"But here I'd like to add to what the Tempter's Manual suggests. Depression, at its finest, is not a Future that they cannot hopefully construct, nor a shamed Past that hounds them, but an agonizing Present that they cannot escape. We want to disable their Present so that they cannot use it to look Heavenward."

"The Bible is the one book we've most succeeded in having them never read as a book. Keep it that way."

"Also, always encourage 'being good' over 'doing good.' Acts of goodness are the difficulty for us and should, of course, be avoided. 'Being good' is far less problematic, largely because it lacks definition and can be solely a state of mind completely unattached to reality."

"Though I despise it, I do not doubt His Love for the creatures. I have seen it -His ever-reaching outward for any hand that might reach back. At His love, I tremble yet believe."

"The eye is to light as the soul is to God."

"When sex was something godlike, Lust was the profane curiosity that killed many a straying cat. Now, having removed mystery, Lust is less a long-standing, overpowering yearning, more a sudden craving of the appetite. Less quest, more impulse buy."

"Gratitude, not guilt, as motivation is always His starting point, thus guilt as a motivation leads nowhere."

"For example, your man might think: I don't steal. Maybe on my taxes, everyone does that, but not in the way I heard so and so stole from his company. See? Those men for whose opinion he cares approve of embezzlement in one area, not the other. He uses them to maintain a claim on goodness while at the same time stealing."

"Finally, slowly, drippingly, degrade the term Choice down to its most meager means: The red car not the black one. The 9:25 showing, not the 7:15. Ritz not Wheat Thins."

"Press them continually with memory and dream and have them waste their Present there."

"If they ever envision Goodness as a thing that exists outside them, some real thing they've been called to participate in by their actions, well then, we're headed right back toward The Virtues."

"Guilt, if cultivated in a Christian client, can render their Christianity worthless to themselves and others."

"That's where thinking started, where thinking stopped, where all her prayers so long ago had dried up. She no longer prayed, nor even dreamed of changing her father. Her dreams now played variations on the theme of escape. And they were nothing more than that -just dreams, just play. She'd been alone at the end of her dreams so many times before and never had God helped her escape her father, because God couldn't, because she would never escape her need to love him."

"You see my point? The average person has a very average notion of goodness to which they aspire averagely. To aspire to goodness in any remarkable way would be 'undemocratic'."

"The Adversary, of course, simply wants them to lay down their sins, guilt and all, and follow Him. But this type holds on to their sinfulness and their guilt for it, because otherwise, they'd have no relationship with Him at all. And, of course, no relationship can be based on guilt and survive."

"Without God, reality is madness. Reason will tell you so. You either madly trust in God, or you trust in a world gone mad without him."

"Selling a new lie is easy, but not so with un-teaching an old truth."

"If we blind them to The Adversary -decrease their desire for The Desire- while at the same time encourage them to do anything else they desire with increasing 'freedom of choice, then eventually we snuff out desire while leaving demand in tact."

"Still, despite all our noise, this universe hinges on a melody, that's the dismal truth of it. Oh, we can propagandize all we wish, it doesn't change the fabric of things. This universe was not made for the fallen, only the redeemed."

"Indeed, if their wristbands asked them the question: 'What-Would-Jesus-Buy-well now, that could very well revolutionize the Christian church in America."

"They think that if they had more belief they would pray more, so keep them lacking. Never let them realize that the opposite is true: If they prayed more, they would have more belief."

"Joy is that paradox where a man so trusts, is so enraptured, as to be caught up and lost in the other, while at the same time, being utterly known by the other, thus utterly himself."

"Grace runs downhill and now all his time is being redeemed."

"Trust becomes the only road home, back to love."

"Turning an experience about to observe it, results in a lessening of the experience directly proportional to the amount of observation. To think about it is, to some degree, to stop the pleasure, to stop the experience, to step outside it."

"True Prayer is the work of relationship, where He moves them from mere information about Him to a one-on-one experience with Him, so that now when they talk about 'knowing God, they mean more than, 'I understand what you're saying about God, but also, 'It fits my experience of Him."

"I say 'illusion of choice because, in many cases, the nature of their choices hardly reaches the level of will, but of merely perfunctory activity. For the most part, their desires are not too strong, they are too weak, apathetic and easily placated. They often can be tempted into doing Nothing."

"They scold their own hearts but it actuates no real change, only deepens the wound. But they can't look away from it. Thus, by paralyzing their Present, we beat The Adversary on His home turf. And loop after loop, the depressed haunt and harrow themselves, sometimes for years, when they have only, for a brief moment, to look away from themselves, to look up."

"You don't change the world by telling it what to do, sitting at home, and telling it what you believe. You believe by throwing yourself into it. Making a leap, getting involved, then waiting, taking some one person's place for a while, one suffering person at a time."

"I don't even like the phrase 'opportunity to sin' because it implies the opportunity to obey."

"They forget that for a Creator to create, He must be greater than His creation, thus He must be by definition not less than emotional."