

Whatever the case may be, never think for a second The Enemy won’t be up to something. Whether He is going to come in and put a stop to your work against this man’s chastity right now or not, you may be sure He is not inactive. We don’t fully understand why He doesn’t do this every time He is asked, but I suspect it is usually because the patient himself doesn’t fully want Him to do any such thing. But any amount of desire for relief on his part will call forth a response from The Enemy. The goal for us is to get the patient to let that opportunity of “Grace” go by without any active response. The key to that is compartmentalization.

The human male is a creature of great disconnectedness. This was originally designed as a means of allowing them to prioritize issues and deal with each one in turn, without distraction from other issues. We have since worked on many levels, cultural and individual, to exaggerate this quality. In extreme cases I have seen male patients so well trained that they can go directly from rape and murder to endowing churches and tucking their own children in bed at night without a qualm. In the more ordinary scheme of human life it is not at all unusual for a male human to move from his wife’s arms one night to the strip club the next night and think the two completely unrelated. He does not feel guilty because he does not think the two are connected at all. His wife has his “heart” and his paycheck. The stripper on the stage has his eyes and his attention for a moment. It is much the same as a king in other ages, marrying one woman for offspring, but keeping dozens of others around or running through them one after the other for “love”. The trick is to find a way to split the two in your patient’s mind.

In the old days we made good work of the idea that the mind and the body were separate things. The male humans could lust after whatever they wanted, so long as they never actually touched them. Or he can touch whoever he wants, so long as he does not, in some vague undefinable sense, “love” them as he “loves” his wife. We are still reaping the fruits of that in society at large, but the damaging thing about the Polish Pope’s work is precisely that it exposes that lie and proclaims the truth, that nothing the body does is separate from the soul, and nothing the soul does is separate from the body. He is undoing millennia of work, going all the way back to our re-interpretation of Paul with the Manicheans.

What he cannot undo, however, is the culture. We still run that, and we have no intention of giving that up. Your patient now believes in his own psychosomatic unity? Good for him. He still thinks that TOB is all about sex, and there we have him. If he is married you need to encourage his infatuation with this new fad for the few minutes a day (or week, or month) it takes for him to copulate with his wife. Let him indulge all sorts of sublime, spiritual fantasies. Let him expect to hear angelic choirs singing, be uplifted to the seventh heaven. One of two things will happen. Either he will have such an experience or he won’t. If he does, play on the insatiable human desire to “do it again”. So all through the day when he should be thinking of his wife’s happiness now he is instead looking forward to seeing her in her nightgown that evening. You may have to endure a great deal of nauseating human romance, maybe for a very long time, but you can get your revenge later. If you can confine TOB to the bedroom you will completely pull its teeth. If it never sees the kitchen, the laundry room, the diaper changing table, or the trash bin, it will fail in the bedroom eventually, and might I add, most enjoyably.

Now if this profound emotional flutter doesn’t happen to him, your work is even easier. A sensible human would see the connection to The Enemy’s other sacrament, the one with the wafer. That does whatever it does whether the human feels it or not, but don’t let him see that. Convince him to try to feel the “holiness” of sex by sheer strength of will. Eventually this effort will defeat itself and in the wake of his disappointment you will have all sorts of options, ranging from depression and porn use, to apostasy, to affairs, to divorce. Use your imagination.

Again initially you will have to encourage some marital sex which it is usually our policy to discourage. I grant you it is unorthodox, to encourage what is undeniably a virtue, but the principle is really to unbalance the relationship. You will destroy their love the rest of the day, and eventually their sex life will follow as well, and it will be all the more amusing to watch when it does. Defense against the White Arts is my specialty and sometimes you have to fight fire with fire.

You and I know that whenever and wherever a Christian couple lawfully enacts their disgusting marital embrace, The Enemy’s sacrament is there. We cannot help but know it. We are seared and blinded by it. We burn and sizzle under the scorching, hateful light of it. They do not. They enact it and they do not know it and this is why when one sensible human tells them the truth we can use that very truth to poison their entire sexuality. When they don’t feel that scintillating personalistic vision, they assume it isn’t there, and if it isn’t there then maybe they just shouldn’t do it tonight. They don’t feel supernatural enlightenment, so they must have done it wrong, when in reality they were just tired, or had something else in the backs of their minds, or it was too warm in the room.

You and I see this with all The Enemy’s sacraments, but this one sacrament they somehow think should be different than the rest. It’s the same lie we’ve been using for years now, dressed up anew. If you don’t feel “in love” with someone, then somehow the marriage no longer counts. Well now among a certain sect we can teach them to think if they don’t feel “unified” by it, it doesn’t count as “spiritual sex.” So they separate soul and body once again and we enjoy it even better than before.

