by Robert Igoe

Created on: January 21, 2009

Two rules of business I've learned in my life:

1) Keep an eye on your friends, because your enemies will take care of themselves

2) If you can survive the help of your teammates, your opponents will be no threat to you.

If God had bothered to look 6,000 years into the future and see what his church has become, he'd have expanded the Commandments by at least these two.

When I started writing this story, I immediately thought back to a research project I did in college to try to gauge the true extent of Satanism. Finding students who drew pentagrams on the floor in chalk and say stuff backwards was easy. Finding a true Satanist was not. This was surprising considering that this was the height of the big Satanism scare of the late 1980s. If the Christian and secular media were to be believed, the country was at the mercy of a network of cults dedicated to the destruction of the Christian church (even more so than the televangelists?) and even using female members as breeders for infants used in sacrifices. The fact that not one of these human sacrifice cults were ever found didn't seem to bother anybody.

Eventually, I did locate someone who claimed to be a member of a Satanic cult. No baby killers, but still into some pretty disgusting stuff if he was to be believed. I asked him how on Earth he managed to recruit kids into worshiping the symbol of ultimate evil.

To this day, I get chills to the bone when I think of his answer.

"We don't need to recruit," he said. "Why should we, when the Christian church does it for us?"

The most chilling part is that I knew he was right.

They say the devil's greatest trick was convincing the world he doesn't exist. A close second was the creation of the Christian youth group.

Every church and high school has one of these groups gathered to demonstrate God's love toward us all. It's a nice thought and it would actually work if these groups weren't basically the same judgmental and condescending cliques the typical kid sees in his own school. Obviously, it wouldn't be Christian to just send the unpopular kids packing, so the group simply makes their meetings and events so uncomfortable for them that they leave. On the way out, that convinces these same kids that God has no interest in them, but that not important. The wolfpack remains intact, and that's the only thing that matters.

Here's how Satanism is so successful in recruiting kids. Unlike the Jesus Posses, Satanic cults don't care how much money a kid has, what clothes he wears, what

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