# List of demons' tricks to deceive us

The initial extraction is from C.S. Lewis' *The Screwtape Letters*.

## Background

Before [he shows his hand](spiritual-warfare.md), the devil uses *many* techniques to redirect and distract our focus.

If it weren't so [evil](morality-evil.md) and destroyed [souls](humanity.md), it'd be truly [fascinating](values-quality.md) how [creative](mind-creativity.md) he gets!

You can expand this concept even further by internalizing and applying everything *humanity* normally does to [distort image](image-distortion.md).

## 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](technology.md) magnifies information.

Since the battle is over the mind, and information is the vehicle for how we [understand](understanding.md), the devil and demons work tirelessly to warp it.

The devil's entire [purpose](purpose.md) is to create a constantly [fearful](mind-feelings-fear.md), anxious, bewildered, unsettled person who [reacts](habits.md) before thinking.

- [Political events](groups-large.md) like [war](people-conflicts-war.md) can turn attention away from [spiritual things](identity-christian.md) or [God's Kingdom](https://theologos.site/millennium/) to [nationalism](https://theologos.site/the-west/), patriotism, rebellion, or pacifism.
- In peacetime, we can turn to materialism and worldliness, since it distracts from the [inevitability of death](hardship-death.md).
- However, incessant war is bad for the devil because it brings out [good things](morality.md) in people, even non-believers.
- If we internalize it correctly, [hardship](hardship.md) can be very valuable for our spiritual development. Otherwise, the devil can make us live with perpetual [PTSD](hardship-ptsd.md).

[New Christians](christian-new.md) are the easiest targets for the devil because they still hold on to many world-focused [habits and routines](habits.md).

- New believers are more easily deterred by distractions from other believers, mostly from how their [expectations](imagination.md) won't meet [reality](reality.md).
- 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](morality-sins.md) 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](mind-feelings-fear.md) or lust, while ignoring the good states of mind, such as [joy](mind-feelings-happiness.md) or [love](people-love.md).
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](awareness.md) 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](language.md):

- The aim is to make [sins](morality-sins.md) feel that they're not as bad [as God sees them](https://theologos.site/god-sight/).
- Watch for inspiring words like "bold", "modern", "progressive", "social justice", and most of what the [Left](leftism.md) claims.
- Stay attentive to socially acceptable actions that are legitimately sinful, especially if it's [shameful](morality-taboo.md) 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'](maturity.md) understanding:

- The natural product of this is that they have to [relearn](understanding.md) *everything* the previous generation had to learn.
- Plus, without the context from prior generations, the person will be left endlessly [wondering](imagination.md) about the context or condemning their predecessors without considering [motives](purpose.md) or [understanding](understanding.md) beyond their own [preconceived notions](mind-bias.md).

## Tricks Against Devotion

The devil invalidates [prayer](spiritual-exercises-prayer.md) by shifting it from the physical submission of mind and body into a general [feeling](mind-feelings.md):

- 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](habits.md) of doing absolutely nothing while thinking we're being [spiritually productive](spiritual-exercises.md).
- 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](god.md) into a [fabricated image](image.md) 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](imagination.md) He has to go through a gargantuan effort to answer *any* of our problems.

While God is more concerned about what we [decide](decisions.md) and [do](results.md), the Satan redirects us to thinking about [what will happen](results.md) to us:

- More uncertainties creates more opportunities for anxiety and [fear](mind-feelings-fear.md) of the future.
- If possible, when we're [praying](spiritual-exercises-prayer.md), 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](reality.md).
- We can often engage in various types of [media](creations.md) (e.g., movies, video games, book) that permit us to explore moral decisions without any outward [consequences](results.md). Thus, we can use [technology](technology.md) to be as lawless as we want while excusing it as "not real".
- Further, by abstracting humanity into sub-human monsters inside [stories](stories.md), the devil can further blur the line about morality (e.g., zombies, vampires).