So your principles are, confine this dangerous new fad of his to the bedroom. This will eventually make his wife very unlikely to get excited about it with him, which will give him an excuse to doubt her zeal for “the faith” which is really nothing more than his own pet version of The Enemy’s Faith.

Then, disillusionment (which is really illusionment), disappointment, despair. Once they start down that road you must press your advantage as far as you can. Crush the little vermin into the mud of their own frustrated desires. Let them never even dare to be happy again.

Cheers,

Thugfang

Ask Thugfang: Ex-Catholic in the Bag?

His Right Dishonourable Loathsomeness, Master Thugfang, is a demon of great infamy among academic circles. He is a frequent columnist for “Tempter’s Times”, an assistant editor for “Wickedness Weekly” and current chair of Tempter’s Training College’s Department of Defense Against the White Arts, after the sudden disappearance of the most recent head under mysterious circumstances. Now, His Right Dishonourable Loathsomeness takes your questions. Having problems with a particularly troublesome patient? Meddlesome enemy agents stymieing you at every turn? Don’t wait, write immediately to “Ask Thugfang” C/O “Underworld Magazine.”

Dear Master Thugfang, I read with great appreciation your recent column on the use of family to corrupt infants before they reach the age of reason, and I thought I would write in to provide my own testimony. My patient is an ex-Catholic in her late twenties. Due to the abusive, repressive atmosphere I was able to establish in her home she rejected the Catholic Church entirely when she left home. Now she tries to tell all her Catholic friends how wrong and perverse the Catholic Church is, she never receives the Sacraments. She did try to go to Mass once, but she had an anxiety attack and left right away. That was five years ago. She is so completely insulated against the Faith that nowadays I barely even have to work at all. Yours Truly, Success Story.

My Dear, Darling, Wonderful Success Story,

Please allow me to join you in telling you how amazing you are. As you know (because you tell yourself this constantly) you are undoubtedly the greatest tempter the world has ever seen. Why don’t I promote you to undersecretary of a department, and let you write this column and teach all my lectures? Oh, I remember…

It’s because you are an arrogant little sprite who still thinks anxiety attacks are great fun. The mark of an immature palate is the over attention paid to cheap, passing torments. What can you know of the nuanced, subtle complexity of an entire human life drowned in misery, despair and sorrow? Nothing. You’re too busy with pranks. And you are lazy to boot. By your own admission you are not pressing your advantage on this patient. Not only did you admit it, you boasted!

Do you not understand we are at war here? Or did you think that the Enemy will abandon that patient the way you apparently have? I promise you, in your absence while you were fondly imagining that your work was done for you, the Enemy has not been absent for a moment. His agents never sleep. No matter how far she has run, I guarantee this patient has not closed herself off to them completely. Hardly any of them ever do before death.

Do you congratulate yourself on the work so far? Yes, there have been some successes, but not so deep or so permanent as you blissfully imagine. The patient has rejected “the Church” has she? Fool! She never knew the Church! Not the Church as we know it, that damnably tough bastion of human happiness, freedom and virtue. We see the spiritual reality spread out through the millennia, an agonizingly bright cavalcade of martyrs, poets, philosophers, saints, and millions upon millions of souls forever and ever, eternally, achingly lost to us. Do you for an instant believe that Church is what she rejected? Ha! She hears “Church” and sees her mother yelling at her about her neckline. That is what she rejects. Her “faith” was hardly worth the effort of destroying. Essentially you spent the first seventeen or eighteen years of her life telling her lies about what the Church was. First chance she got she rejected that shadow church outright. Does that put things in perspective for you, you insufferable little know-it-all?

Now, she still believes those lies, to some extent. She really thinks the Church is oppressive and self-contradictory. You had better hope she never learns the truth, because if she does it will cut through all your claptrap like a lighthouse through fog. This brings me to the biggest fault I find with you, given the very limited information in your letter. She tries to convince her Catholic friends to leave the Church. May I ask what the Heaven you are playing at? If you don’t want to lose that soul, you had better put a stop to that quick. Is it not obvious to you that the very fact she tries to argue people away from the Church is because she still really cares? Deep down inside she cannot quite get away from the haunting need to belong to whatever little bit of the real Church that touched her. Even hatred of the Church is not so useful as you might think, and I don’t think she really hates it. It might even be that she really cares about her friends and wants to rescue them from her nightmares. That really is the height of incompetence, to allow anything done from love to continue. Any love, even misguided love, is the Enemy’s territory.

