Contents
Preamble
Post 1
Post 2
Post 3
Post 4
Post 5
Post 6
Post 7
Note
These documents have been slightly updated in terms of format from the original November 2000 posts, as part of an overall site redesign. Interpolations after the original postings are restricted to footnotes, and identified as such. Updated versions posted July 2002.
The Screwtape Posts
Post 7 — November 30, 2000
Seventh post. As my foil was no longer even attempting to give me anything of substance to which to respond, it's really just a footnote. (This annotation added after original posting.)
Original post here.
WitchHunter:
Temper, temper. Can I assume from your final refusal even to address any part of the argument now that you'd really like to walk away?
You know it doesn't work that way, don't you? I've got a few more dozen pages in mind you might like to read. Long theory on the propagation of modern mystery religions. I've got books and everything.
You'll enjoy it. You can complain that I'm obsessed about this too. Do join me.
But for now, I'll accept your utter inability even to face (let alone refute) the charges I've levelled as tacit admission you know how poorly you've fared here. I've had more graceful concession speeches, but I guess this will have to do.
So in the spirit of the Inquisition, your guilt is now declared. You are hereby sentenced to a shallow, meaningless intellectual life, in which, for the rest of your existence, ye shall stand with your head cropped closely, on the street corners, in eternal, enthusiastic repetition of the phrase "Empty your mind of all rational thought. I did. Look where it got me."
Ye shall cease to discuss anything that can be treated with the tools of rationality. Ye shall pass off all questions to an imagined, unremarkable psychic experience half-remembered, half-imagined, from years ago, as though, for some reason, this actually makes sense. Ye shall pursue persons of wisdom in the public places, and annoy them with your pat, semaphoric answers to what ye believe to be all of life's questions, even though they haven't asked. Ye shall entertain no thought that could not be written on a postcard. Your discourse with all shall be empty of all reflection. Ye shall reject all evidence of your eyes, all semblances of rational thought, and shall purge yourself of your critical faculties — thereby accepting the reduction of your entire function to that of a hollow vessel, repeating this one phrase, carrying this one viral meme1; its repetition and propagation shall become your entire raison d'etre. Ye shall mangle and distort all logical arguments longer than four words. Ye shall entertain no semblance of intellectual self-respect. Ye shall sing vacuous, grating, meaningless modern hymns with boring, conventional harmonies and syrupy lyrics, in major keys, in all the public places. Ye shall smile vacantly, so that the world can see your tonsils. Ye shall paper your car in bumper stickers.
Ye shall convince yourself you're happy about it.
Oh.
Wait.
Not a lot of point to this, in your case, is there?
Ah well. You are so commanded anyway. I'm a stickler for the letter of the law.
As to your difficulty with my verbiage, I can't really help you there. Actually, this evening, I'm working on collecting my posts in response to you into a properly indexed subsite off my main one. I'll let you know when it's done. I'm also planning colourful new graphics.
And do me a favour, oh scary one. As previously. Jes' drop your absurd superstitions about witches, retract it publicly, and I'll happily commute the sentence.
Thus endeth the lesson.
— 30 November, 2000 / AJM
1 See Dawkins, Richard, The Selfish Gene. WitchHunter, if you do get around to reading this, you might check out the chapter on the meme as a replicating unit in human culture, and think it over, in terms of the propagation of your particular variant of faith.
