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

 

Peace Be With You

All my sins rise up before my eyes

And choke the light with memories of black.

These acts of mine I never can take back

The lusts, the hates, the snobbery, the lies

And simply you reply “Peace be with you.”

 I stand accused with nothing but the truth.

Thus I thought, desired, spoke and did.

These acts were mine and more, I am sure, lie hid

Buried in the subconscious of my youth.

But your only word to me, “Peace be with you.”

Hidden sins I cannot even bring

Before the accuser, hungry for my faults.

Unknown and festering in dark submental vaults

They lie in wait, and to my soul they cling.

But your command to me, “Peace be with you.”

New life, new love, new hopes send down the blade

Through the water’s shallow clarity

Below the shine of surface charity

Plunging into the murk I’ve left unsaid.

And sharply you remind me, “Peace be with you.”

Who knows what lives down there in all that silt?

The water’s peaceful surface boils in fright,

I blame the dredge for what it brings to light,

And still you plunge the blade in to the hilt

And fiercely promise me, “Peace be with you.”

For this you came, to bring the sword of peace

With wounded healing hands through silent war.

Prying, cutting, searching the very core,

Taking away so that you may increase

My hope. My only hope. “Peace be with you.”

Impersonal Warfare

In my last post I talked about sneering and mistrust as the natural way for a soldier to deal with the reality of his work. The vast majority of modern wars (with significant exceptions) are matters of masses of anonymous men seeking out and killing masses of other anonymous men. That, at least, is how it seems from the point of view of those who run the wars, and many of the people who prosecute those wars. This too, is a psychological defense mechanism. Wiping out a blip on a computer screen or a little green shape on the drone’s camera is such an impersonal thing, which, I firmly believe, is the real reason for the modern emphasis on super-technology in war. It is not because of the practical effectiveness (it is, on the whole, immensely impractical) but because of the psychological leverage it gives us.

Things are not so sterile for the front line soldier. Faced with two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, a yelling voice, and the sensory reality of sweat and blood on the body, the front line soldier cannot hide behind computers. Instead he has to resort to a more primitive method of psychological distancing. He has to convince himself that the enemy is somehow less than he is. Anything can be used as leverage for this “othering” of the enemy. Skin color is an old favorite, but uniforms will do. Language is a solid choice, carrying as it does connotations of a whole alien culture. Specific habits of the enemy, can be subtle proof of inferiority. (Iraqis usually squat instead of sitting to answer the call of nature. Therefore we are superior to them.) Real or imagined wrongs done by the enemy to people I somehow identify with are the best leverage of all, because it provides not merely a psychological but as pseudo-moral justification for violence. It is justice, meted out by the soldier. This is also a useful handle for demonizing anyone on our side who proposes a more moderate course.

The end result, the goal and object of this process, is the othering, the de-humanization, the objectifying of the enemy, in order to make him easier to kill. Sometimes this rhetoric is at least subjectively sincere. The person spouting it really believes it. More often I suspect it is a bastardized attempt to cover up the psychological damage of hating another person. The louder the rhetoric, the more I suspect it is only skin deep. The really dangerous person is the one who believes it so completely he doesn’t feel like it needs to be explained.

This is a brief, rough sketch of a reaction to the impersonal violence of modern warfare (personal violence is something else entirely. It is the natural refuge of men who are no more than cogs (albeit willing cogs) in a machine that cares little more for them than for the people it wields them against. (This should not be understood as an indictment against impersonal government. That should be discussed separately, but after a certain point, all human government has to be impersonal. It’s part of the nature of government.)

But as I said, I believe there is another way, although it is not open to most people. I’ll get to it in another post.

HHS Health Reform Strategy: Two Scenarios

There has been a huge hue and cry in the Catholic blogosphere recently in reference to the White House’s recent statement that there will be no broadening of the conscience clause in the Health Care reform bill. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and many other religious organizations in America have been lobbying for this broadening since the bill was passed, and this month, three days before the National March for life in Washington, the White House stated that “This group (Faith based institutions) will ultimately have to offer female employees cost-free contraception, just like others across the country.”


This was not at all what those faith based institutions were hoping for. In a somewhat insulting nod to these organizations, the White House is allowing them an additional year to comply. This is not an acknowledgement of the conscience issue, but to allow more time for administrative changes that will need to be made. “We know that a lot of these organizations may be large organizations, there are approval processes that require the approval of boards,” an administration official told reporters on a call this afternoon. “The transitional period responds to those concerns.”

