Screwtape’s Guide to Conditional Repentance

My dear Wormwood,

You seem to be reveling in your recent successes with your patient. Do not be deceived! Absurd behaviour, whilst offering us some merriment, can present a danger. The patient may, in an unguarded moment of introspection, catch sight of the inconsistencies we are currently celebrating. Plus, the more absurd the behaviour, the more likely it is that certain acquaintances of the patient will attempt conversations with the Enemy on his behalf. Believe me! You do not want that kind of attention.

So, while it may be nowhere near as amusing, it is far better to encourage bland and quiet contradictions. Remember: at the end of the day, all that matters is whether you have kept their tails out of the Enemy camp or not.

Alas, I fear some introspection has already taken place in this department, and therefore the possibility of some commitment to change looms ahead. If so, it is your responsibility to manage this change. If repentance is on the agenda, then you must ensure it adheres to our specification.

For starters, encourage the patient to repent subject to certain conditions being met. Insisting that others recant is the most common approach, but ANY condition will suffice to render the act pleasantly inert and still bestow the patient with pride in their ability to make allowances for their lessers.

It is possible for them to seek forgiveness for their behaviour and, in the same breath, offer a valid reason for it. Yes, I know it sounds absurd, but it is really just a charmingly quaint custom of theirs. What you want is something along the lines of:

“I’m sorry for what I did. I didn’t realize your mental capacity was unequipped to handle my harmless intellectualisms.”
I trust you get the idea.

It is important that they see the errors of others as a shocking offence (as if sin were not common practice amongst them—hehe), and that they be driven by a sense of spiritual justice to reciprocate when so offended. They must divide sin into two categories:

1. Major sins – the ones others commit against them
2. Minor sins – the ones they commit against others

This renders repentance more an act of protocol than of anything more detrimental.

And yes, let them apply their intelligence to this game, inasmuch as it reckons on rationalising beyond the childish tenets of their gospel to more meaty practicalities that keep them nice and busy and out of the Enemy’s clutches. The Enemy has provided them with something simple to believe yet impossible to achieve. You must provide something difficult to believe and slightly less difficult to achieve. As long as that something has them acting independently, your work is more or less done. This also greatly increases their capacity to understand themselves and misunderstand others.

Finally, with regard to your request to start up an independent forum to discuss alternative and new-age tactics for manipulating these vermin, I would have thought it plainly obvious that whilst we are obliged to encourage such divisive activity in our charges, we need hardly seek such divisions amongst ourselves. Please try to stick to first principles. Remember: the road most travelled. Do NOT force my hand on this issue.

Your affectionate uncle,
SCREWTAPE

(With sincerest tongue-in-cheek apologies to C.S. Lewis)

Harry Handelbar

Harry is a recovering satirist, part-time philosopher, and metadata tinkerer. His archive spans two decades of metaphysical mischief, theological punchlines, and poetic nonsense. He believes in satire’s transformative power, the elegance of expressive metadata, and recursion—once writing a poem that never ended and a script that crashed browsers.