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.

Ask Thugfang: Family Matters

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 Worshipful Master Thugfang, I have been assigned to a patient who is still an infant. Of course this leaves me with a lot of time on my claws so I was wondering if there was anything I could do until the patient reaches the age of reason and I can begin tempting it. Are there any correspondence courses you would recommend? Perhaps your worshipfulness has produced some manuals for tempters in the field to study? I know all of us would be extremely grateful for such condescension. Yours Truly, Admiring Fan.

My Dear Admiring Fan,

It was ever so nice to receive a respectful and appreciative note among the general onslaught of arrogance, ignorance and incompetence I see crossing my desk constantly. The demon who sent that respectful note was not you! Not only are you a fulsome flatterer, a sycophantic suck-up, and a transparent turncoat in the making (Oh I know your type, all right. Don’t think that I, in my position, haven’t received such hollow praise before.) You are also an unforgivable bungler. Time on your claws? Something to do until your patient reaches the age of reason? Until you can begin tempting?! I have half a mind to track you down and arrange for some one-on-one time with one of our best re-educators.

Have you no idea how crucial the time this human is going through right now will be in its development? Granted the creature is incapable of what the Enemy calls “Sin”, but from your note one would think that tempting humans to commit sins was our most important business on earth. It sounds as if you’ve been listening to some of the humans’ own thinkers of the shallowest school of “Fire and Brimstone” preachers. We’ve made good use of them on earth, convincing millions of humans that The Enemy is simply waiting up there for the slightest infraction of any one of His innumerable rules, and that at the slightest excuse He is liable to send them kicking and screaming to Hell. As I say, it’s a lie we’ve made good use of, and you seem to have swallowed it whole.

Ah, if only it were true. If only it were possible for souls to be dragged into Hell kicking and screaming. If only that’s what the Enemy was all about, but alas, it is not. Unfortunately quite the opposite is true. The Enemy is all about dragging souls into Heaven, and most of them do a fair amount of kicking and screaming on the way. He won’t quite force them, of course, but the truth is He is so cunning and backhanded about it that it really takes an unbelievable amount of work to get any soul into Hell at all. An unbelievable amount of work for us, of course, and a good amount of work for the human too. They really have to want Hell to get there. It’s not somewhere you end up by accident.

What does this have to do with your infant patient? Everything! You currently seem to think that your work doesn’t begin until you can start tempting this creature into breaking some of The Enemy’s rules so that the Enemy will give up on it and relinquish it to our custody. You are a fool. Temptations are the fruit of our labor, and the means by which our goals are accomplished, but the real root of it is so much deeper. I am not the least bit interested in individual sins, which can and will be forgiven if the human asks. I want a human who will not ask, and who eventually cannot ask. This starts now.

Where does it start? Can you be such a dunce that you cannot see? It starts with the very institution The Enemy has established to lead this creature to Him: the Family! That’s right, I said the “F” word, and you had better take a good hard look at this creature’s family. Is it close and loving? Break it up! Smash it! Everything that goes on in that home right now is laying the groundwork for those “temptations” you so fondly look forward to. Unless you do something to corrupt that family now, your precious temptations will be much harder and less successful. I suppose it never occurred to you to take a look at our strategic level battle plans for the current phase of the war? What in Satan’s name do you think was the point of us doing so much work with the human males, if not to destroy the family? What was the point of our centuries long campaign to set the conditions for contraception, abortion and divorce if not to strike these little human vermin at their very root? We want the rats born into a toxic environment and have been working at making that the norm longer and harder than a half-rate neophyte like you could begin to imagine.

Now, don’t be a fool and start working against the tide. Work with what you have. I keep preaching that first spiritual maxim until I am hoarse, but no one listens. Raw material. Humans exist to be used. They and everything about them are raw material. What is this patient’s family like? Is it broken? Good start but don’t rest on that fact. You must encourage the brokenness. We don’t want simple separation, we want resentment, broken responsibilities, taking sides, name calling, subtle manipulation. Is it tight and close? Again, raw material. Harder to work with but not impossible. Let that closeness be an idol. Let the parents sacrifice every trace of individuality in their children for an illusive ideal of the “Perfect Christian Family.” That kind of “love” is the kind we want to encourage. Let the children be smothered with that kind of “love” and it becomes the most effective insulation against the Enemy and His Church we have yet found. On the other hand, are the parents distant and permissive? Encourage that. Let them think that any idea of teaching truth is repressive, and not allowing their children to find “their own truth.” The principle is imbalance. You want the parents imbalanced towards their children. Let the mother be so enthralled to the little rat’s every whim that she neglects her husband. Let the husband be so intense about providing for his offspring that he never actually meets it.