Unfortunately, these were never actually concerns. This is not a question of “an approval process” as if the implication were that “boards” just need enough time to argue about it before finally bowing to the mandate of Washington.

The uproar has been considerable, though not as widespread as the response to the SOPA bill. Catholic bloggers and bishops, not-for-profit organizations and media personalities have been firing back. I cannot say anything that they have not already said.

I am interested, though, in the Administration’s point of view. What is the end game here? It was a bold strategy, not only the decision to ignore the principles of the largest religious body on the planet, but to drop the ultimatum three days before the largest gathering of Catholics in one place in America. Coincidence? I’ll just say, competent strategists don’t allow coincidences like that. If the timing was not taken into account it was sheer incompetence. If it was, then what on earth was the strategy?

You see, only an idiot goes into battle without knowing his enemy. While there are varying levels of competence in Washington, I’m not ready to believe that the architects of this bill are idiots. They went into battle, and they had to know how the Catholics were going to react. This isn’t an administrative policy we are talking about here, this is a matter of moral principle. The Catholic Church’s opposition to contraception is a matter of history, and She has been before now the single voice in the world condemning the contraceptive culture. We made it through the 60’s without changing that for crying out loud. There is no excuse for ignorance about the Church’s position on this topic. Therefore, there is no possibility of compromise. We literally cannot give in to this law. It would be like forcing Jewish businesses to sell Kosher Bacon.

So I have no choice but to believe that at the very least the Administration knew that there was going to be an uproar. Perhaps they underestimated how rapid and loud it would be, but they took it into account in the decision making process. What part did it play?

I can think of two possible strategies that account for this blatant aggression. The first, and I think the most likely, is ideological. Perhaps the President and his advisors really believe that contraception and abortion are so obviously mainstream healthcare, that anyone who does not provide them shouldn’t be in healthcare anyway. An analogy would be someone who did not believe in prescribing antibiotics and refused to do so on moral grounds. Such a person has a right to believe that, but no hospital in America would hire them. They would not be allowed to practice as a physician, and rightly so. I think it is possible that Obama and his cronies are so in love with the idea of contraception that they have deluded themselves into thinking that contraceptives are on the same level as antibiotics and other routine, life-saving interventions. The rhetoric of “reproductive rights” might well have tricked its authors.

If this is the case then the move to engage in open warfare, as it were, was seen as a calculated risk. They think they are right to force people to take care of their employee’s health and welfare (their view), and they are counting on popular support and even more popular apathy to wear down religious resistance over time. In this scenario they expect to hunker down, weather the storm and keep up an endless stream of propaganda. It will blow over eventually and they will get their way.

The second scenario is more sinister, and I think less likely. In this scenario the motives are not ideological but pragmatic. They don’t give a damn about reproductive rights or contraception or any of that. What they do want is power. The Catholic Church, by Her nature, is always a possible threat to the power of the State, because She claims divine authority to resist laws it deems unjust. In this view the goal is to hamper the freedoms of this institution, consolidating power for the State. What you need for that is to do two things, simultaneously: First, you need to isolate and weaken the institution’s base of support among the population. Second, you need to create the opportunity to take action against that institution in such a way that it will be perceived as legitimate. To accomplish these you need an issue which will be at the same time odious to the institution in question and widely popular among the rest of the population.

So in this scenario this particular issue is not the issue. Instead it is simply a weapon. The goal is to draw intense, outspoken, and hopefully hot-headed or even inflammatory response from the Church, which can then be construed as backward, selfish and intolerant. The Church is forcing her beliefs on employees who do not even share the same beliefs! The hope then is that when the inevitable confrontation occurs, whether the Catholic institutions try to continue operating in defiance of the law, or close their doors, any government action can be presented as preventing the Church from imposing Her ideas on other people. No one will come to our aid in any effective way.

I don’t think this is the scenario, because it means that the Administration thinks the Church is weak enough that they can get away with it. You don’t deliberately provoke an all-out power struggle until you are certain you have the tactical advantage. I don’t think we are at that stage yet. In fact, if anything can bring out a little fight in us, this is it. But in the short term, motives matter very little. In either scenario the crux of the matter remains the same. The side that sways the people will win, and if Obama has proved adept at anything, it is influencing the people. People will point to his crashing polls, but the mystery is not that they have crashed so far, but that they have not bottomed out. The man can spin a yarn, and people listen. This is the most dangerous quality he possesses and we must not underestimate it.

In any revolution or counter-revolution, the propaganda war is the real war. The human terrain is the only terrain that matters.