Screwtape Lost and Found - Unbelief is the Obscene Sin Demons and the Enemy Tolerate the Least

The Enemy it is said sees things as they are to Him, and Demons try to get their charges to see things as they should be for them. The battle for clear sight is a mental confabulation that is summarised in the word belief. The great thing for the Enemy and for Demons is their complicity when it comes to belief. It is a surprisingly happy arrangement. To outsiders it is a complicity they can’t understand. But who cares what they think! They are to be ignored, these outsiders. But nevertheless, shadowing belief, as night follows day, is unbelief, the enemy of the Enemy and of Demons. Unbelief is usually borne in two ways. There may have been no belief in the first place, or, after first believing and then doubting, there is the final and absolute refusal to believe. But either way, not believing in them is potentially big trouble to the Enemy and Demons. No speculation, no art, no existence. Luckily for them, it is apparent the majority of humans would like to believe in something, be it the Enemy, Demons, aliens, miracles and other unbelievables, by choice or through mindfilling, and many like to tell the world so. But there is a growing number who don’t and who tell no-one and these are the dangerous ones.

A task of the Enemy’s agents and of Demons is to watch for unbelievers, but they do it for different reasons. Should the world exist for unbelievers the Enemy’s agents would be unemployed and sad, and the Enemy’s grip on the human psyche is terminally weakened. Demons would need an identity makeover to remain relevant, should they as metaphors for the wayward human condition be replaced by rational thought. What favours the Enemy and Demons is the human need to simplify complexities by creating labels and clichés to describe them. Words like love, fate and luck attempt to explain the unexplainable while the word Demon covers a wide range of skewed behaviours. Out of the two the Enemy, the biggest word of them all to His agents and his lay believers, is the most vulnerable. Pure faith is the nectar for belief, and the word is syrup in the Enemy’s spokespersons. The Enemy’s faithful blinded say yes to everything; Demons and their subversive charges ask, are you sure? And because the composition of faith is similar to air, and air is not enough for life, faith words are strongly embellished with theological fancy before their consumption.

It is said that to be ignorant of the Enemy and His enemy Demons is freedom for unbelievers. And they are pro-actively ignorance of the Enemy’s truth. How could they! After all truth is the foundation of faith vehemently espoused by His earthly agents. And yet unbelievers still ignore them. Unbelievers won’t associate the Enemy with their life’s end although some do associate Demons with something, the imaginative ones anyway. Their views on the end to life are supported by a wilful ignorance that is tested by believers during their lifetime. But by death their unbelief is the unchallenged ascendant point of view. Their will ultimately assents to their truth, beyond the Enemy’s truth, and which is proper truth to them and answerable to none but themselves. They must be, according to the Enemy’s agents, possessed by an evil will. Demons heartily agree, for in this way they are one step ahead of the Enemy. Rebellion affronts the Enemy’s agents, these militant users of coercive words, mandated with over minds and with superior theology, and living in high places: but what they say of unbelievers merely ignites the fires of scepticism which is the knife to belief itself. Oh but beware Demons! Unbelief is difficult to reverse, which makes it a very obscene sin indeed.

Unbelieving belongs to the works of the mind-flesh paradigm which grows with youth before flat lining with age. In their reasoning for survival unbelievers want a good life as it arises out of self sufficiency and confidence, understanding there will be the inevitable setbacks. They are inspired by the imagination, since this faculty has a direct connection to the flesh; how the senses translate experience, and how the imagination stimulates it. Some who are outspoken on behalf of the Enemy hold that unbelievers are mischievous and erroneous in their ways. Unbelievers imagine they are sound and right when they stubbornly resist believing; and, by refusing to mend their pernicious and deadly doctrines, unbelievers react by unconsciously employing their apologists, comic Demons, to annoy the Enemy as much as possible.

Unbelievers however should beware of accusing believers of illness; however misguided and perverse unbelievers think believing is. Leave it to Demons to do the tempting and testing of believers! Belief is something defended with obstinate fervour each second of the believer’s day, because of what they seek and how anxious they are. Unbelievers should mind their opinions, and realise how critical belief is to many. But unbelievers must be vigilant. Their Demons will upset their ideas by having them believe in their own superiority. An ironic sin if ever there was one! It should be a good thing for the world that unbelievers remain respectful and quiet. Why should it matter to them that the Enemy’s sinners are at their most rowdy in empty, cavernous churches?

