Student Wormrot:

 

I am advised by Chief Librarian Globscumulous that you have spent a number of hours in the library pouring over the pages of WORLD WAR II - DAYS OF DELIGHT AND DAMNATION as I suggested. Such dedication to learning the damning arts is most certainly a good start for you, and I have made note of this in your student compendium, which shall be reviewed in the next Master Trainer's General Sessions.

 

As mentioned in Lesson One, your first task is to find a subject who is mentally suspect or on the brink of some form of insanity, and then to work with that subject until you bring them to the point that they are receptive to having an "epiphany." In order to do this, you must at all costs be sure that the hated Enemy's Church is reviled in their minds, so that they would not for a moment consider reading any of the works of the Apostles, the Early Fathers, or any of the more intelligent writers which abound among their ranks. The tried and true tactic here is to focus your subject's thoughts like a laser beam on all the various oddities, nutjobs, cranks, and crazies that the Enemy has had to endure in His Church. Confuse your subject with one or two doctrines which not only make no sense to him - such as the Eucharist being the real Flesh of our Enemy, or the honor given to the Queen of Heaven - and be sure to place thoughts of abhorence in his mind so that he turns from these realities in disgust and confusion. After rejection of the Enemy's truth, you will have a fertile field into which you can place the seed of a doctrine which your subject will eventually accept and preach as being truth to anyone who will listen.  So it is, so it has always been.

 

The host of servants we have developed from this tactic is quite long and has given us the pleasure of seeing a number of assemblies spring up like mushrooms coming forth from horse dung. It is also a delightful recreation for us which yields many long term benefits. Your great, great grand-uncle, Grandus Tormencular, was the one who appeard to Joseph Smith with those fraudulent "Plates of Moroni" and persuaded him that he was seeing "an angel of the Lord"  One of my own students, who is now climbing the ranks of the Lowerworld with constant and steady work, simply shone a little light on a passage of the Enemy's word being read by Ellen G. White. The rest was, as they say, history. That one little piece of work created yet another fine assembly of lunatics who hate the Enemy's Church and go to extreme lengths to say the most vile things they can about it.

 

So you see, it can be done, and quite easily. In this day and age, we are finding more and more opportunities among the human vermin. False Messiahs are cropping up everywhere, compliments of our dedicated students. Patience, grasshopper. You will get your turn.

 

For my follow up on your first lesson, look at the chap second-left with the rather impressive looking beard. That is John Calvin, one of our best servants. The whole Protestant Reformation would have died out without his work. His thick and mendacious tome, known among the humans as The Institutes of the Christian Religion is almost as revered as the Enemy's book among the non-Catholics who hate our Enemy's Church. Even those who do not know about it unconsciously follow the doctrines which Calvin set forth in it, such as Total Depravity and Perseverence of the Saints.

 

Why is this important?

 

Because after you establish a heretical teacher among the hairless apes and get his ideas to have a hearing among them, you have to work with these ideas to sell them. You need someone to clarify them, engage them to the masses, and make them believable as being truth. Remember Luther? It is said of the Reformed Doctrines which we started with him that "Luther laid the egg that Calvin hatched." A man with an axe to grind is a good start, but unless you find a follow up person to bring that anger to fruitition, all your work will be for naught. Anger, madness against injustice, rebellion against authority - those can only go so far before they fizzle out. That is what happened with several of our good doctrines in as the Enemy's Church grew. The Albegensians and Cathars died out just for that particular lack of a theologian to spread their false teachings. All they had going for them was anger against our Enemy's Church and rebellious spirits. Luther was pretty much in the same vein, and due to his pride, we were able to keep him going, but it took Calvin to really sell the Protestant Reformation and make it take off among the non-Catholics of the next 500 years. His theological work was so good on behalf of error that it is still the foundation of all non-Catholic Protestant thought, no matter what the denomination.

 

So that is my lesson for you today - short and sweet. After you find your angry, crazy man and start your new religion with him, be sure you have a follow-up to his work in the form of an intelligent presenter with whom you can work. Don't pick a dunce for your follow-up work, you will lose everything. You must pick a polished orator who is an intelligent defender of  whatever falsehoods you give him. 

Here is your long-term homework assignment. Since you were the one who initiated this conversation, I am giving you a paper to be turned in at the end of your fourth year. How you do on it will determine your rank in your graduating class, although I will say that from what I have seen so far, I expect good work from you. I want you to study Calvin's Institutes. Note the form and function in them, how Calvin borrows from the language of the Enemy's Church and orthodox belief, but how cleverly he digresses just far enough to be presenting falsehood. It is really a masterpiece. Take particular note as you are studying in the days to come, of how Calvin uses the same terms as the Enemy's Church - for instance, the use of the word "Sacrament" - but cleverly and with great verbosity brings that word to mean something entirely different through the use of his theological sophistry.

 

Master this in the next three years, as I believe you will, and you will no doubt find and develop the Dark Underworld's next religion to oppose the Enemy's Church and send us scores of souls upon which we may most delightfully feast.

 

Good work, young imp. Your future looks damnably good.

 

Your Master Trainer,

 

Infernus