If you were the Devil, how would you keep yourself from knowing the truth? If you were the Devil and your goal was to keep yourself away from God, how would you do it? Asking these questions can bring about some interesting insights if answered honestly, and the answers might be a bit disturbing because they might be right in front of you.

C.S. Lewis in his book, The Screwtape Letters, makes quite an interesting example of how the Devil accomplishes these goals in Screwtape’s letter to his nephew, Wormwood. You see, they’re both demons, and their primary task is keeping their “subjects” away from God, and the best way to do so is to be subtle, so subtle that you would never notice it.

First of all, they aren’t going to argue with you.

You see, Wormwood is attempting to convince his subject to be a materialist, keeping his subjext’s attention on worldly things and away from God. However, Screwtape warns against trying to argue for the case of materialism and to instead suggest to the subject that materialism is associated with attractive qualities such as strength and courage.

The reason that the senior demon suggests this strategy to his nephew is because the subject has lived his whole life with conflicting philosophies dancing around in his head. The man doesn’t use the Virtue of Reason to determine what is true and what is false.

“Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think that it is strong, or stark, or courageous-that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.”

–Screwtape, in Letter One

When you have a multitude of philosophies running about in your head, and you have no allegiance to any one belief, you become an unwitting ally of the Devil because he will use whichever philosophy that he determines will be the most effective as tool to help you convince yourself to take a path that leads away from God.

The mass media does this constantly. TV shows and movies are one of the ways the Devil suggests to us that drinking alcohol is normal and associates its consumption with the attractive actors and actresses you see on the screen. It is a way to subtly convince you if they do it, I should too, look at them they have all the things I want. They make alcohol consumption attractive, so you get into it and get trapped.

The screens show you people who have everything you could ever want in the material sense, all to keep you lusting for things of the world. To keep you thinking that the more you consume, the happier you will be. They show you characters that will make you associate beauty or strength or masculinity and power with materialism. Commercials are always trying to convince you that you’re not enough and that you need more things to be happy.

They show the bad guys as the ones who have all the money and power, suggesting that if you want such things that you have to sacrifice your morality to get them. They show you men and women being unfaithful and promiscuous to try and make you susceptible to the idea that this sort of behavior is what attractive people do, and if you aren’t doing it as well, then you’re missing out.

“It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy’s clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that.”

-Screwtape, Letter One

The Devil wants to bombard you with so many conflicting ideas and information that you cannot make heads or tails of what is real and true and what is false. The Virtue of Reason helps you sort these thoughts and suggestions out into the categories of true and false.

The way you sort information and ideas into the categories of true and false is to use logic, and have a standard to hold things to. That standard can be science, it can be a code of morality, it can be your religion, but it should be something that helps you get closer to God. Something that is true, or as true as you know, so you can hold everything else up to it and use reason and logic to determine falsehood from truth.

It’s not an easy task, and the Devil has been playing this game for much longer than we have, but if there is one thing that can aid you in the battle for your mind, it is the Virtue of Reason.

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