[Moral decay](morality-sins.md) is a slow fade, so the Satan keeps us [unaware](awareness.md) for as long as possible by telling us that it's always unimportant and easily reversible. The smallest [habitual](habits.md) sins can work more effectively than large, [decisive](decisions.md) ones to send people to hell:

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

## Tricks Against "Now"

It's healthy to focus on the present state and the [very near future](imagination.md), so the Satan can make us anxious about the "[big picture](trends.md)" 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](morality.md) 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](mind-feelings-happiness.md) 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](hardship-death.md) and start considering [life beyond it](religion-answers.md), 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](philosophy.md) 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](reality.md)", we stop considering that our perceptions are *all* subject to [interpretation](image.md) or the [unknown](unknown.md).
- Often, he'll push bad things we [imagine](imagination.md) 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](science.md)" 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](understanding.md) 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](purpose.md) for humility is for us to [enjoy](mind-feelings-happiness.md) 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](results.md), and [relationships](groups-small.md) all [came from God](god.md) in the first place.
- Generally, he'll provoke us to overthink things, creating [elaborate models](logic.md) we can then [require](imagination.md) 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](imagination.md) anything that conforms to [reality](reality.md). 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](addiction.md).
- Often, he'll add other things to complicate those simple pleasures, such as unrelated memories that have a particular connection with a [sin](morality-sins.md). 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](morality-justice.md) to us:

- God has given us *everything*, so He is entitled to take it away. This includes [money](money-1_why.md), possessions, [relationships](people-4_friends.md), [understanding](understanding.md), our [essence itself](people-love.md), 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](language.md) that implies [ownership](people-boundaries.md) (e.g., "*my* shirt", "*my* car", "*my* boyfriend").

[Humor](humor.md) is valuable for our healing, and the devil can distort it:

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

Gluttony isn't merely from excess, and can often be from delicacy. [Western Christianity](https://theologos.site/the-west/) 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](stories-storytellers.md), and [technology](technology.md).
- 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](understanding.md) "real [quality](values-quality.md)".
- To provoke gluttony of excess, demons redirect someone into a false sense of spirituality through their awareness. If they start considering the [medical effects](body-4_health.md) 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](purpose.md) to an internal dialogue that justifies how that action is somehow selfless.
- Once someone is a [glutton](addiction.md), 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](god-will.md), especially if it triggers that person's [shadow self](personality.md).

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](relationships-3_marriage.md):

- God designed genders to [complement each other](gender.md), but the devil provokes us to imagine relationships are a [power](power.md) game where one person *must* lose for the other to gain.
- Marriage, sex, and [families](church-family.md) 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](mind-feelings.md) 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](imagination.md) 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](understanding-certainty.md) 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](humanity-christian.md) for [love](people-love.md), obedience, reverence, and dignity. The other is a bodily desire for [novelty](image.md), [control](power.md), and [recklessness](addiction.md).
- The first desire *can* be perverted, but the devil far more often uses the second desire to trap people. He'll use popular [trends](trends.md) 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](morality.md).
- 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](humanity-christian.md) 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](awareness.md) to discover them.
2. Shift [prayer requests](spiritual-exercises-prayer.md) from an actual person into an [imagined caricature](imagination.md) 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](morality-evil.md).
4. Build a self-righteousness with a double standard about appropriate [conduct](culture.md).
5. Magnify any [feelings](mind-feelings.md) of [injustice](morality-justice.md) or jealousy.

When we discover the nature of new [friends](people-4_friends.md), he uses a technique to tempt and distort reality:

1. If the person is [unaware](awareness.md) enough, they can be tempted to wear many masks to maintain a [false image](image.md) 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](groups-small.md).
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](money-1_why.md) on the wrong things and experience [division](people-conflicts.md) with their [families](church-family.md).

By using our [images](image.md) 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](habits.md).
- By delaying our [awareness](awareness.md) for as long as possible, we become less able to [change](people-changes.md) those behaviors, especially about small worldly vices like [trendiness](trends.md), [friends](people-4_friends.md), or [ambition](success-4_routine.md).
- 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](language.md), 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](hardship.md), men tend to talk less and women more, which can put a rift between the [genders](gender.md).

Any [conflict or struggle](conflicts-inner.md) 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](habits.md) from the situation into more destructive [purposes](purpose.md):
  1. Dishonorable, cowardly [fear](mind-feelings-fear.md). 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](leftism.md). Any [virtues](morality.md) 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](mind-feelings-happiness-stress.md) is by directing hate to someone who harmed someone else that they [love](people-love.md). Then, the Satan can add shame as needed to keep someone miserable until despair takes hold.
- [Making precautions](safety.md) tends to increase [fear](mind-feelings-fear.md), 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](trust.md) something that isn't God.
  4. Trigger the cowardice when it's time to stand for a conviction, which will feed into the [sinful](morality-sins.md), perfectly natural state of [fear](mind-feelings-fear.md).

