This is a thread to test your powers of intellect and imagination. C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters) and Peter Kreetft (The Snakebite Letters) would approve.
If you were one of the Devil’s lieutenants, how would you counsel him to ruin the human race and increase the population of hell?
Or, what strategies has the Devil already used with greatest success?
Any takers?
advice to a journeyman tempter who aspires to master status:
focus on Catholics and the Catholic Church. sow division, disunity, resentment, accusations, recriminations, blame, carping, grumbling and bitterness as broadly as “the Enemy” (as screwtape refers to the Lord) sows the seed of the Word. Ignore non-Catholic denominations, they are fostering disunity by their very existence so need little of our attention unless and until the begin to sound like Catholics–then make your move on them.
dissenting Catholics, clergy and lay, within the Church both right and left wing, are already great allies in our work and need only constant reminders that they and they alone are “the faithful remnant” to keep them committed to disobeying the Enemy’s last command before he died (glorious day for our side): Unity.
your target should be faithful Catholics among clergy and laity, and yes the tried and true still work best, attacks on purity, lying, gossip, envy, and so forth, those things that tempt them in terms of the pleasures we find so abhorret and inexplicable, but as long as we can pervert those pleasures so the Enemy’s will is not furthered by their enjoyment, as he intended, our work is productive. For the Catholic who still goes to Mass (we have largely won the battle with the others, the task there is to keep them from responding to any internal urges to return, driving past Denny’s on Sunday morning can work as well as resentment against a priest who was unkind to them 10 years ago) our best approach is to destroy the pleasure and grace they derive from worship of the Enemy by distracting their attention from the reason they are there. Again focus on their own preferences, desires, satisfaction whether in the music, preaching, architecture, personality of the celebrant, incense, art any of the peripherals that can enhance worship–all these can be use with equal effect to destroy true worship if we successfully turn the parishioner’s attention to his own needs, experience and wishes, and away from the horrible action on the altar, where we cannot even bear to look, and dare not even approach.
But our real target, and winning one of these souls is worth hundreds of the picayune sinners in the streets, is the committed Catholic who has largely one the initial battle and emerged through the dark night of the senses. Curses that their wise ones have seen through our strategy and tactics in that fertile period and warned our victims of the dangers but thankfully, so many today have forgotten those “outdated” spiritual masters. Wonderful work our new age department has done on that front, by the way.
Here our weapon is the strongest in our Disgusting Father’s arsenal: the first and foremost sin of all, Pride, and the one we are all most familiar with since it is our reason for being here in his service. Their are saints on earth, curse them, but it is our task to prevent them from being saints in heaven, and as long as we can convince them of their lofty status and encourage them to start polishing their haloes now, we have won, as long as we continue to distract them from the Enemy’s service by directing them to consciousness of how holy they are becoming.
It attempted to point out that a rational, smart “Devil”, if he existed would have employed smart and useful tactics to make his own victory even greater than it is… To continue my little joke: “the most convincing evidence that God does not exist is that he never came down and he never kicked the living daylight out of you believers for spreading such vicious nonsense about the almighty creator of all existence”. (I admit that it is based upon the Calvin and Hobbs cartoon, where Hobbs says: “the surest sign that there is intelligent life in the Universe is that they never tried to contact us”… I hope you see the parallel.) 
:hypno: