Think Tales - Contemporary Parables

By Douglas Christian Larsen

Seven modern-day parables to better understand perplexing issues faced today by both Christians and non-Christians. How to connect Christians, despite themselves, to the Gospel of Christ. How to understand such baffling ideas as Creation, demons, prayer in public schools, global warming, stewardship and heaven.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9781105119194

Book preview

Think Tales - Contemporary Parables

Think Tales

Contemporary Parables

By Douglas Christian Larsen

Wolftales UNlimited

www.WolftalesUNlimited.com

Wolftales UNlimited

© Copyright 2011 Douglas Christian Larsen. All Rights Reserved by the Author. No part of this book may be reproduced (except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews) or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the publisher, Wolftales UNlimited.

This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.

Think Tales — Contemporary Parables

ISBN: 978-1-105-11919-4

Dedication

To those that love thinking,

and parables, and storytelling,

and especially to those that

love it most when all of

these things come together.

Think Tales

Dedication

Oh, Ye Lowly Apes

The King, the Wizard, & the Golden Crown

Green Adventurers

Abominators

Make the Children Prey

Distant View

Seventh Heaven

About the Author:

Oh, Ye Lowly Apes

Imagine you are part of a scientific investigative team, let’s say you are part of a study group that is measuring levels of violence among hominids, and your ability to stimulate violence among warring tribes of aboriginal groups, and how violence itself induces evolution. If you can imagine it this far, take it a step further, in that you have at your disposal Star Trek-type high technology, you can go invisible at will, beam in and out at the flick of a switch, and interpret any language, regardless of how low or high.

You search and discover a planet peopled by crude apes, perhaps a little more intelligent than the gorillas of Earth, only these are carnivorous apes that lust for the taste of blood, and utterly glory in bringing death to other tribes.

You don’t need to induce their violence, as they are the most violent creatures ever discovered in the galaxy. They are strong, the apes, and crude, and vicious, natural warriors. They live for war. They live for death. They die for war and they die for life.

Your mission is to induce these creatures to take it even further, to determine the best ways of inducing violence and hatred even among peaceful creatures.

You beam in among these apes, remaining cloaked, and you study them, these apes, learning about them, annotating their every habit, their desires, entering all your gathered information into a massive database which you can access at any moment. Your technology flows you along these apes at great speeds of relativity and thus you are able to study generation after generation of ape.

Harnessing the power of this relativity technology you may travel as slow or as fast as you like, study the split instant in an ape’s decision-making progress, spending months arguing with your colleagues, performing experiments, ironing out hypotheses and theories, and when you reflow along relative time again you are not a second older and you witness the fruition of the ape’s decision, and thus you are able to compare your theory in games to the actuality of a moment.

Personally, you have nothing against these apes, they are just research. And you do your job well. At times you entice the apes into violence against their neighbors, deciphering what stimulus triggers the worst aggression. And it is easy, because you have a native intelligence of 200, and these poor apes, if they could be measured on a low-brow human IQ test, would only rate about 65 (on a good day, and these would be the extra-smart apes, the average IQ of the most violent would rank about 45, equal to that of our Earth-born chimpanzees).

With a gesture, you can provoke a large male ape into mistreating a smaller female ape, or even smashing in the heads of its offspring. You may entice death with the single push of a button, rape by the minute adjustment of a dial. You have mapped out the markers in their very brains, you have memorized all the chemicals released during aggression and what facial expressions best stimulate the flow of chemicals, the firing of antagonistic neurons.

In short, you know what these apes are thinking, and you know how to generate thoughts in their skulls. In a short time, you and your colleagues are masters in this fine art of manipulation. The apes do not stand a chance against you.

At any given moment you can perform a sweeping MRI scan of primate brain functions and instantly compare genetic mapping to the sleeping brain, the aroused brain, and the neural network computers can even aid your own high IQ in leaping to proper conclusions.

With the flip of a switch your technology can even reward the apes when they have performed in an especially barbaric expression, thus training them generationally to respond favorably to brain chemical releases related precisely to simian barbarity.

This is like shooting fish in a barrel. And comparatively speaking, you are like a god to these low-brow hominids. These low-brow barbarians are real dummies.

Several years into your study you note something very odd. It would appear that a very few of these apes of low intelligence somehow discern your presence. They cannot see you, nor any other members of your team, but somehow they know.

They know you are here, among them. They somehow sense your manipulation.

There is a certain glint in their eyes. When you seat yourself on one side of these different apes they somehow track you, maybe after a few moments, but they do know you are there. Somehow.

Soon you are deciphering messages from these different apes to other apes, talking in their low way that they have discerned your presence. They are warning each other about you and your team.

Scanning them, these significant apes, you produce no quantitative difference of brain data, especially not in genetic markers. These different apes are no brighter than their comparatively blind brothers and sisters.

Yet, somehow, they...know.

It spooks you and your associates, how the different apes seem to know when you are tracking them, or scanning them, or enticing them. You even begin to collect data on how these other apes resist you at times, deciding courses of action different than what you are pushing upon them.

You and your team apply yourself to the problem. You begin to formulate scenarios to overcome these other apes, to wipe them out, or when that fails, to at least circumnavigate their aggressive resistance.

These other apes are your enemies.

In truth, that is a gross exaggeration. These apes and their extra knowledge, their resistance to your manipulation, they are no real problem to your mission, because these apes have very little success in passing on their knowledge to the other hominids, and even those that accept the warnings of the significant apes, forget very soon, or twist the knowledge into fables.

But it irks you. The pathetic arrogance of these apes, to challenge the very gods set against them. You check yourself. You laugh nervously. You didn’t actually mean to think of it that way, that you are a deity, and that these stupid, violent animals are in some fashion supposed to worship you.

That these stupid, violent animals are somehow people. The thought is absurd. The concept crude and disgusting.

The actuality is, of course, that many of your colleagues have begun to enjoy the mission. They place bets on various