Dear Hatewad

Dear Hatewad,

I have been hearing of your recent efforts to strip your patient’s dogma. This only shows your ignorance. There is no use trying to convince a man who has been a Christian all his life to believe the Bible isn’t true or the that the trinity is illogical. He is too far gone in his illness, and his stark devotion to his beliefs unfortunately cannot be helped.

Remember, for us destroying things is very difficult, and creating them is impossible. But take heart; twisting them is easy. In your patient’s case, this is most easily done by over-complicating his convictions until they become irrational and distracting.

In other words, you must reverse your approach. Mature Christians spend their whole lives expanding their perception of the Enemy. Your job is to shrink it by piling on useless constraints. You must put the Enemy in a box—I don’t mean a box made of the biblical promises by which He defines himself, for that provides freedom and clarity (two things you must prevent at all costs). I mean of course a box made of random nonsense.

Let me explain in terms you can understand. Instead of trying to remove his faith, you must inflate it with as much dead weight as possible. Does he have a loyalty to a particular denomination? Does he believe one aught to wear a suit to church? Musical tastes? Full submersion or sprinkling? That’s my favorite, when Christians argue viciously over their symbols when they already agree on the thing they represent. It hardly matters what the extra beliefs are. In fact, the more trivial the better. Be sure to add a handful of his own idiosyncrasies to his religion as well. The more useless things he believes (or even useful ones he is entirely too serious about) the more ill-conceived witch-hunts you can send him on, and thus the less real battles he will fight in the mean time.

Basically, your job is to make him an extreme patriot of his own personal country. Soon enough he will war on his neighboring Christians, and thus rid his mind of everything important. It sounds harder than it is. Memorize this method. Help him construct arbitrary standards (based of course on himself) and then he will condemn everyone who does not conform to them. Whisper to him the subtle thought that Jesus is exactly like him, in every way: if he’s white, let him pray in front of pictures of white Jesus. If he’s tall, short, loud, quiet—let him think that is also what the Enemy is like. Not only will he have a bloated concept of his own righteousness, but it will cause him to worship and preach his own personality. Remember, if you cannot silence your patient, you can always make him into an innocuous noise.

With Malice,

Slothbile.