Screwtape strikes again!

666 Judecca St.
Circle Nine
City of Dis, Pandemonium 666-666
October 31, 1999

Dear Wormwood,

Greetings on my very favorite holiday!

Now I understand why you’re so tardy in your correspondence. It’s true that when a junior Tempter flunks his first assignment, he’s liable to be sent down to the House of Corrections for the usual penalties.

There is, however, no need to forward your report to the Deputy just yet. For one thing, a failure on your part reflects rather badly on my supervision.

All is not lost. As The Enemy has said, it all depends on the type of soil the Patient has fallen upon. As long as we intervene before he takes root, there’s no need to report your bungled performance to the Lower-Ups. It will be our little secret.

At this stage we will need to implement a 12-step deprogram.

The first order of business is to undermine his faith in miracles. For if there are no miracles, then the Bible can’t be true, in which case we explain it by resort to the usual suspects, viz., comparative mythology, Freudian psychology.

Yours truly,

Screwtape

Undersecretary to the Lower Deputy Archon
screwu@infernos.org

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666 Judecca St.
Circle Nine
City of Dis, Pandemonium 666-666
November 3, 1999

Dear Wormwood,

Thanks for the draft copy of your little speech. Timing is everything. It’s best to plant these insidious thoughts in his mind when the Patient’s resistance is down. When he’s dreaming—erotic dreams are best! When he’s bored by the sermon. When he saw his girlfriend hanging out with the quarterback.

As to the content, the substance is fine, but style is everything.

Yes, you’re quite right. In telling the Patient that miracles can’t happen, we’re begging the question. All that fancy talk of a closed system is just a highfalutin name for atheism.

But it’s precisely because we’re begging the question that we need to dress it up in something pretentious and neutral sounding. Employ resonant phrases like “closed causal continuum,” “methodological naturalism,” and “the principle of uniformity.”

Yours truly,

Screwtape

Undersecretary to the Lower Deputy Archon
screwu@infernos.org

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666 Judecca St.
Circle Nine
City of Dis, Pandemonium 666-666
November 21, 1999

Dear Wormwood,

I’m afraid the Patient has the better of the argument here. It’s true that methodological naturalism is prejudicial as well as stipulative.

It’s also true that the only evidence for uniformity is historical testimony, which happens to be the same type of evidence we have for miracles.

So it’s best not to belabor this point. It will only remind the Patient of what a losing hand we have.

Instead, you should appeal to his sense of snobbery. This is much more persuasive than reason and evidence. Snobbery trumps logic nine times out of ten.

Tell him that the only folks who still believe in miracles are beetle-browed, knuckle dragging Fundies who attend snake-handling churches.

Bring up the psychic hotlines while you’re at it.

And remind him that everyone who lived before the mid-20C was in bondage to gross superstition.

Add a dash of Marxism while you’re at it—you know, how the filthy rich invented the Christian faith to distract the working poor from their sorry lot in life.

Yours truly,

Screwtape

Undersecretary to the Lower Deputy Archon
screwu@infernos.org

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666 Judecca St.
Circle Nine
City of Dis, Pandemonium 666-666
December 5, 1999

Dear Wormwood,

So the appeal to snobbery didn’t pan out. What a pity. That was our silver bullet.

Now we’ll have to trudge through the remaining steps, one at a time, to see which one does the trick.

The next course of action is to attack his faith in the Bible. Here are a few pointers:

1.Your strongest argument is the argument from silence.

Yes…I know...that’s a weak argument. But sometimes your strongest argument is a weak argument.

This is a two-pronged argument:

i) Assure the Patient that if there’s no corroboration for a biblical event, then it never happened. The Bible writer made it up whole cloth.

ii) But if there is corroboration, your fallback is to say the Bible writer borrowed the story from a filthy pagan source, and rewrote it.

That way, you can turn any evidence for Scripture against Scripture while you also insist that the absence of evidence counts as evidence against Scripture.

Practice this argument in front of a mirror several times a day to so that you can instantly change facial expressions as you switch from one standard to its opposite.

iii) Another back-up plan is to impeach the character of the witness. Something like—the gospel writers were Christian, so you can’t take their word for it.

According to the Columbia School of Journalism, you should never believe the report of a reporter if the reporter believes his own report. A report is only believable if the reporter doesn’t believe it himself.

