Where can you buy a chain strong enough to secure the power of a full grown Asian elephant? If you found such a chain what could you secure it to? The answer is fairly simple and provides a very good atheist parable. You don't need to. To chain an adult Asian Elephant you need a chain that the elephant thinks is strong enough for the task, and you can actually tie it to a clump of grass. The elephant won't stray. Actually that's not true, if you caught a wild Asian elephant you would need a very stout chain attached to something which would take a lot of effort to make secure, but a tame elephant, a working elephant, an elephant whose spirit has been broken doesn't take much securing. The trick is to condition the elephant when it's small, when it is no stronger than a big dog. What you do is to drive a stake into the ground, about four feet deep, and use a chain with links the size of a human finger, just regular agricultural grade stuff. This couldn't hold a struggling adult elephant for ten seconds but it is strong enough for a baby elephant. That's what you do. You chain down that baby elephant and leave in the chains for several weeks. She will pull and push and strain and bellow and stomp tug at it with her trunk and kick the stake and do everything within her power to fight the captivity. And then she will learn that resistance is futile. She will learn that tugging on the chain doesn't break the chain it just chafes her skin. Kicking at the stake doesn't break the stake, it just hurts her foot. There is no escape from the chain and struggling is just painful and achieves nothing. You break her spirit and get her to accept her weakness. Within a few weeks the baby elephant stops trying to escape or pull on the chain. From that moment on you can secure that elephant anywhere you want using that chain or rope. She won't pull against it, she won't try to escape, escaping hurts and it won't work, she knows that. Of course we can see that as she grows the chain is no longer strong enough to secure her. It isn't the chain around her ankle or around her neck which keeps her from straying, it is the chains inside her head, it is her memory of being weak and powerless to resist which keeps her weak and powerless to resist despite her now much more formidable strength. Similarly it is very hard to take a a well educated adult who has had no childhood conditioning and make them believe in the story of Noah's Ark or the virgin birth of Jesus or Muhammad's night ride to Jerusalem on a flying horse or the idea that a man who took his friend's nine year old daughter to bed was the best example of moral leadership our species had ever known. Religion needs to exploit the weakness and vulnerability of the young. You will always see the religious preying upon the weak and defenceless: children, especially their own, people from primitive tribes, the dying, miserable addicts separated from their drug and prisoners facing a long bleak stretch of time with hardly any control over their life. It is time we told these ghouls where to get off. Religion should never be presented to the young and impressionable as if it was true and the only option they have is to believe it or feel the chains chafe their skin. Religion should be for adults only and we should stop showing respect to those who abuse children by teaching them to be weak and powerless for ever, restrained by the feeble chains of religious lies. |
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