Spiritual Data: The Devil’s Tricks

The initial extraction is from C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters.

Background

Before he shows his hand, the devil uses many techniques to redirect and distract our focus.

Honestly, if it weren’t so evil, it’d be truly fascinating how creative he gets!

You can expand this concept even further by internalizing and applying everything humanity normally does to distort image.

The Devil’s Purpose

Generally, spiritual things travel at the speed of thought. While the Satan works constantly to prevent us from sharing our ideas with others, this has come to a fever pitch with how much our technology magnifies information.

Since the battle is over the mind, and information is the vehicle for how we understand, the devil and demons work tirelessly to warp it.

The devil’s entire purpose is to create a constantly fearful, anxious, bewildered, unsettled person who reacts before thinking.

New Christians are the easiest targets for the devil because they still hold on to many world-focused habits and routines.

  • New believers are more easily deterred by distractions from other believers, mostly from how their expectations won’t meet reality.
  • Thus, demons work very hard to keep our expectations unreasonably high about the Church. This gives room for feelings to overtake convictions.
  • Also, new believers often have plenty of conceit to prevent them genuinely asking if they’re morally justified in condemning other believers.

Demonic distortion comes through a few simple approaches:

  1. Focus on adverse states of mind, such as fear or lust, while ignoring the good states of mind, such as joy or love.
  2. Redirect believers’ attention to things they think matters, but doesn’t.
  3. Disconnect ideas from one another and distract people as long as possible to become unaware of their thoughts and need for God’s healing.

Tricks Against Truth

Arguments against the truth aren’t nearly as destructive as pleasant-sounding jargon:

  • The aim is to make sins feel that they’re not as bad as God sees them.
  • Watch for inspiring words like “bold”, “modern”, “progressive”, “social justice”, and most of what the Left claims.
  • Stay attentive to socially acceptable actions that are legitimately sinful, especially if it’s shameful to indicate that they’re sin.

By isolating each generation from previous generations through rebellion, the devil can avoid wisdom from previous generations seeping into youths’ understanding:

  • The natural product of this is that they have to relearn everything the previous generation had to learn.
  • Plus, without the context from prior generations, the person will be left endlessly wondering about the context or condemning their predecessors without considering motives or understanding beyond their own preconceived notions.

Tricks Against Devotion

The devil invalidates prayer by shifting it from the physical submission of mind and body into a general feeling:

  • We often think the devil is making us connect things, when in reality he’s working hard to disconnect them.
  • By directing our attention to conjuring a feeling instead of actually doing anything, we can make habits of doing absolutely nothing while thinking we’re being spiritually productive.
  • e.g., trying to feel forgiven instead of asking for forgiveness.
  • A more subtle version is to redirect attention away from the eternal, all-reaching God into a fabricated image in our minds of God.
  • Another approach is to train us into thinking that our prayers for daily needs are less spiritual than vague prayers for supposedly spiritual things. This can extend to our prayers for others’ needs as well, rendering our prayers relatively useless.
  • Plus, if we pray for vague things, God won’t grant them. Then, if the devil makes us misremember what we prayed, we can think He’s not answering our prayers.
  • The Satan will also magnify the effort God will need to change things. While God designed the universe where it’s a relatively easy effort to tweak something to answer our prayers, we often imagine He has to go through a gargantuan effort to answer any of our problems.

While God is more concerned about what we decide and do, the Satan redirects us to thinking about what will happen to us:

  • More uncertainties creates more opportunities for anxiety and fear of the future.
  • If possible, when we’re praying, demons will direct all our focus to the worst possible futures for us. That way, we focus on all the worst-case scenarios (which are impossible to accept all at once) and ignore accepting merely the current hardship as it is.
  • We can often engage in various types of media (e.g., movies, video games, book) that permit us to explore moral decisions without any outward consequences. Thus, we can use technology to be as lawless as we want while excusing it as “not real”.
  • Further, by abstracting humanity into sub-human monsters inside stories, the devil can further blur the line about morality (e.g., zombies, vampires).

Moral decay is a slow fade, so the Satan keeps us unaware for as long as possible by telling us that it’s always unimportant and easily reversible. The smallest habitual sins can work more effectively than large, decisive ones to send people to hell:

  1. He’ll use consistent church attendance and good lifestyle decisions to shift attention away from those tiny sins.
  2. Since backsliding creates unease, it’d normally push someone to full-blown repentance. So, he directs it toward reluctance about God and spiritual things.
  3. Eventually, enough unease can inspire a dislike of religious duties like Bible study or prayer, including dreading it beforehand and promptly forgetting it afterward.
  4. If this becomes a habit, that person will try to avoid direct contact with God, even while praying.
  5. From there, nothing will give that person pleasure. They’ll spend countless hours doing unimportant, unfulfilling tasks, which can waste away some of the most powerful years of their life.

