I was trying to scare the CRAP out of people!

I don't think Blackstone and I would disagree about the fact that "worshiping the Creature instead of the Creator" is the path towards doing things you really, really wish you hadn't done. Blackstone has his rhetorical strategies towards the end of making people aware of that truth, and I have mine. Being artsy-fartsy, I like to SHOW VIVID PICTURES of what that kind of thing looks like. Peter Lorre's Beckert in "M" is simply the most vivid picture I could find. The people who have the moral sense to understand that they are traveling on Beckert's track -- however far along it they go, or however well-restrained they are -- are the people I don't worry about. The ones I worry about are the ones who burble about "sweet precious innocent children." This starts to sound like GOLLUM muttering to himself, and it's only a matter of time before such people want to "turn invisible" and start "catching and eating nice juicy fishes."

(For the symbology here, see the Greek expression "catching a lizard," and Eliot's creepy early poem on the death of St. Narcissus, a poet's cautionary tale:

"Then he knew that he had been a fish
with slippery white belly held tight in his own fingers
writhing in his own clutch his ancient beauty
caught fast in the pink tips of his new beauty."

The point, of course, is that St. Narcissus is clutching his OWN "fish"/"lizard."

---Didaskalos