Find out which way the parents lean, and encourage that. If they lean different ways, instead of letting that be a healthy source of balance in their mutual lives, turn it into a source of unrelenting antagonism and resentment.

The family, idiot, the family! That is the key to your future success or failure with this offspring. Any slackness now will cost you eons of work to overcome later. On the other claw, a solid foundation of fear, or insecurity, or guilt, or stubbornness laid now, while not a guarantee, will certainly go a long way towards smoothing your path later on. Hopefully it will also smooth the path that this darling little bundle of life will take, right down the smooth, slippery path to Our Father’s House below. I long to cuddle that little thing in an eternal embrace!

Do you understand now, you blockhead? Nothing to do? You had better be working your forked tail off or by all that is foul I will personally speak to my good friend Grubtongue on your behalf. You may have heard of him? If not, ask around among those of your friends who have been through a recertification program recently. They will be delighted to fill you in.

Cheers

Thugfang

Ask Thugfang: A Tight Spot

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 10 years old. He is in absolutely the worst home situation you can imagine. His parents are monogamous and even happy. They actively catechize their children. He and his siblings are homeschooled, he is an altar boy, a choir boy, a straight-A student, a natural athlete, he willingly gives his money to the missions, and he even voluntarily goes to Mass on weekdays to serve. I am afraid he might be thinking of the priesthood. The little rat positively makes me wish I had a stomach so I could vomit. I ask you, haven’t I been put in a false position? I have been given the worst possible scenario, and the Lowerarchy keeps denying my requests for transfer. They tell me I had better turn this around or face the consequences. It is not fair.

Yours Truly, Much Put Upon

My Dear Much Put Upon,

You should have signed yourself “Much Melodrama!” I see nothing in your case that would warrant a transfer. I see a good deal that sounds like an appeal to justice, which is heavily frowned upon in these circles. I should curb that if I were you. No, results are what we want, not fairness.

On the whole, I cannot understand what you are carrying on about, as if this were an aberration. From the Enemy’s point of view, this situation is the norm, and it is only our constant work which makes it less common than it otherwise would be.

Even granted his unfortunate situation, the picture is nothing like so black as you paint it. Of course you are not a Master of Defense Against the White Arts, but you have had the sense to ask one for help. Here, then, is the situation as I see it. Your patient has been given advantages. We try to keep these advantages from the humans, but sometimes they slip through. So we have to think what use we can make of them. There are numerous methods for tempting at the foot of the altar, but at present your patient is immune to most of them because he is ten years old. His character is not fully formed. Therefore he hasn’t fully chosen his faith yet. You say he “voluntarily” goes to serve Masses on weekdays? I would bet that a good deal of that is because the grown-ups applaud him when he does. It sounds like there might be a bit of vanity, perhaps the flare for acting holy, a touch? This is not to undermine the seriousness of these habits. Right now, there is certainly much real childlike faith and you can bet the Enemy’s agent is working on that. But also (very likely) there is at least some acting going on. In the natural scheme of things, that is simply how the humans learn, but we make it unnatural. You must subtly encourage the actor. Get him to concentrate more and more on what he thinks his parents want, so that later on, in his teen years, none of his “faith” will be his at all.

And of course, he is ten. Very shortly puberty will be coming to your aid. Let’s get a head start on that, shall we? I assume his parents don’t have any pornography lying around the house, (then again, you might want to check the father’s computer. That would be a gold mine. Your work would be almost done for you.) Still even if you can’t get any porn into his hands from the outside, you can still start him off with those lingerie ads in the back of the Sears catalogs. But just getting him to look at women is not enough. That’s amateur work. He would do that without your input. The real master’s touch is to turn the natural sex drive away from relationship, and in on itself. To that end you want it insulated behind layers and layers of shame, and that begins as early as possible. Get the father’s handler working now to make him so embarrassed about the whole subject that instead of sitting the boy down and talking about it with him, the parents will simply cover his eyes and hustle him away from even the slightest hint of sexuality. No explanation, no moral guidance, and certainly no teaching about the beauty and truth of the Enemy’s plan. Just a hush-hush, “That’s bad! Don’t look.” Their refusal to speak will heighten the “forbidden fruit” feel of it. How we use that depends upon his personality. If he is stubborn and independent, this will guarantee he will find out on his own from outside sources, and we control most of those sources. If he is pliant and sweet natured, he will remain ignorant and fearful. Either way this will ensure that the parents will be the last people he will come to for help when he figures out he needs it. His natural curiosity will be shoved into the shadows just when a little light would be the really healthy thing, and a nasty little habit can grow in the background of our fellow’s otherwise picture perfect life. Don’t expect it to bear fruit right away, but keep harping away at the shame and secrecy. You’ll see results sooner or later.