And yet there are the many prominent scholars, thinkers and scientists who, on behalf of rationalism, look to the conversion of meandering believers, whom they condemn after their rational argument and discourse has failed. If the believers they encounter remain stubborn the rationalists, giving up hope for conversions, look to the justification of their own, by dismissing believers and separating them from the rational. This is good Demon work. For is it not unexpected that the righteous should persuade and then turn one away to another? For example, when ordinary persuaders have the authority of the Enemy, they deliver their enemies for trial, and have them certified as sinners. They cut away from them the decayed parts of sinning minds, and expel the flesh like mangy sheep from the fold. These persuaders, preachers, revivalists etc fear unbelief. They fear the whole pastiche of belief might descend into irrationality, and the whole of their followers and their Demons might disintegrate, rot, and then die. This is how Demons have it both ways, while the Enemy is bound to just one.

A question believers might ask themselves is how far their beliefs should go before they reach their limits of sanity. How much does a believer really want to know? Ideally the Enemy and Demons as pure ideals could never decompose, be dismantled or deconstructed. Then all would be well. They would be as equally existent as not. Sadly the human imagination is unable to avoid first cause. Something is always backwardly before, which must bring the explorer of that something into the realms of infinity, and therefore possible madness. The concept of the Enemy and of Demons seem astonishingly vivid to a causatious mind. Thoughts of them nourish belief; the Enemy as the cause of goodness, and Demons for badness.

It is a fact there are many who unflinchingly testify to their beliefs, even for martyrdom. The Enemy has for its support mystics, the born again, and theologians; and they must not be questioned. Demons have for them possession, and the stigma of the scapegoat. Once veracity is accepted, belief in them assents absolute certainty. The authority motivating this belief must therefore be inhuman. Demon and Enemy truth are akin to truths naturally and unwittingly believed, like the weather. The Enemy and Demons, as mutual opposites, struggle over the rights to intuition, memory and imagination. But where does the reasoning behind this battle reside?

To counter unbelief, Demons lever free will to accept the unconscious as their home, while the Enemy attacks free will through whomever it speaks. Whichever way, through emotion, feeling and desire, the will waxes and wanes to the power of influential words. The election of the will to accept belief in its construct is inspired by conflict. Demons are in the unconscious from conception; the Enemy via the persuasions of His agent’s theological propaganda; and thus spark synapses, and thus goes the mind hither and thither.

Believers work to cause belief by directing minds to the evidence. As a simple example: little Sammy has told a lie, his parents found out and called the lie a sin, and little Sammy asked them why, and it’s because a little Demon had got in, because of nasty original sin, and little Sammy smiles to himself; because it was that little Demon which sucked him in. His parents always know and Sammy is keen to please them, and it’s off to the Schoolmen who’ll tell him the reasons why; because when Sammy doesn’t lie, that’s when he’s told his little Demon goodbye.

The distinctions between belief and unbelief are said by thinkers to be commonly confused. Anxious moments cause these confusions to persist, and when the Enemy and Demons are blended in the mix, neither is readily distinguished from the other. As it stands ordinary life depends upon beliefs to motivate and stimulate the imagination. From the simple notion that imagination is all in the head to the complexities of winds upon which migrating birds travel, to the motivations behind little Sammy’s first lie; no doubt something complex is going on.

Reconciliation is the adversary of complicity. If humans are to continue with Demons and the Enemy, let them find mutual benefits and commonality. For Demons it is important unbelievers do not dismiss them as easily as believers fear them. As long as there is fault Demons will be considered, even by hardcore unbelievers. Imagination is on the Demons side. Their depictions down the centuries have been inspired. Goat’s heads, lacerating tails, foul smells, the vocals on the song Cherub, business suits, and even, and on many an occasion, black clerical garb.

And believers fed up with being harried and judged by the Enemy’s fallible agents are seeking belief outside of dogma. They want to regard the Enemy in a different and enlightened way. If only believers could get together in an equal and neutral manner and speak of the ways they might bridge their differences. Their resentment toward old and stale authority is deep and bitter. The Church of course is the main culprit. Empowered believers, formerly mindfilled by the Enemy’s agents can deprive them the means of perverting others. Their Demons will be subverting such gatherings of course, but that is life, and the Enemy can’t have it any other way. Indeed Demons in both believers and unbelievers might themselves get together in a secluded sulphuric bathhouse, away from the Devil Himself and discuss how they might work closer together. Just a Demonic little thought.

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Ebook edition copyright B F Moloney 2014

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