2.Along the same lines, challenge the authorship of Scripture. For example, if the style of one writing is different from another by the “same” writer, that proves you have a forgery.

But if the style of one writing is too much like the style of another writing, that proves to you the forger was trying too hard to imitate his source.

3.Routinely blur the distinction between a variation and a contradiction. So if one account differs from another, turn that variation with a material contradiction, even though the addition or omission of a circumstantial detail doesn’t really entail a contradiction.

This works best if you talk very fast. Go to a cattle auction to improve your elocutionary skills.

4.Tell the Patient that he can’t trust the text of Scripture. Convert a trivial difference in spelling or word-order into a wholesale reason to distrust the Greek and Hebrew MSS.

If, on the other, the Patient says a wrong name or number may have been miscopied, make fun of his appeal to the originals.

5.Assure the Patient that a historical account cannot be true unless it records every single thing that happened to every single participant in the exact order it happened—even if several things were happening at once—while reporting every single word of every single speaker.

Make it all as simple-minded as possible. Confusion is the best policy.

Yours truly,

Screwtape

Undersecretary to the Lower Deputy Archon
screwu@infernos.org

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666 Judecca St.
Circle Nine
City of Dis, Pandemonium 666-666
January 9, 2000

Dear Wormwood,

So you say the Patient is judging the Bible by the literary conventions of any ancient writing? That’s most unfortunate.

But if we can’t undermine his faith in Scripture as a whole, at one stroke, we can attack it at a few stress points.

Pick on the creation account and the flood.

Point out the “glaring” contradiction between the creation account and modern science.

Never let the Patient ask himself what the world would look like if it really were made in six days.

Just between you and me, I was there when it happened. The whole shebang went up just like one of those prefab houses, where a landscape gardener wheels in full-grown trees from the nursery and rolls out bails of green grass like Astroturf. Why, in a few weeks time you’d swear it was there for many years.

Always remember that this is not about winning the argument, but winning the debate. Ridicule is our best weapon. The Enemy has reason, but we have ridicule.

You see, most folks would rather be foolish, but seem wise, than be wise, but seem foolish.

As to the flood, the trick here is to play upon his mental picture of the modern world—the world after the flood. Make the Patient ask himself how he’d square the flood account with life after the flood.

Of course, you and I know that life long after the flood isn’t the same as life before the flood, so the trick is to make him forget all that. To make him measure a prediluvial world by a postdiluvian yardstick. Same climate, diet, species, geography, &c.

And assure him that everything has to be explained by strictly naturalistic principles, as if there were no God to make it happen.

Yours truly,

Screwtape

Undersecretary to the Lower Deputy Archon
screwu@infernos.org

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666 Judecca St.
Circle Nine
City of Dis, Pandemonium 666-666
February 2, 2000

Dear Wormwood,

You say the Patient read a copy of Thomas Kuhn? I thought I told you to burn that book!

Burning things is what we do best down here.

Very well then, if we can’t use science, there’s always the problem of evil.

Make the Patient see this as a problem internal to Christianity. Either God is able to prevent evil, but unwilling, in which case he’s malevolent, or else he’s willing, but unable, in which case he’s impotent.

It’s possible, though, that the Patient has been reading his Bible. That’s always a bad sign.

And if he’s been reading his Bible, he may quote you something about how God did have a good reason for ordaining the fall, in order to manifest his mercy and justice.

If the Patient goes that route, then you’ll have to switch horses from an internal argument to an external argument. Ask him how a good God would allow Bambi to die in a forest fire. Something like that. The more emotional, the better.

This works best with wide-eyed fawns and pink-eyed bunny rabbits. Oh, and don’t forget about beagles. The cuter the better to tug at the heartstrings.

By no means talk about the gratuitous suffering of rats and roaches, snakes and crocodiles. They lack the cuddle-factor.

Yours truly,

Screwtape

Undersecretary to the Lower Deputy Archon
screwu@infernos.org

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666 Judecca St.
Circle Nine
City of Dis, Pandemonium 666-666
February 19, 2000

Dear Wormwood,

You say the Patient was asking himself why unbelievers care about the problem of evil when they don’t even believe in moral absolutes?

Well, he’s got a point.

Since that didn’t pan out, it’s time to change the subject.

