Deceiving and Being Deceived
Once I accepted Gloria’s teachings and joined her cult, I fully embraced my new role as a god in training. It was a time of incredible darkness in my life. I was extremely arrogant, even to the point of no longer considering myself human. I thought of everyone else as beneath me, which helped me get past my introverted nature. I started to practice my abilities openly again without fearing a repeat of being mobbed by people wanting to know their futures. If I practiced my gifts for someone else, I only did so for those who I thought were worthy. I had nothing to prove to anyone else.
Both Liar and Gloria were teaching me new spiritual gifts and both Tom and Susan loved participating when I practiced these gifts. Soon, several of Tom’s newest friends started joining us as well. It was clear it wouldn’t be long before I’d be starting a New Age group of my own.
One of these new gifts was aura manipulation. Rather than just seeing someone’s aura, Liar instructed me how to change auras, first my own and later the auras of others as well. This didn’t change their personality in any major way, but I could use it to make someone feel a sense of unease or to give someone a more favorable disposition toward me. One thing I liked doing was reaching out with my aura and touch theirs. The effect was the sensation of a little tap on their shoulder, even if I was several feet away from them. This didn’t always work but it worked often enough that I used that ability often, especially when I was hanging out with Susan or Tom.
Practicing this ability required me to read auras far more often than I had before, so I would often just read the auras of people passing by Susan’s hot dog cart. Oddly, the occasional person had no aura. I asked Liar about this, and he said that some people are so inwardly focused and closed off to any alternative viewpoints that they had no souls. That was more than a little disturbing! I didn’t try practicing my gifts on those people, which was something Liar said was a good idea.
In addition to the new gifts, Liar was teaching me how to think like a demon, especially with regard to destroying the faith of Christians. He taught me the secret of defeating Christians’ faith was getting them to close their Bibles. The best way to do that was to appeal to their ego. I’d say something like: “I don’t care what some 2,000 year old book written by ignorant shepherds says. What do you think?” Doing that would both denigrate the Bible as a source of wisdom and encourage them to use their minds and worldly logic instead. Once they made that mistake, Liar would feed me arguments to counter whatever they said and to sow seeds of doubt. Without the Bible to guide them, they had little hope of defeating these points. They weren’t really debating me at that point, but the demon. Defeating me in debate would be easy. I was only an 18 year old who thought I knew far more than I actually did. Liar, on the other hand, was using layers of deception and worldly logic that demons had been perfecting for thousands of years.
In a twist of irony that Liar no doubt enjoyed, he employed that same tactic on me to make sure I didn’t seriously consider anything these Christians believed. He said Bible was mostly lies, so I should ignore nearly all of its teachings. I was to trust only Liar to tell me which of the Bible’s teachings were genuine and which were false teachings added long after the original manuscripts were written. Liar fed my pride by telling me that my grasp of complex theological concepts was pure genius, even though I was actually just parroting what he told me to say. I believed him and thought I understood it all. In retrospect, I really understood almost nothing.
Liar had me seek Christians out rather than avoid them like I did in high school. Whenever a Christian would share their beliefs, I mocked them and lured them into debating me. The more public the setting, the better. Whenever a Christian took the bait and closed their Bible, both Liar and I smiled inwardly. Before another word was uttered, we knew we’d win that argument and leave that Christian humiliated before anyone else who was watching.
It wasn’t long before I hated Christians and the God of the Bible. I hated God because, if He existed, I thought He was an imposter for not being the cosmic Santa Claus I expected back in my youth. I hated Christians for being foolish enough to believe in Him in the first place. I saw Christianity as a list of absurd rules that only an idiot would believe in. I was a warrior of darkness. I was a declared enemy of God and I was extremely proud of it.