This world isn’t our home, and we as believers have an eternal place set aside for us. If the devil can, he tries to keep us alive until the dull monotony of daily life and steady moral decay of living on this earth take away our desire to die for Jesus:

  • As we gain more reputation, prosperity, experiences, and vices, we can grow quite comfortable living here.
  • More time in this life gives more chances for the devil to attack our souls.

Tricks Against “Now”

It’s healthy to focus on the present state and the very near future, so the Satan can make us anxious about the “big picture” across months or decades:

  • There’s no spiritual benefit to the next 50 years, since the only thing that exists is “now”, a string of future versions of “now”, and our memory of past “now”. Thus, God wants us to always live in “now”, with focus on moral actions that God can bless in the future.
  • So, the devil tries to make us constantly preoccupied with the future, with “now” as merely a vehicle for the future instead of being worthy to enjoy in its own right. Anytime we focus on “now” without the future, he’ll direct us to the painful portions of the past.
  • Then, once we get closer to death and start considering life beyond it, he can point us backward to fondly reminisce about the “good times” we once had, or may direct us toward selfish thoughts in the present.

To destroy deeper philosophical and theological thought, demons will refocus any transcendent thought toward the stream of daily activities and experiences:

  • By calling it “real life”, “the real world”, or “reality“, we stop considering that our perceptions are all subject to interpretation or the unknown.
  • Often, he’ll push bad things we imagine into the “real” space and good things into the “ideal” space, away from what we see as reality.
  • One major variation of this is to provoke people into thinking they’re being “scientific” when they’re merely avoiding things that we can’t explicitly measure.

God wants us to be constantly aware of what we don’t know and not particularly concerned with what we do know, so the devil tries to make us lean on our understanding as much as possible:

  • God’s purpose for humility is for us to enjoy things beyond ourselves as much as our thoughts, so demons try to direct our thoughts inward as much as possible. He’ll try to prevent us from remembering that our talents, abilities, strengths, circumstances, and relationships all came from God in the first place.
  • Generally, he’ll provoke us to overthink things, creating elaborate models we can then require everything else to conform into. This is easy for the Satan, proportionally to our intelligence.
  • However, if we are humbled by what we don’t know, he’ll draw attention to it to provoke conceit in us about how humble we are. If we self-invalidate ourselves, we may become conceited about that until we stop thinking about it.
  • When we finally believe an inconsistent contradiction, we can often attain a false humility inspired by self-hatred. That self-hatred comes through the fact that we can’t seem to ever imagine anything that conforms to reality. At this point, the devil owns the person.

The devil uses an elaborate technique to make us forget that life naturally cycles up and down when believers experience hardship and suffering:

  1. Make us remember the “good times” at the beginning of our conversion to Christ, with a false memory that the experience should have been permanent.
  2. Make us assume the present state is just as permanent as the “good times” were supposed to be.
  3. Vary the technique by the personality of the believer:
    • If the believer tends to be depressive, direct them to discouraging Bible verses and alienate them from strong believers, then set them to working at recovering their old feelings through sheer willpower.
    • If the believer is generally optimistic, make them believe their hardship isn’t that bad and that they must practice general moderation, which will lead to general complacency.
    • Attack their faith directly, mostly with obscuring jargon that creates a self-delusion that “faith” is merely another phase in a progressively improving life, and therefore they must move on from that belief.
  4. If a believer is prone to forget things and has been through a few cycles of hardship, exaggerate how much redemption they will likely feel by simply giving up. That way, they’ll have fight in them from less moral conviction when the reprieve isn’t as strong as they had remembered.

Tricks Against Pleasure

Demons can never create pleasures, but will distort them into less pleasurable forms:

  • By diminishing pleasures, we’ll crave them more. Over time, this will create codependency on a substance.
  • Often, he’ll add other things to complicate those simple pleasures, such as unrelated memories that have a particular connection with a sin. Then, he’ll associate rebellion, anger, or despair with the original simple pleasure that God had designed for our simple satisfaction.

One of the devil’s simplest tricks is for us to feel entitled to specific things that aren’t really ours. Naturally, any misfortunes regarding that thing will feel like an injustice to us:

  • God has given us everything, so He is entitled to take it away. This includes money, possessions, relationships, understanding, our essence itself, and time.
  • Specifically, we tend to see as “ours” when we wake up, so any duties that require our attention are “stealing” or “taxing” our time.
  • We don’t really “own” anything, but the Satan doesn’t want us to remember that fact, so he tries to make us unaware and self-absorbed. The easiest method is to promote language that implies ownership (e.g., “my shirt”, “my car”, “my boyfriend”).