Even when he can't provoke us to conceited thinking or distract us with a bad [belief](understanding-certainty.md) from inexperience, he can still use our behaviors to make others [stumble](morality-sins.md):

- He'll provoke people to imitate bad behaviors alongside good ones, then will magnify the bad behaviors until the person is imitating a [caricature](image-distortion.md) of their role model's original bad behavior.
- God will often endure our [prejudices](image.md) 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](groups-small.md), 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](people-friends.md) with other people when we observe [details about their lives](stories.md).
- Thus, we may grow dissatisfied from general hate, and enough hatred without a motive toward [destruction](morality-evil.md) will make us focus on people enough that we realize we've been [unfair](morality-justice.md).
- So, the devil tries to keep us distant from [understanding](understanding.md) anyone we don't like.
- When people believe [fringe ideas](trends.md), the devil will work *very* hard to turn those beliefs into rebellious ideals.
- Generally, strong-willed people with hard [convictions](understanding-certainty.md) 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](jesus-gospel.md) 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](jobs-specialization.md) 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](trends.md), [technologies](technology.md)), this can easily pervert to a desire for novelty and [change](people-changes.md) merely for its own sake.
- Novelty has a [diminishing return](decisions.md), and requires progressively more investment to maintain. Believers ensnared in [fashions](trends.md) 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](values.md) with their time and place into an antagonist. Cruel societies fight sentiment, [emotional](mind-feelings.md) ones fight [reasoning](logic.md), lazy ones fight honor, [liberal ones fight convention](https://theologos.site/the-west/).
- 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](imagination.md) about the future, which is a vacuum of [understanding](understanding.md), 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](church.md) 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](people-4_friends.md) to *any* church.
- This will make them judgmental of others' ideas that they *should* be openly receptive toward.

[Spiritual leaders](mgmt-church.md) 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](mind-feelings-surprise.md).
- 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](marketing.md), organizational [decisions](decisions.md)).

Through a *lot* of work, the demons have built a society that promotes not [changing inwardly](people-changes.md) 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](trends.md) make the trend adapt constantly in different directions.
- The devil uses many vague good-sounding [words](language.md) like "democracy" and "equality", but makes a fierce effort to avoid letting anyone define them clearly. This can be the cause of endless [conflicts](people-5_conflicts.md) and the source for more of his work.
- Eventually, he'll bring about his [One World Order](jesus-returns.md) on a principle of "equality" and "democracy" to make a society of ineffective, self-satisfied, entitled, [unhappy](mind-feelings-happiness.md) 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](understanding-certainty.md) 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](trends.md) 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](god-will.md) 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](religion-answers.md) and [politics](politics-conservativeliberal.md) 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](stories.md). 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](leftism.md) or an entirely new [cult](culture-cults.md) instead of [Jesus' coming](jesus-returns.md) or [God's Kingdom](https://theologos.site/millennium/).
- If he's *really* successful, he can make people believe a whole separate document as if it were [Scripture](bible.md)!

## It Doesn't Matter

The Satan's entire [belief system](understanding-certainty.md) and strategy considers absolutely nothing but raw [power](power.md).

- 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](understanding.md) can undo *decades* of the devil's work, merely through our [soul's connections with ourselves and each other](humanity-christian.md). It's why he so desperately wants us to do things we hate and avoid things we [like](purpose.md).
- Very often, he'll try to push us against what we really [want to do](identity-christian.md) (e.g., stamp collecting, playing basketball) out of a [fear](mind-feelings-fear.md) that it's not the "[right](image.md)" or "best" or "[important](purpose.md)" 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](language-writing.md) or [say it](language-speaking.md) (especially to [those close to us](people-4_friends.md) or on [social media](technology.md)).
- 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](morality-sins.md).

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](god.md) is absolutely foreign to all the demons.

- They *suspect* it's all a ploy for some secret agenda or meta-game of control.
- Believers [know better](identity.md), and [time will show it](https://theologos.site/millennium/) after the [final cleanup Jesus needs to do](jesus-returns.md).
- Believers, therefore, [understand](understanding.md) reality more than the most powerful force of [evil](morality-evil.md) does.

In fact, the demons go absolutely *crazy* [when believers trust God](https://theologos.site/devotion-chaos/).

- They lose their ability to make calculated strategic decisions at that point, and that's most of the cause of [spiritual warfare](spiritual-warfare.md).
- 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.