By David Kilby
This post is inspired in part by C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters.
Deep in the depths of my junk folder, I discovered an email from someone outside our world, but also very much in it. I usually delete all emails in my junk folder, but I was looking for one a long lost friend sent me quite a while ago, and I couldn't find it anywhere else. Little did I know that my last-hope search would lead me to an email from a place where all hope is abandoned. As I read it, I learned that it was a forwarded message from someone who personified the seven deadly sins, a demon named Eggslap.
As I opened it (and to this moment I wonder if I should have), I read:
Subject: Introducing Eggslap, your new master
Despised minions,
This is your most honorable director of the Web of Deception, Slubgrip, writing to you. Like it or not, I am abandoning this disappointing station and handing over my duties to an even more slippery snake. His name is Eggslap, which is an acronym for our most successful strategies for deceiving our audience. These strategies, as you should know, are: envy, gluttony, greed, sloth, lust, anger, and—the greatest of all—pride.’ Eggslap has contrived the most phenomenal of all plans to date, masterfully combining all seven of these strategies into one killer recipe and distributing the recipe through various media channels. In a word, the recipe is sick. He sends you all this message:
Forwarded message:
“Yes, this is Egglslap. I'm perturbed to meet you, and I have no interest in this pathetic position, but I endure it just to see the demise of more souls. And, it’s come to my attention that my custom recipe for disaster has reached the ears of many demons, who now wish to use it themselves. So be it. I only condescended to the rancid swamps of your email thread to avoid people using the recipe in the wrong way.
The goal of this recipe is to bring death of body and soul, but primarily of soul. We can easily get to the soul through the body, especially by injecting excessive carnal pleasures into it, causing spiritual numbness. This numbness will leave souls indifferent to the effects of my famous recipe. Complacency may seem innocuous to the average soul, but it is the key ingredient in this whole campaign, as you will see.
Here, in detail, is how we ought to administer this recipe to the masses. The most preferable channels for distributing it should be the culture’s media outlets, and it should be served on one of their various kinds of screens. As you well know, they are an ideal breeding ground for deceptive ideas. Media provides a great opportunity for us to create an alternate reality for our audience, one that is not so bound by the laws of the enemy’s first creation.
The propagation of my recipe innately distracts our audience from meaning and purpose in life, especially the meaning and purpose given to humans by that one religion I must not name. We shall perform this act of distraction by focusing on vain ambitions first and then moving onto carnal passions.
As you may see, this strategy is already shaping up to be unique since most of our strategies in the past did it the other way around, starting with the physical pleasures and then moving onto the temptations of the mind like honor and success. I’ve found that starting with physical enticement is not as effective as it used to be, since so many physical pleasures are so easily obtained today. Rather, these days, a dash of envy and greed with a pride base does the trick more often than not, since these vices sort of butter up souls so they are more accepting of carnal indulgences. I’ve seen many a human abstain wildly from eating excessively in his younger years in pursuit of some vain goal. Then, only once the goal was either obtained or perceivably unattainable, could I get him to succumb to late-night fast-food meals and binging his favorite show.
Even when not starting with them, it’s important to keep titillating carnal desires, because memories are an ingenious way to get those fires of desire burning. Too much emphasis in this area, of course, has adverse effects. Be content with a sprinkling of enticing ads here and there so as to keep the embers hot, but no more.
Remember that Pride Base
Now we get to the central and most effective ingredient: pride. I am not so concerned about personal pride, for this has effects on only individuals and the people in their lives. I am more interested in the work of our predecessors. They invented a pride in humanity that has grown so potent that it can now replace God in many of the places on earth where he dwells, or once dwelt. This kind of pride has a very distinct flavor to it, so it needs to be mitigated by other things. Even some of the more respectable philosophies are fair game here. Use deism, relativism, and of course secular humanism to mitigate the flavor. When done right, you will be able to replace God with an anthropocentric communal consciousness among even the sincerest God-believers. Since these believers and their religion are so often influential in their respective societies, this aspect of my plan has the potential to spread its seeds far and wide.
We’ve already seen it spreading in recent decades. It has made humanity put itself at the center of their own lives, even quite literally in some places; observe how the TV is often a centerpiece of the house. This new human-centered religion will eventually utterly replace the one I will not name, if we keep distributing my recipe effectively.
If souls must have some kind of deeper spiritual nourishment from church, we have delightful supplements for that. These alternatives ensure that the soul stays in the spiritual sick bay for the duration of their time on the Barque of Peter. The supplements are filled with soft encouragements that make the person feel better about themselves. So long as we can keep them focused on themselves and their spiritual plight, we can stonewall their desire to die to themselves, thereby preventing them from thinking of the Enemy and other people.
What a detrimental fate that would be for us. I dread the thought of it. Our Enemy and his son are very clever. They took one of our greatest weapons, death and the fear of it, flipped it on its head so as to use it to their advantage. I will forever rue them for that. We must avoid giving any credence to this paradox, but it wreaks so strongly of truth that the best strategy—as I’ve been saying—is to simply distract humans from the realities of the spiritual life altogether. And that is why it is imperative to build up this alternate reality through our media channels.
When using pride, focus on the youth often, for none are more susceptible to the lies that make pride prevalent in the heart. The promises of youth make young people think anything is possible, therefore in their mind all the mistakes of humanity’s past could have been easily avoided with their simplistic solutions: “If we just (insert flawed plan here) we can make the world so much better.” We want to encourage this foolishness. We have successfully led many societies to a sure path of destruction by simply infecting the youth with ideas that could never work in society, but that they thought could work in their prideful ignorance.