Besides, hasn’t it occurred to you that talking about the Church at all with her Catholic friends is the best way I can think of to endanger all your lies? Don’t you see that it’s only a matter of time before she runs into a Catholic who actually does know a thing or two about the real Church? What do you think will happen then? You’ll be facing a long, long time in a very dark place, that’s what. It is only our unrelenting work within the Catholic Church that has saved your neck thus far. The general mediocrity among Catholic humans in her society is entirely the work of wiser and more motivated demons than yourself. That is what you have to thank for her continued ignorance, not your own skill.

Argument in general is not something I would rely on. Oh sure, it can be an opening for our own particular brand of argument. A flurry of half-baked ideas and barely hidden resentments clothed in cheap rhetoric, that is the closest you ever want to get to real argument. Real argument teaches her to ask whether this thing is true or not. Truth is something we don’t believe in here in Hell. You had better curb the idea in your patient as well, or she will never get here, and then… well… let’s just say we won’t be going hungry.

Not to mention that if she does find her way back in it is likely to be a more serious thing than you are ready for. What I mean is, the new faith she finds through hard searching is likely to be a real faith, chosen in her will, based on her intellect. It is not going to be something forced upon her by anyone. She will have had to face up to her fears and overcome them. She will have had to look your lies in the face and see through them. Hence she will value her new faith. She will also be poignantly aware of the difference between “The Faith” and the distortions and abuses that can creep in, so she will be on her guard against them.

Forget the argument. Put a stop to her even talking about the Church. We aren’t trying to reason her away from it. What you really want right now is a really solid vice or two to saddle her with, something that will distract her and absorb her. Maybe it doesn’t even have to be a vice. Save the Whales will do, as long as it takes up her time and attention away from her need for conversion and repentance. But I think while a cause or a hobby is all right as a distractor if you have to use it (the more vacuous the better) I think you’ll get more mileage out of a vice in the long run. You want something that will call up all that old, half-forgotten shame and guilt she associates with the very mention of the Church, which will cause her to resent the mention of it, and will cause her to insulate herself from those who will mention it. That’s how to get the patient to do your work for you. The sicker she gets, the more she will run away from the only medicine which might cure her. But don’t for a second dare to think you can stop chasing her. Temptation duty is not a vacation.

I have your file in front of me as I write. Perhaps, on second thought, we should meet.

I promise, if you don’t stop slacking off and bring us some results, you will be called back. You don’t want that. I don’t even want that. Really, all I want is to help you do your job better.

Cheers,

Thugfang

Ask Thugfang: The Games

His Right Dishonourable Loathsomeness, Master Thugfang, is a demon of great infamy among academic circles. He is a frequent columnist for “Tempter’s Times”, an assistant editor for “Wickedness Weekly” and current chair of Tempter’s Training College’s Department of Defense Against the White Arts, after the sudden disappearance of the most recent head under mysterious circumstances. Now, His Right Dishonourable Loathsomeness takes your questions. Having problems with a particularly troublesome patient? Meddlesome enemy agents stymieing you at every turn? Don’t wait, write immediately to “Ask Thugfang” C/O “Underworld Magazine.”

Dear Master Thugfang, My patient is a single worker in his early twenties. I had been handling him nicely with the World category of temptations. He was quite the party animal, strip clubs, alcohol, casual drug use, fornication, social lying, gossip, everything, a really textbook case. Things were going along nicely until he suddenly stopped all of that. One of his friends introduced him to online gaming and now that’s all he does every waking minute he’s not at work. Should I be worried about this new development? Or is it just a phase? Yours Truly, Worldly Wise.

My Dear Worldly Wise,

This is a new development, of course, not only in terms of your patient’s personal history, but also in terms of our campaign in general. The computer game, as such, is a new weapon, but that is still no excuse for your ignorance. Do you have any idea how much research we’ve invested in this subject? Have you read even a single one of the scholarly articles written about it recently, or have you been wasting our time writing overly wordy and transparently self-congratulatory letters to diabolical periodicals? And in what possible way is this in my area of expertise? I am a Master of Defense Against the White Arts. Petty questions like this are so far beneath my notice, they are insulting.