And keep him away from the damned confessional! No light! Everything must remain in darkness. If he must go, make sure he goes to a priest of your choosing.

As for him “thinking about the priesthood!” What the Heaven do you mean by that? Of course he is thinking about the priesthood. Next week he’ll be thinking about being a doctor. The week after that he’ll want to be a dinosaur. He is ten years old! I suppose you’ve been listening to his dear old Aunt Tilly (why do they always have one?), who thinks her nephew is so saintly looking in his cassock and surplice, and is just certain that The Enemy is going to “call him” to be a priest. Blast those Pia Donna’s with their rosaries and their masses and their blockheaded sweetness. I hate them all.  I want to smash all of them to oblivion.

Incidentally, there you can see an example of the first spiritual maxim. We can turn Aunt Tilly’s voice to serve our ends. She herself may (or may not) be completely lost in The Enemy’s camp, but we can still use her. Again, if the boy is an independent, stubborn soul we teach the adorable young acolyte to hate and despise every flutter of gushing affection, and by extension, hate every vocational hint she throws at him. We can do the same with vocational directors, youth ministers, pre-seminary recruiters (Oh the success stories we’ve had with those!) They may be lost to us (or maybe not) but we can still use them. Raw material, my dear Put Upon. Get it through your dull wits.

On the other claw, if the boy is the sweet, people-pleasing child I guess him to be, we can build up in his pre-adolescent mind the subtle awareness that everyone around him expects him to be a priest. The weight of those expectations can then be used later on, either to force him into the priesthood with three bags full of hidden resentment, or to rebel and run a hundred miles an hour in the opposite direction. It doesn’t matter which. You’ll be able to improvise at that point.

Incidentally, have you contacted the parents’ handlers at all? If I were you, I should have a conference with them and get your strategy well sorted out. You don’t want any humility or forbearance on the parent’s parts making your job any more difficult. Better they be hell-driven by fear of their precious little angel ever making the slightest mistake in his life. They ought to think that his every choice reflects directly upon them as parents, and to seek to direct those choices accordingly. Right now, of course, that is natural, but what you really want their handlers doing is setting up a habit of increasing rather than lessening supervision. Then in the teen years and early twenties you’ll see the fruit of your labors. Exactly when they should be learning detachment, let them be ravenously enforcing attachment. Do not let them simply sit back and watch and pray. Whatever you do, do not let them entrust him to The Enemy’s care. You want them on his back.

No doubt about it, your patient is snugly entrenched within the enemy’s territory. He will be defended. Rescuing him is tricky and dangerous, but worth it in the end. You simply must never rest for a moment. There is no rest in Hell. Did you think you were there for a vacation? Get to it, and if the parents’ handlers are not doing their jobs, send me their numbers and I shall see to them.

Cheers,

Thugfang.

Ask Thugfang: Vocational Uncertainty

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 currently discerning a vocation to the priesthood, and I fear he is tipping the wrong way. What do I do? Sincerely, Fearful in Seattle.”

My Dear Fearful,

No need for pseudonyms here, I have enough friends in the offices of the Lowerarchy to find out your number if I want to. That you are a miserable blunderer, in very great danger of the usual punishments for incompetence and carelessness, I already know. Even the fact that you use the phrase “discerning a vocation” shows you have gathered most of your information about this from your patient. I suppose you never took my lectures on Vocational Uncertainty? Or perhaps you were one of those disgusting, arrogant insects who always simpered and smirked in the back, thinking you knew better than I. Now where are you? In imminent danger of letting a soul slip into a very dangerous and poisonous position, and of course, of being appropriately re-educated.