This tactic can only prevail if you imbue the culture with an infatuation with things that are new, modern, and young. Teach them to idolize young celebrities and to hold onto their youth as much as they can through artificial means. Make old age look as deplorable as possible. Keep them away from realizing the happy blessings of the twilight years. Make them think old age is nothing but a lethargic waiting period before leaving the only place they’ve ever known. This will make them not only hate their human state, but also cause them to forget their true home. As always, all the new forms of media are delightful tools for achieving these ends.
The New Storytellers and Death of Virtue
That bothersome human desire for touching stories is bound to rear its head again and again. My recipe can neutralize this passion, though. Those old-fashion storytellers were onto us, accurately identifying the traps of our deadly sins. But never mind them now, for—thanks to my recipe—the new storytellers have replaced the old quite thoroughly so no one gives strong consideration to the stories from humanity’s childish past.
If someone from your audience does give credence to the old stories, make sure you have a medley of modern offerings to counteract his foolhardy attempt at a renaissance. Vestiges of that simpler time must be suppressed, for they are the germs of legends, and legends encourage humans to be more than the vermin they are. Legends inspire the proliferous virus of virtue, so we must popularize the alternatives. If our audience’s craving for pure virtuous stories must be satiated, make sure what you offer them is either depicting heroes with such superhuman abilities that no human can match them, or offer a refurbished version of an original tale, minimizing the importance of virtue in your retelling of it (and maybe even sprinkle in some favorable vice).
There are a few spices I’ve added into the mix that add duplicitous flavor to my recipe. These spices are the words “modern”, “science”, and “progress”. “Modern” is quite universally accepted as a sure stamp of approval for whatever we desire. Slap it on whatever you can. Make every story that crosses a soul’s newsfeed emphasize its importance. Focusing on the imperativeness of being “modern” will distract people from things and concepts that can actually lead them directly to God: like truth, goodness, and beauty. Ugh! I hate those words. That’s why I worked hard to make them seem relative. “Modern” on the other hand, must feel absolute, supreme, and definitive in its usage.
An akin word, “progress”, and its brother, “moving forward” are also very valuable. (For some reason, I’ve found, humans love using the latter in email correspondences, ironically. Perhaps it makes them feel like they’re getting things done.)
Another word or phrase powerful in its skullduggery is “science” or “scientifically proven”. I’ve also used these quite liberally. Use “science” or “scientifically proven” in whatever you want to promote, and you will quell our audience’s criticism of that thing, whatever it is. They will cower at the mere thought of being labeled “uneducated” or “unenlightened” for going against the “science” supported by the accredited and acclaimed scientists of the day. Oh, how I enjoy the liberal use of these words.
Humans still think their worldly titles and recognitions have some merit; and they’ll readily accept them over truth and goodness any day. Gone are the days when scientists cared about truth, and even farther gone are the days when scientists saw the connections between truth and goodness—in general of course, for there will always be those flies in the chardonnay of our white lies. Therefore, we must continue to propagate these lies by using our esteemed scientists. Garnish them with titles and awards galore. By all means, promote the idea of “the scientific community”, so bandwagon appeals win the scientific arguments. Make it so a scientist risks his career and reputation if he goes against this community.
Journalism was our next conquest in our campaign to bring all forms of storytelling to our cause. It is so convenient how one vice leads to another, how one bleeds into another. And if it bleeds, it leads. Mindless binging, scrolling, and clicking leads to sloth on the couch, which leads to lustful thoughts as one pathetic soul after another falls into our traps. Their cell phones might as well be cold and dark cells, with bars of power and all. Their lust leads to bad relationships and anger, which leads to a sense of helplessness and more sloth. Then envy toward others slips in as they see their life passing by, and they want everything their neighbor has. Another bowl of ice cream promises to ease all that pain, until they read the next shocking headline that makes them angry at the world. A myopic social media post filled with that anger then just stirs the pot and makes my recipe even more effective.
As our pathetic soul continues down this path of despondence, self-pity overwhelms him Another day passes by, and his electronic devices subliminally perpetuate the misery with inevitable headlines, sound bites, talking heads and talking points. It was all part of my plan from the beginning, you see? His complacency is making his soul rot like an old socket. There is no need to extrapolate the effectiveness of all the ingredients further. Once the human is immersed in this fake world of our design, all the ingredients will exponentially complement each other from this point on.
Since the dawn of time we have moved in the dark, in secrecy, in the subtleties of life, slithering through trees, disguising ourselves in idols. With my recipe, there’s no need to operate in this way. We don't need to prowl about the world, like lions in the underbrush, seeking the ruin of souls. Make everything nice, cozy, and easy, and souls will slip right into your hands. We've been hiding in the shadows for too long. Humanity’s own devices have given us all the tools we’ll ever need to fabricate a religion of the masses that will shine so bright it will blind them into oblivious complacency, ensuring that they never turn to the true Light that has blinded us just as it hardened the heart of Pharaoh.
Spitefully, Eggslap”
I closed my email app, bewildered by what I read. It all made sense, even though I didn't want to admit it. I walked away from my desk and stepped outside, taking a deep breath, filling my lungs with the fresh air of the real world God gave us, praying for the faith to hold onto the truth, goodness, and beauty that preceded all man-made things.
Dear Lord, save us from ourselves. Come fill the breach that has allowed legions of demons to enter our lives and our homes. In Jesus' name. Amen.
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