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S a t i r e
The Devil in Cyberspace
By Mark P. Shea
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MY DEAR SLIMEMOLD: I am gratified at your latest report concerning the spectacle of fratricidal malice among the patients who participate in the Christian e-mail list we are monitoring.
I see that Pusfang has got one of the hairless bipeds into that delightful state where it can set out to attack a fellow human's faith in Eucharist with bad satirical poetry (coated in a veneer of greasy humor) and then take offense when the attack is seen for what it is and objected to! Excellent!
I must remind Pusfang, in my next communiqué‚ to be sure to play on the creature's thwarted will to bully and abuse by teaching it to say that it has a "sense of humor," whereas all around it are simply trembling nerves of sensitivity. Pusfang must keep far from the creature's mind any idea that charity would forbear laughing at any gift offered to the Enemy, even one it thinks objectively absurd.
I am also gleeful to see that Suckspew has the female human conducting her continuing campaign to attack, misrepresent, dismiss, and dominate the other creatures on the list, utterly heedless of the many requests for charity, common sense, and factual backing for its many accusations against its fellow Catholic, Masonic, Mormon, and Jehovah's Witness humans (among others).
Much of what this patient writes is delightfully ignorant of its subject (ranging from claims that Constantine's building programs "paganized the Church" to third-hand assertions about Mormons and Masons based on badly researched books, to assertions that the phrase "what goes around comes around" is proof of a disputant's alleged New Age faith in reincarnation).
As you can see, the creature's cocksureness must expand to fill the void created by the distance between its dogmatic opinions and the sheer factual ignorance of the many, many subjects it holds forth on. The benefits of this are splendid, since, in addition to being unjust to Catholics and ignorant of the Enemy's teaching, the creature also creates the impression among those around her that Masonic, Mormon, and Jehovah's Witness theology is also "basically the same thing" as Catholic belief.
Ignorant criticism begets uncritical acceptance-a lovely phenomenon which the Research Department has beautifully exploited in transforming the hard-core atheistic hatred of the spiritual of the early twentieth century secular elite into the mindless and mushy acceptance of New Age pantheism of the late twentieth-century elite.
I also see that Suckspew has, in tandem with your fellow tempters on the list, created an artistically polarized atmosphere in which any attempt to correct even minor misunderstandings is regarded by the female human as defiance of God's Word, while nearly every utterance of the female patient is now regarded by its fellows as further reason to utterly reject the creature.
All this is to the good and brings me to you, Slimemold.
You have been assigned to the Catholic patient on the list. Hitherto, you have been successful at whipping the patient's sense of resentment at these other patients' abuses of his faith into a delightfully foamy frenzy that tastes delicious as a chaser for fricasseed Pharisee and Modernist mousse.
However, the wretched creature has apparently been seeking counsel and even the revolting and debasing sacrament of confession as a result of your miserable failure to conceal your hand at work on him. As a result, quite without the creature's earning it and with a long train of sin as its only plea before the Enemy, the creature has been granted the noxious cloud of grace which the Enemy exhales upon such pathetic vermin. Indeed, it has actually been attempting a change in its behavior.
You must put a stop to this!
A direct attack is, for the present, exceedingly difficult. The creature now not only knows, but is seriously attempting to obey, the command to turn the other cheek at attacks it perceives as directed at it. Worse still, it is attempting to make something redemptive out of this situation by writing clever notes to the list in my voice! It dares to make fun of me!
Given this, you must therefore direct your attacks at those hairless bipeds it loves. The simmering habit of resentment which it is attempting to break is much easier for the creature to justify if it can be direct toward the "defense" of those it imagines it is "protecting" by its anger and resentment. What you want is to get the creature into a state of soul where it will say, "I'm not angry at those who hate me, but I'll be damned if I let those people beat up my fellow Catholics."
Yes, indeed! Play your man correctly, and he will be damned! But to do so you must keep from the creature the awareness that, if it is to love its neighbor as itself, it must be willing to forgive its neighbor's enemies as it would forgive its own. Let it instead congratulate itself on "caring for others" as it indulges its anger and pride.
Let it forget that charity is the source and goal of all that it is to do, and let it imagine that something else is the point of being a Christian. And especially, keep the creature from ever forgetting the voice of Pusfang and Suckspew speaking through their patients, while simultaneously putting from its mind the many times you and I have made a veritable megaphone of its capacious mouth. Do not let him consider that, however muddled, both the patients mentioned above really seem to believe and therefore may yet be cured of their ignorance, arrogance, and bullying by the Enemy.
And to you I say, as I say to the rest of the tempters assigned to this list and all Christian lists, remember the motto: In essential things, confusion; in doubtful things, dogmatism; in all things, malice and unforgiveness.
I remain your affectionate uncle,
Corkscrew
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