Humor is valuable for our healing, and the devil can distort it:

  • Humor can make almost anything enjoyable that would otherwise be inappropriate or immoral.
  • However, by twisting it around, the devil can promote repulsive, awful values through immoral characters, simply because they’re funny.
  • There’s a profound moral difference between enjoying base sexual humor for its merit as a joke and enjoying it to imagine performing it. The first is an acceptable appreciation of quality, but the second is simply lewdness.
  • Very creative people can make completely harmless jokes about virtue, but humor about practicing virtue can deaden us to loving it.

Gluttony isn’t merely from excess, and can often be from delicacy. Western Christianity tends not no talk about it, which allows the devil to work:

  • The idolatry of gluttony runs the range of anything we can consume and goes beyond food to domains such as chocolate, cigarettes, beer, television, consumed media, and technology.
  • The dangers of gluttony in delicacy come when someone isn’t satisfied with what they have and merely wants something “a little better”. Females can become obsessed with one “single, little thing” they want, while males can believe they’re merely acting out of understanding “real quality“.
  • To provoke gluttony of excess, demons redirect someone into a false sense of spirituality through their awareness. If they start considering the medical effects of their lifestyle, the devil can redirect them to a love/hate obsession with over-exercise or make them even more picky with their food decisions.
  • To counter God’s command for selfless sacrifice, the Satan will often direct a selfish purpose to an internal dialogue that justifies how that action is somehow selfless.
  • Once someone is a glutton, they’ll lose all sense of goodness or kindness once a substance is removed. This can be strategically useful for disrupting an entire group pursuing God’s will, especially if it triggers that person’s shadow self.

God designed us to be sexually pure or monogamous, and the devil has spent hundreds of years building up the lie that being in love is the only true path to a good marriage:

  • God designed genders to complement each other, but the devil provokes us to imagine relationships are a power game where one person must lose for the other to gain.
  • Marriage, sex, and families are a generational development of how God’s love is supposed to play out, so the devil has a particularly strong agenda to destroy them.
  • While being in love isn’t necessarily good or bad, the devil will try to push our sentiments away from good things. Direct them to a passionate tryst if they’re particularly sentimental, or guide them to rigid sexual repression and bitterness if they’re more rational.
  • While we’re in love, people are inspired to act kind and lovingly, and demons can provoke us to believe that we must always be in the frame of mind of giving what they want, even when we don’t really know what they do want! Taken past the honeymoon phase, couples will become very unhappy by imagining their partner is ungrateful for all the sacrifice they believe they’re making.
  • Being in love often postpones or suppresses relationship issues, so the devil tries to secretly build up the issues while they’re in love. For example, men see selflessness as respecting boundaries while women see it as intervening, so both sides can grow to believe the other is selfish.

While staying sexually pure has no adverse health effects, the devil tells us sexuality must be explored:

  • We have two types of “romantic” desire. One is a good marital desire from our soul for love, obedience, reverence, and dignity. The other is a bodily desire for novelty, control, and recklessness.
  • The first desire can be perverted, but the devil far more often uses the second desire to trap people. He’ll use popular trends to emphasize a specific body type or specific physical features a “trendy” person would like. This places all emphasis on that human body, with no emphasis on other good qualities like moral character.
  • He starts by tempting us to fornicate. Then, he’ll push our desire for another person’s seductive skill to draw us into an unhealthy marriage.
  • If someone later decides to divorce, the devil will try to draw out the divorce experience as long as physically possible. If successful, that person’s soul will be so devastated that they’ll no longer serve any earthly or spiritual benefit.

Tricks Against Others

The Satan will magnify our attention on daily nuisances people may have with one another, through a predictable cycle:

  1. Create obliviousness to personal failings, to the point that they’d have to seriously self-reflect to discover them.
  2. Shift prayer requests from an actual person into an imagined caricature of that person, thereby making the prayers vague and less effective, while also aggravating the person as they’re trying to give their problems to God.
  3. Magnify relatively irrelevant but slightly annoying behavior quirks to make them feel malicious, horrible, or evil.
  4. Build a self-righteousness with a double standard about appropriate conduct.
  5. Magnify any feelings of injustice or jealousy.