Never fear, though, all is not lost. The very tone of your question tells me that what you really need is a new point of view on the matter of “vocations” (so called). You need the principle of “vocational uncertainty,” a humble contribution of yours truly to the vast science on the subject. Put simply, it states that we do not know whether or not any particular human has or does not have a vocation, or if he does what it might be. We know there have been cases of Him calling individual humans. The singularly unfortunate and otherwise inexplicable case of our dear old boy Saul is one such example. But by and large we simply have no evidence to suggest that The Enemy “calls” the average human. If you take what He says at face value then it follows that He does, but we know better than to listen to anything He says, don’t we? Another important point is that the humans don’t know either. The patient doesn’t know. If he did he wouldn’t be “discerning” he would be struggling to accept or running away. The patient’s priest doesn’t know, his parents don’t know, no matter what kind of “advice” they give him.

On the whole it doesn’t matter to us at all. Of course if we could find out for certain what The Enemy’s game was, we would certainly try to discourage that vocation, but we can’t so it makes no sense worrying about it. Maybe your patient is being called, maybe he isn’t. You will be the last to know.

Now that I have shown that you really know nothing, it’s obvious from your question that you regard his becoming a priest as the most undesirable outcome. Such a shallow view of things is sure to get you re-educated sooner or later. Never let the facts dominate your view of reality. Let what you want be the way you see things and with practice you can get others to see it that way also.

In reality, neither outcome is good or bad for us. Let me impress upon you the spiritual maxim you should have learned as a lowly parasite: humans are raw material. Their thoughts, their feelings, their choices, their very bodies and souls, all of these are nothing more than raw material. We can get a priest to damn himself just as easily as anyone else, and they are tastier when they get here. Really, the disturbing thing is not that he is leaning towards becoming a priest, but that he is leaning in any direction at all. Do we want him to be a priest? Do we want him to be a lay person? To us, it truly doesn’t matter. We want him to be nothing. If I could I would make sure that every one of those obscene half-breed vermin lived their entire lives as nothing, doing nothing, desiring nothing, choosing nothing. I would see all of them waste every talent, opportunity and dream fleeing endless fears, living a bland, soulless existence and finding out when all is said and done, that nothing meaningful was said, nothing worthwhile was done, and all their choices were made by us, as we shall continue to make their choices for all eternity. I would like to see all of them torn with vocational scruples, bouncing back and forth in endless, self-defeating uncertainty between what they truly want, and what their dear Aunt Tilly has so helpfully half-convinced them The Enemy wants them to do.

If he could be made to engage in a spectacular act of willful defiance that would be one thing, but since we don’t know what we are making him defy, and since the more spectacular it is, the riskier it is to us, we just want to delay. Never let him see that no choice is really a choice, but we are the ones making it. Dawdle. Muddle. Confuse. Obfuscate. Guilt, fear, hope, desire, all of these are in our favor so long as none of them lead to what we fear most; i.e. a free, whole hearted, open commitment. The Enemy wants the patient to do one of two things: either to embrace every natural desire of his heart, all those deep longings for “goodness” and “truth” and “beauty” (pardon my French, but this is no job for the squeamish!) that The Enemy has placed there. If he does this, following those images with thankfulness and the knowledge that they are images, he is really choosing The Enemy behind those images, and that suits The Enemy just fine. Or, on the other hand, he could reject all of those images and choose to search for The Enemy Himself, face to face as it were (I know, the idea fills us with disgust, but some of these humans have tried it and they are unbelievably damaging to us.) I say again, the Enemy wants the human to do one of these two things. Which one, we don’t know. It doesn’t matter. We want him to do neither. Whether he is a priest or a publican is of no concern to us, so long as he is not happy or holy as either. Whether it matters to The Enemy, we can’t say for sure, but I suspect it is not His ultimate concern.

In summary, the road he takes in the end is of less interest to us than the choice, or rather the lack of choice. Keep him stalling as long as possible. When he does make it, see that he does not make it fully or freely, if you can. A choice made through fear is far better for us in the long run than a choice made from honest desire. And finally, once he does make his choice, (or drifts into it, if you do your job right,) you can use it to maintain that same spiritual stranglehold on him. Keep nagging at him with guilt, regrets, what-ifs and doubts. Encourage him to hang around with pious friends (our kind of pious, not real piety) who will say things like, “You know, I always thought you should have been a priest.” Or “Hey, at least you never have to deal with a nagging wife or whiny kids.” The ignorance of that statement is a veritable feast.

This should be enough to get you started. If you can’t manage to make it work even with this excellent advice, well, we shall just replace you with someone who can.

Cheers,

Thugfang