Worried? Why in the name of Hell should you be worried? You, and all those devils like you, think so shallowly. So he isn’t committing all those sins you had been spoon feeding him for so long? No more lustful glances at that stripper up on her pole? No more boastful lies to his buddies about that girl he wanted to sleep with? No more weekend benders? Instead he is wasting his time with some harmless entertainment. The fact that you even ask if it is “just a phase” tells me that you are hoping it will pass so you can get back to the real business of shoving the world down his throat. My dear, poor, ignorant befuddled demon, never shove a temptation down a patient’s throat. They only end up throwing it up in the end. Let the darling creatures choose their own temptations. This patient has, for now, left the world. Never fear, the habits are still there, and you can call on them if the occasion ever arises. Your thought should now be absorbed in deciding how this new development is to be used.

The problem I have always had with the World, as a main line of attack, is that it is too human. That is, there is always human interaction. Of course our business in the World is to poison, twist, and stunt human interaction so that it takes place only on the shallowest levels, and is limited to exploitation and abuse. When that process is firmly established, I grant you the results are quite gratifying. However, I have seen some sad cases (not mine, but unfortunate acquaintances I used to have). You see, in the World there is constant interaction with people, and people are always other. It requires constant vigilance to ensure that the patient never sees them as people because if he did he would look for something deeper. The Enemy has a teaching that persons should give of themselves to each other and that somehow this will make them more full, instead of more empty. He calls it “relationship.” According to their doctrine, Heaven is Relationship. (You will, of course, recognize the twist on my beloved acolyte, Jean Paul’s famous saying that “Hell is other people”.)  To the Enemy and His agents, Heaven is the fulfillment of all relationships.

That dogma is, of course, heresy to us, but we use the word as shorthand for whatever-it-is-that-is-really-going-on-there. In any event “relationship” is purely the enemy’s territory. The last thing we want our human to have is a relationship. In my mind, the perverted shallow relationships of the World are really only a concession. In the end, in Hell, there will be no such thing as even the tiniest vestige of relationship. All will be turned in upon self in an eternal, crippling self-adulation and hatred. We want to begin the work as soon as possible since The Enemy created the little vermin and His calls are deep inside them and hard to eradicate. The human interactions which we must allow them for now are our concessions to this weakness in them, which we slowly wean them away from over time.

If you’ve been able to comprehend what I have so clearly explained above, then you should be able to see why I am so frustrated by your short-sighted ignorance. Don’t wait for this “phase to pass.” Use it.

Let us first establish what we do not want to have happen. Male humans will often gather together in one of their homes to play video games, often combined with beer and pizza. This we absolutely do not want. Of course we have ways of exploiting even this, but the combination of human interaction, food and drink, harmless high spirits, and the phenomenon of “fun” renders the event, on the whole, less than favorable to us. At least they aren’t coming together for virtuous pursuits, you say? True, and if that’s all I could get I would take it, but on the whole I say, when the games draw humans together at all it rather defeats their whole purpose.

Some experts on the subject advocate sex and violence in video games, and we have made great advances on those fronts. I am dubious about how much harm they really do to adult humans, but as an indicator of what the human’s real longings are they are invaluable. After all, he wouldn’t be playing at buying prostitutes and then killing them if that idea didn’t have a certain attraction in his heart. And as a part of our overall flooding of society with those two themes, it is of course only natural.

But to me the real genius of the games is isolation. Let him sit in his house alone, to play them. If he plays with people he knows online, so be it. Sometimes a little dose of interaction is better than nothing. It makes them feel like they are in relationship so it is a vaccination against the real thing. Let him spend all those longings for adventure and accomplishment on a series of ones and zeros in a computer program somewhere.

Does he use them to escape human interaction, that is the question? When the moment of truth comes, which does he choose, his game or the other person? To this end, you want to keep that moment of truth as fleeting and as low key as possible. He should not even know that it is a test with eternal repercussions when it happens. The moment of truth does not look like a messenger from the enemy with a flaming sword. Far more often it looks like a snot-nosed little human brat asking Daddy to read a book. It might look like a text message from a friend inviting him out. You, of course, can see the weight of consequence hanging on each of these choices. (At least you should be able to. From the letter you sent, however, I have my doubts.) He, almost certainly, cannot, and your business is to blind him more and more until all he can see is the image on his screen.

 Can you take the games from being part of his real world, and make them the whole world? If you can, then you have successfully illusioned him. It is excellent preparation for when they arrive down below, where never again through all eternity will any reality ever intrude itself upon their shrinking souls. The human who voluntarily chooses that while still alive is already half-way to hell. He just doesn’t know it.

The question is, my dear Worldly Wise, can you teach him that his fantasy world is more important than The Enemy’s real world? If not, then do let me know, and I will be happy to arrange for a more intimate refresher.

Cheers,

Thugfang.