from: Bloodstone43956@i-mail.irs
to: Raventrap39996@i-mail.irs
date: 7518.44166
My Dear Raventrap ~
A word to the wise: It’s unbecoming for a tempter to complain about his workload. It is what it is. You must be 100% devoted to The Corporation or suffer the consequences. If you were trying to get sympathy from me, keep in mind I haven’t got any. Also, keep in mind all I-mails are being monitored by the CIA (Central Informants Agency) so watch what you say.
As to your caseload, your challenge is to be as crafty and devious as possible, no matter how many clients are assigned to you. There is no use asking for fewer clients or questioning why there are no healthcare or pension programs in The Corporation. You know as well as I do there are no “retired” tempters. The rule is “serve or be served” ~ on a platter. According to Our Executive, the minimum wage you young tempters are receiving is high enough already. So suck it up and do your job. You are to prove yourself worthy of a demotion, not just act like you’re entitled to one after serving for only a century or two. You will do as Our Executive demands and you will like it. The penalties for failure are well known. Your fear alone should be sufficient incentive to be more productive, so don’t expect a raise ~ only Our Executive’s Select Staff is eligible for profit-sharing.
Raventrap, if you think your caseload is too demanding; you really must find more ways to tempt the vile creatures to do your tempting for you ~ delegate! Take a hint from the COD; divide and conquer. Set brother against brother, sister against sister, husband against wife, coworker against coworker, children against parents, and more powerful still, faction against faction. Factions practically manufacture reasons to hate one another out of thin air, they self-replicate, and they evolve right before our eyes to adapt to perceived threats from the opposition. With a little coaxing from us, factions will become echo chambers for their members’ attitudes and beliefs as well as active antagonists towards other factions. If you do this right, you can even turn families and friends into rival factions.
Over a century ago, I took a little vacation on the temptation time I saved by instigating a feud between two families ~ it went on for generations. You may have heard of the Hatfields and the McCoys. All it took was a stolen pig and the power of suggestion. Who needs demons when we can teach humans to do our work for us!
On the Earth at present there are a number of opportunities for factional warfare, some large, some small, and most with the potential of all kinds of self-serving behavior practically certain to win contracts for The Corporation. One fertile field is the battle between evolutionists and creationists. Never mind the fact that Our Competitor is neither a counterfeiter nor a conjurer. He would never do anything to make the universe appear to be a certain way just to fool humans, or magically fill-in the blanks of science, or deliberately make it more difficult to discover the way things work. Fortunately for us, He seems to be consistently honest, and that trait is ours to exploit. If He were more like Our Executive, it might be a little more difficult to spin the universe in our direction, but I have no doubt it could be done. As it is, Our Competitor’s transparency is the gateway to cynicism and distrust, two of the best friends a tempter ever had.
Not even we can deny Our Competitor made everything that exists. The big questions, the questions he actually wants the little busybodies to ask, are why, when, where, how, and under what conditions? They’ve been charged with the dual tasks of inquiry and discovery, both necessary to the exercise of freedom of choice. As even the most junior tempter knows, without freedom of choice they can never become fully human and more importantly can never join Our Competitor’s Company. That thought is as portentous as it sounds. Our Competitor’s intent seems to be that somehow, as they choose to become fully human, they will also become worth infinitely more than we can imagine. We don’t know how this works at present. We suspect it might have something to do with “What’s His Name,” but we can’t be sure. So, it remains up to us to direct our clients’ thoughts towards choosing anything except Our Competitor, or failing that, to do everything in our power to obscure or take away choice entirely.
Now, as soon as they started asking the questions, how, when, where, and under what conditions, the curious little mongrels invented science. And in due course science made it possible to discover that life adapts to changes in the environment over time ~ an almost inconceivably long time. One of their scientists called this process “descent with modification by natural selection.” It’s actually quite an ingenious invention, and we wish we had thought of it, but apparently Our Competitor did. As the Scots say, “Aye, there’s the rub.” Both Our Competitor and Our Executive have a marvelous sense of time. They can see infinitesimal changes occurring over millions and millions of years as if everything is happening at once. Humans, on the other hand, find it difficult to conceive the flow of time for more than a lifetime or a hundred years at most. So, do you see the opening, Raventrap? By being honest about the appearance of things, and by making the little plodders with a limited sense of time, Our Competitor has handed us a goldmine of opportunity. Some of our clients will find it impossible to think past say, six or seven years, let alone six or seven thousand years, while others will be able to conceive time in millions of years. So, play upon your clients’ divergent conceptions of the passage of time and we will have an opportunity to win their contracts.
A word or two about “theories.” In everyday parlance, the mini-maggots use the word, theory, very loosely, to mean conjecture, speculation, hypothesis, or even guess. “I have a theory about that” usually means their best guess, not a clear statement of well-reasoned explanation. So, consequently there is little understanding of what scientists and other professionals mean by the word, theory. [Even music theory ~ why anyone would want to study the theory of music is a mystery to me ~ I hate music even more than I hate silence! ~ is a much more precise use of the word, theory, meaning a well-supported explanation of the structure of music. I suppose this kind of thing is useful for those who wish to compose or perform music, but how would I know?]
In science, a theory is a well-supported explanation of how a phenomenon works. It has the power to explain observations, confirm hypotheses, make predictions, and produce repeatable experimental results. So, there are many scientific theories: “theory of gravitation,” “theory of heliocentrism,” “theory of general relativity,” “quantum theory,” “theory of plate tectonics,” and “theory of evolution by natural selection.” Our job is to conflate our clients’ understanding of scientific theories with the general sense of the word, theory. Thus, they will conclude any theory, including the “theory of evolution” is only a theory, and isn’t worth much more than anyone’s guess.
As they debate evolution, some of your clients will become convinced any understanding of the world based on science is an attack on their religious beliefs, while others will see devotion to religion as a denial of the methods of scientific inquiry. I will state the obvious: of course life on Earth evolves, and of course Our Competitor created it. Questions concerning how, when, where, and under what conditions life has evolved are certainly appropriate for a scientist to ask. The one question science is not particularly equipped to ask is, “why?” Even Our Executive can’t answer that question. And while religion seeks to answer the question, “why?” religion is ill-equipped to answer the other four questions without the help of science. So, we are left with two factions, each stubbornly holding its position, each carrying a lot of unrelated emotional baggage, each afraid the other will win out, and each unwilling to see the obvious. It doesn’t matter one bit in Hell if the Earth is young or old, or whether or not humans and primates shared a common ancestor. What matters is the choosing of sides and the self-righteousness our clients can develop whenever they join a faction. We have more or less equal rations of evolutionist and creationist clients at present.
Your Devoted Cousin,
Bloodstone
MurrayWorks 