Sunday, December 8, 2013

The Slubgob Correspondences: Letter VII

My Dear Screwtape,
It seems you are making excellent progress with your band of misfits and our stocks are quite high…for now. But like any other organization, our delight is tempered by higher expectations.  The better your performance, the more our expectations grow.  There are no plateaus in Hell.
In line with this thinking, I will advise you on your question of abortion. It is a topic which causes tremendous excitement down here. It does so because it is one of the few areas where almost all roads lead here. It is very easy for us to capture any human who possesses a strong opinion of the matter one way or another. So we do well pulling these strings on His puppets.
First, let us consider those against the procedure. They view it as murder and therefore see it as wrong and wish to abolish it. Within any one of these groups there is a leader – one who claims to infallibly know the will of our Enemy and wishes to spend eternity with Him. Here, we take a line from scripture: Strike the shepherd and the sheep will be disbursed! Find his weak spot and press it. Our colleagues in the IT (Individual Temptation) department can help immensely with this. They will be interested in getting that individual down here, and your team must be interested in making such a journey as public as possible so we can grab his followers like lemmings off a cliff. I am copying Dungwart on this correspondence so he is aware of what we’re attempting and can assist accordingly.
Secondly, for those considering the option we must take careful stock of where they are situated on our journey. If we have them mostly well-in-hand, it might do us better to steer them away from the procedure and toward having and keeping the child. Humans who are already on their way here – those who have succumbed and whose hearts have already been sufficiently hardened – would give us the extra benefit of passing this stubborn selfishness onto their offspring with little effort on our part.
Make available to them messages which talk of how having a child makes them feel. Not real love mind you, but that wretched warmth they get when being the object of another’s affection. I know, I know – it’s a revolting thought, but remember we’re interested in the long game here. This reinforces in the mind of the subject that the child’s sole purpose is to please the mother. Not in any permanent sense, of course, but in the temporary moments of a baby’s cuteness. Therefore, when the child is not being cute – i.e. when it requires something of its parents – it is not fulfilling its obligation and is to be punished for being bad. That’s our hook, my friend. The child is to be no more than an object of entertainment. These individuals often know this routine well from experiencing similar punishment from their own parents. Abuse is a most effective tactic.
But before you intend to proceed along this route, make sure their heart is sufficiently hardened. The symptoms of such resoluteness usually include some kind of addiction – drugs or alcohol, it doesn’t matter. What you must avoid are any feelings of legitimate guilt a parent may feel from treating their child poorly. Shame, on the other hand is fine, let them believe they are a bad parent and that they can never be a good one. Our daytime talk shows do wonders for encouraging this. Pride is better – “I’m this way because I love my kids and I’m better than those fools on TV.” If they can justify their abuse this way, we’ve really hit the jackpot.
The third group, and one of the hardest to hold on to, are those that have actually terminated a pregnancy. The fact that someone having and keeping their offspring yields longer term benefits for us, is certainly counterintuitive but true nevertheless. Because of the Enemy’s abominable capability for forgiveness, one who has had an abortion may always be welcomed back into His graces with a sufficient degree of guilt and faith in His eternal benevolence. They are lost to us at this point unless we can make them proud and turn them into those types who protest and insult those whom they resembled just a brief time ago.
The aim in these circumstances is to encourage their memory to dwell on uncivil confrontations between them and the so-called pro-life camp. Because the pro-lifers claim to represent the Enemy, those who ultimately decide on an abortion are inclined to think: “If God chooses these jerks to represent Him, I want no part of Him.” This puts the individual well on our path though it requires effort to keep them there. If they ultimately decide against abortion, we convert them to the rabid pro-life camp where they will make their way to us by encouraging others to reject the God they claim to represent. Their intentions may be otherwise but that matters little to us.
The ultimate victory is encouraging the procedure because they feel ashamed of their actions and wish to hide what they did. This causes a rift between them and the loved ones from whom they hide their torment. Torment is something humans are incapable of handling alone and if used properly leads to suicide which is the ultimate act of despair and, therefore, an express ticket to Our Father Below. If it doesn’t lead to torment directly, it leads to indifference, which leads to repetitions of the same battle and the more battles we win, the more ground the Enemy loses. Then, it becomes simply a matter of time.
So, to summarize: The consciousness of the abortion conundrum among the humans by itself lends us tremendous advantage. The three main types: 1) The rabid pro-lifer, 2) The abusive mother, and 3) The unfazed serial abortion patient, all present advantageous opportunities to achieve our goals. There are only two narrow yet strong bridges which the Enemy has managed to keep for those in this camp: 1) The path of humble penitence for the sin, and 2) The strength He so readily provides to those who carry their children to term only to make the willful and disciplined decision to give it up to someone else capable and desirous of raising children.
If you can keep them out of these last two areas, our success will be great.
                                  Your Merciful Master,  
                                      Slubgob


Cc: Dungwart, Senior VP of Operations for Individual Temptation and Soul Procurement

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