My Dear Mogslopper,

The giddiness evident in your last email to me indicates you are either naive or are trying to test me. On the contrary I tell you: it does matter that your man belongs to the Church; it does not matter so much what church your man belongs to. The difference is immense. On the one hand, we wish for every man to be completely absorbed in himself. As he looks inward, not to examine himself but simply to see what it is he desires, he becomes smaller and more shriveled in his spirit. It is like the Ouraborous--the snake that eats its own tail: he can be as greedy or dainty as you please, he will still consume himself eventually. Now the truly lusty man will gobble himself up in chasing after pleasure. Even though he will eventually reach our Father's House if all goes according to plan, these fleshly lusts are not enjoyable for us. They are base, yes. They are strong Lusts, yes. But they were put there by the Enemy to serve some purpose. It is only through our twisting that they take on the fruitful significance in our patients' lives that we long for. But the miserable brutes still gain pleasure out of the Lusts and any Tempter will tell you that is laborious to watch for a Spirit. On the other hand, we want the man (as I've indicated before) to look outward continually, sincerely believing he is being truthful while simultaneously producing nothing but lies, to be sincerely in love with the ideal of truth and completely incapable of stooping to produce an honest statement. This is but one way to move your man in two directions at once. Eventually, you will find this divided human's friends leave him. His business associates distrust and avoid him. He becomes increasingly isolated and therefore even easier to tempt. It is a downward spiral of hypocrisy that warms the hearts (and stomachs) of devils Low and Lower. At the same time, his outward focus has been so honed by you, his Tempter, that he is aware of every minute inconsistency, injustice, weakness, foible, etc. in his neighbor. Again, you want him to desire to love his neighbor as himself so that he superficially speaks of love and neighborliness without initiating any lasting, internal or external change. So how does this apply to the Churchman? Above I mentioned that the type of church your patient attends is not important. I do not want to over-state my case, there are churches that only have the facade of Christian ritual pasted over an essentially homogenized bit of respectable, self-congratulatory acquisition (or even naked avarice), packaged in numbing sermonizing and hymnody. This, I think I can safely say, is nearly as good as not having a human be in the Church at all. But in this day and age, these churches are generally confined to the under-educated, under-employed areas of the United States they call, pejoratively I might add, the "Bible Belt." Your man is just outside of this region, in the "urbane area"--locals where our Methods have become entrenched in society so as to be inseparable. If your patient attends a church in these areas, now patronizingly hostile to churches in general, beware. You may have permitted him to stumble in to a veritable hotbed of gentleness, self-control, compassion, and the rest of that lot. In either case, you should avoid having him view this thing they call Worship or the Service or the Message or the Program as a time of instruction and molding by the Enemy. In the best case scenario, your patient spends one hour upon the grist mill of the Church a year (or at most once a month). The entire time, you should drive his attention toward the woman with the nasally voice, the way in which the music is ever so slightly off , or, if he is an especially inward-examining twit, the way he feels like not quite enough was accomplished in the hour and he left feeling dissatisfied. Your patient should never put together the fact, so obvious to us, that this hour is just a formal expression of how the Enemy would like him to be living anyway. If he was as truly internally and externally as quiet and reflective, self-controlled and kind the rest of the week or month or year as he is over this hour, we would be undone. Make him sense the ridiculous or irritating or unseemly or unacademic or non-progressive or vaguely unsatisfying nature of that one hour and let your patient assume it is the fault of the others in his church--the clergy or the laity or, better, the whole preposterous Religion. Maybe with years of training, he will believe that, as hypocritical and silly as the Enemy's Church is, Its Founder likewise must be cosmically undesirable. You see in his great Love for the vermin, the Enemy wants your man to be in a position of learning initiated or refreshed during that one hour that your patient then carries with him throughout the intervening days. Supposedly, a churchgoer will be learning to love as a reflection of how the Enemy loves. Your patient should believe, however, that he is a competent critic of his fellow churchgoers, analyzing the surface nuances of language and appearance. A well-Trained patient would not be concerned about learning to become more loving. If it were up to him, he might for instance change a thing or two about the whole "Love your neighbor as yourself" to make it a bit less demanding. Not because he recognizes his own shortcomings mind you, but because his neighbors are just so damned unreasonable or poorly dressed that they are all, to a person, unlovely and unlovable. Certainly, he can have loving feelings toward those outside of his tiny new "family of saints" as much as he wants--as long as they remain at a distance that permits only superficial relationships. The patient's inability to love his nearer neighbors, his Christian neighbors, will make it nearly impossible for him to go beyond milk-and-water feelings toward anyone he truly gets to know. The really difficult commands of the Enemy--the one where He commands his Followers to love their enemies as they want to be loved--will be right out the window in practical life (though he may assent to it in his fantasy). And it is by this style of temptation that your patient survives membership in the Church unscathed. It goes without saying that he should never be allowed, despite the Enemy's strategies in the opposite direction, to view himself the way that we do: an eminently Significant Creature that has fallen and cannot regain his feet on his own. If he becomes dependent on the Enemy without becoming proud about his dependency (an act of internal Rebellion, you can be sure), then, Mogslopper, you can count your patient lost to us. But for now: constancy, Mogslopper! Get your man to become a connoisseur of church gatherings, never committing himself deeply to any of the Churchpeople. He can go inside the building and watch the primitive rituals and sing the horrid songs all he wants as long as he remains disconnected from the people. That will keep him safely oriented toward a long and...flavorful...future Downhere. Ever Willing to Advise, Your Uncle