Try to pin the Oedipal complex on him. As Freud put it only yesterday when I was talking to him, “the terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood aroused the need for protection—for protection through love—which was provided by the father. Thus the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fears of the dangers of life.”

Make the Patient feel ashamed. Shame is much more efficient than logic. Bully him. Talk down to him. Make him feel like an overgrown child who can’t bring himself to sever the umbilical cord.

Yours truly,

Screwtape

Undersecretary to the Lower Deputy Archon
screwu@infernos.org

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666 Judecca St.
Circle Nine
City of Dis, Pandemonium 666-666
March 24, 2000

Dear Wormwood,

What? You’re telling me he tried to turn tables on us by saying to himself that Lucifer was one the one suffering from a father-fixation?

What an impudent little twerp! I’m not sure the Patient is good enough for a life of pure evil here-below. We have standards, you know! Hell is a gated community.

Since the Freudian tactic didn’t work, here’s another angle:

Lampoon the whole idea of an invisible, intangible God.

Compare it to “Harvey.” You know, Jimmy Stewart’s invisible, 6-foot rabbit.

Form that image in his mind.

Assure him that God is just like that: an imaginary friend, like a little girl’s secret friend. No one else can see her or hear her or touch her.

Yours truly,

Screwtape

Undersecretary to the Lower Deputy Archon
screwu@infernos.org

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666 Judecca St.
Circle Nine
City of Dis, Pandemonium 666-666
April 17, 2000

Dear Wormwood,

So he told himself that if we can’t believe in some intangible, invisible God, then we can’t believe in some intangible, invisible devil?

Well, bless my horns and hooves if this Patient of yours isn’t becoming more insolent by the day! What are they teaching young people in school these days? Has he never read the demonological argument of St. Hellion’s?

“Diablo, ergo sum.”

And you say he also told himself that if we can’t believe in something intangible or invisible, then we can’t believe in our own thought-process since we can’t see our own mind at work?

Well, as one evil spirit to another, I’ll admit to you that he’d got us over a barrel on that one.

Once again, it’s time to change the subject.

Make fun of the Trinity. Ask him how three can be one, and one can be three.

Make sure you keep it at that simplistic level. Don’t let him ask himself if “one of” something can be “three of” something else. That won’t get you your contradiction.

And if that fails, dust off the old stone paradox. You know how it goes: Can God make a stone so heavy that he can’t lift it.

Yours truly,

Screwtape

Undersecretary to the Lower Deputy Archon
screwu@infernos.org

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666 Judecca St.
Circle Nine
City of Dis, Pandemonium 666-666
May 8, 2000

Dear Wormwood,

So he didn’t go for the stone paradox, eh? Said it was too anthropomorphic, did he?

Where did he learn a word like that, anyway? Here we’re quite literally doing our damnedest to dumb down the public school curriculum, but there’s always one who slips through the cracks and gets a decent education despite our best efforts. Was he home schooled or something?

Okay, try comparative mythology. Ask the Patient why he believes in Yahweh, but not in Hercules.

Yours truly,

Screwtape

Undersecretary to the Lower Deputy Archon
screwu@infernos.org

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666 Judecca St.
Circle Nine
City of Dis, Pandemonium 666-666
June 8, 2000

Dear Wormwood,

The Patient told himself that he’d believe in Hercules if he had the same evidence for Hercules as he had for The Enemy?

I’m afraid our strategy has been way too cerebral. We can’t win on the facts when the facts are stacked against us.

So go back to raw emotion. The tried-and-true three-hanky stratagem.

Bring up the subject of hell. Play on his emotions. Ask him how he can believe in a God who’d consign his kid brother to the everlasting bonfire.

Paint the picture in your best Dantean, Day-Glo colors.

And under no circumstances are you to let his thoughts wander to the question of how every homicidal maniac is someone’s son or brother.

Yours truly,

Screwtape

Undersecretary to the Lower Deputy Archon
screwu@infernos.org

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666 Judecca St.
Circle Nine
City of Dis, Pandemonium 666-666
July 19, 2000

Dear Wormwood,

Yes, I just confirmed your preliminary report. My contacts inform me that the Patient did, indeed, die in a car crash last night. His soul was seen ascending to heaven.

This is terrible news! You and I will have to go into hiding before we’re both taken into custody and dunked upside down in acid vats of holy water.

Yours truly,

Screwtape

Ex-Undersecretary to the Lower Deputy Archon