When we discover the nature of new friends, he uses a technique to tempt and distort reality:

  1. If the person is unaware enough, they can be tempted to wear many masks to maintain a false image among various social circles.
  2. Once that person has seen their double life, they can be inspired to feel superior over their “open-mindedness” to other groups.
  3. Finally, convince them that avoiding association with their more worldly friends would be something vaguely “intolerant” or “unloving”.
  4. From here, people may spend too much money on the wrong things and experience division with their families.

By using our images of others around us, we can fall into very destructive behaviors like superficiality or callousness:

  • We’ll imitate certain behaviors from our recurring patterns of shame, pride, modesty, and vanity, which eventually become a part of us through habit.
  • By delaying our awareness for as long as possible, we become less able to change those behaviors, especially about small worldly vices like trendiness, friends, or ambition.
  • Frequently, if the Satan can direct our attention to compare ourselves with others as a matter of self-valuation, he can provoke us to self-hatred over impossible standards or conceit over standards that are beneath the way God designed us.

We can often misunderstand through language, and the Satan can magnify it:

  • We often use words to refer to the experience of a thing as well as much as the thing itself, which gives room to provoke impatience and anger.
  • In hardship, men tend to talk less and women more, which can put a rift between the genders.

Any conflict or struggle is a golden opportunity for the devil:

  • First, the devil will try to inspire one of three types of sins, then redirect the natural triggers from the situation into more destructive purposes:
    1. Dishonorable, cowardly fear. Since it’s extremely painful, it can’t last indefinitely. However, there is some pleasure in the other two, which can make them mental sanctuaries if a conflict persists long enough.
    2. Courage that breeds pride. This one, however, causes good things in society, so the devil tries to avoid it if possible unless paired with rebellion. Any virtues that come from it can be directed as merely conditional on their hardship, instead of coming as an outflow of hardship.
    3. Hatred and rebellion at the causes of the struggle. The easiest way to sidestep the conscience’s impulse for forgiving and releasing is by directing hate to someone who harmed someone else that they love. Then, the Satan can add shame as needed to keep someone miserable until despair takes hold.
  • Making precautions tends to increase fear, so it’s easy to remove courage afterward:
    1. Inspire us to make increasingly more backup plans in case things ever go badly.
    2. Provoke subconscious superstition, if possible.
    3. Keep fostering the feeling that someone can trust something that isn’t God.
    4. Trigger the cowardice when it’s time to stand for a conviction, which will feed into the sinful, perfectly natural state of fear.

Even when he can’t provoke us to conceited thinking or distract us with a bad belief from inexperience, he can still use our behaviors to make others stumble:

  • He’ll provoke people to imitate bad behaviors alongside good ones, then will magnify the bad behaviors until the person is imitating a caricature of their role model’s original bad behavior.
  • God will often endure our prejudices and silly views, but the devil can easily distort those prejudices until they’re applying to the wrong groups (e.g., viewing “my group versus other believers” as “believers versus the world”). Taken far enough, that person can build a smug “secret society” attitude toward everyone outside their group, starting with unbelievers and eventually covering other believers.

Tricks With Groups

The devil makes us hate people groups, but only as a passive, brewing hatred:

  • We tend to connect with other people when we observe details about their lives.
  • Thus, we may grow dissatisfied from general hate, and enough hatred without a motive toward destruction will make us focus on people enough that we realize we’ve been unfair.
  • So, the devil tries to keep us distant from understanding anyone we don’t like.
  • When people believe fringe ideas, the devil will work very hard to turn those beliefs into rebellious ideals.
  • Generally, strong-willed people with hard convictions are easily misled by divisive beliefs, while weak-willed and compliant people will be misled by pacifism and compromising ideals.

Christianity is a simple message that naturally unifies all humanity through recognizing their need for salvation in light of their sin. The Satan responds with “Christianity and…” to create special interests that make the person feel separate from the rest of the Church:

  • While God built us to have an interest in cycling seasons of new things (e.g., yearly seasons, fashions, technologies), this can easily pervert to a desire for novelty and change merely for its own sake.
  • Novelty has a diminishing return, and requires progressively more investment to maintain. Believers ensnared in fashions will invariably feel dissatisfied or greedy as their interest persists, which can lead to many other sins.
  • Across society, fashions create many other vices that convert some of God’s values with their time and place into an antagonist. Cruel societies fight sentiment, emotional ones fight reasoning, lazy ones fight honor, liberal ones fight convention.
  • To answer our roles in these trends, we should ask simple questions (Is it right? Is it possible?), but the devil provokes us to ask complicated questions (Is it progressive or reactionary? Is it on the right side of history? Will this make an impact?). Those questions wonder about the future, which is a vacuum of understanding, so the Satan has full control to make suggestions that provoke more misery.

After enough time away from other believers, demons can provoke someone to go to many churches on the justification of being a type of “connoisseur”:

  • All the devil needs to do is to regularly stir up memories of the worst qualities of the worst actions that person remembers, and the person will develop a habit of never growing close to any church.
  • This will make them judgmental of others’ ideas that they should be openly receptive toward.

Spiritual leaders are especially susceptible to the Satan’s tricks:

  • Some leaders will dilute their teaching to make it more palatable, but make it utterly irrelevant to their congregation.
  • Other leaders are so embittered that they teach audaciously only for the shock effect.
  • Most church divisions come through his redirection of thoughts away from spiritual matters and theological differences and toward various procedures and minutiae of running a church (e.g., worship music, marketing materials, organizational decisions).

Through a lot of work, the demons have built a society that promotes not changing inwardly to the point that people feel peer pressure to build out their vices:

  • Heavy sinners who willfully rebel against God are uncommon in civilized society, but many smaller and pettier sinners are merely selfish, though the fashions of the time make the trend adapt constantly in different directions.
  • The devil uses many vague good-sounding words like “democracy” and “equality”, but makes a fierce effort to avoid letting anyone define them clearly. This can be the cause of endless conflicts and the source for more of his work.
  • Eventually, he’ll bring about his One World Order on a principle of “equality” and “democracy” to make a society of ineffective, self-satisfied, entitled, unhappy people.

Tricks About Himself

While the devil can show his hand to scare people through things like magicians or witches, hiding himself can create materialists and skeptics:

  • The easiest way to hide spiritual things is to bring pop culture references to mind (pitchfork and horns, cartoonish behavior), then communicate how silly they are to truly believe in.
  • He’s built systems for ages that make things that appear to be sensible and natural immersed heavily in spiritual things, such as futurism and transhumanism.
  • The best way he can keep working is for people to either believe he doesn’t exist, or that it doesn’t matter if they’re aware of his existence.

We cycle through good and bad times, but the devil isn’t necessarily tied to bad times:

  • Those bad times are God’s best growing periods for us, so the devil simply works opposite whatever God’s desires are whenever those times arise.
  • God wants us to follow Him wholly with faith, so He starts with an incentive and removes it later in difficult times. While God loves this faith, the devil despises it.

Lucifer can and often does show himself. He transforms into a celestial being, which often draws people into an illusion:

  • Often, he’ll blur the line between religion and politics and redirect people from the reality that the Jesus of the Bible hasn’t changed in thousands of years.
  • He’ll over-emphasize some parts of the Bible and downplay others until it removes all context for the story. This then creates a distant Jesus as if it were a historical biography instead of the living God who came to earth for humanity’s sin.
  • By doing this, Christians can be directed zealously to all forms of social justice or an entirely new cult instead of Jesus’ coming or God’s Kingdom.
  • If he’s really successful, he can make people believe a whole separate document as if it were Scripture!

It Doesn’t Matter

The Satan’s entire belief system and strategy considers absolutely nothing but raw power.

  • Even the people who have pledged allegiance to Lucifer himself are clueless about how much he’s exploiting them, at least until they’re no longer useful.

Whenever God wants, He can stop everything the Satan can try to do:

  • He can speak directly to believers’ hearts to inspire or encourage.
  • A simple walk outside or genuine intellectual discovery can undo decades of the devil’s work, merely through our soul’s connections with ourselves and each other. It’s why he so desperately wants us to do things we hate and avoid things we like.
  • Very often, he’ll try to push us against what we really want to do (e.g., stamp collecting, playing basketball) out of a fear that it’s not the “right” or “best” or “important” thing to do.
  • Self-discovery can be very profound, so anytime we run across a genuine thought, he’ll try to scramble it before we can write it down or say it (especially to those close to us or on social media).
  • Of course, if we avoid publishing it, he can foster a sense of self-righteous superiority that we’re “above all that”. Taken far enough, it can become the cause of tremendous intellectual pride.

One of the Satan’s biggest lies is that he won’t let up on tempting us until we relent:

  • In reality, he only persists as long as God has a use for him.
  • Once we’ve learned what we need to, God quickly removes him from our lives.

God’s loving nature is absolutely foreign to all the demons.

In fact, the demons go absolutely crazy when believers trust God.

  • They lose their ability to make calculated strategic decisions at that point, and that’s most of the cause of spiritual warfare.
  • Thus, if there’s spiritual warfare or perceptible demonic activity, and it’s not being promoted as a good thing, there’s a very real possibility something spiritually good could be happening.