Metaphor 9 - The Wise Hunter

In a church I once attended, we had a Texan who hunted animals for a hobby.

One day, some boys from the church entreated him to take them with him on a hunt. But he was a very wise hunter, who knew that one just doesn’t take anyone on a hunt, because it can be a dangerous business and it has to be done quietly if any game is to be taken.

So before the hunt, he left the boys in a field and told them he would be back in a while to begin the hunt with them. Then he went off to a place where he could remain out of sight, but still observe the boys. And sure enough, boys being boys, and time being time, restlessness set in and they started making noise, and even firing their rifles at ant hills and other nearby inanimate targets. And so the Texan came back and told them he had witnessed their undisciplined behavior and the hunt was off.

If we can conceive of a Supreme Being, who is a Creator, and who has created for His own highest happiness some self-aware, responsible beings who have free will, then we can perfectly well imagine this Supreme Being putting His new Creatures to such a test as that described above.

It is a test to find out what the responsible creatures will do with their free will. Will they retain the Creator as their right and proper contemplation and so retain a character inoffensive to that Creator? Or will they change their character to one unlike that of their Creator and thus dethrone Him from His right and proper place in their hearts?

Our blindness, deafness, deadness, and loneliness would strongly indicate that the first people failed that test, and that their failure has become our heritage in the part of us that is Chicagoland. Being responsible self-programming beings, the first people in effect changed Chicagoland Version 1.0 into Version 1.1, and in the process introduced a profound and global failure into it.

And with these latest metaphors we have now arrived at a foundational notion of what might be meant by the idea of original sin, which is very nearly the hardest concept for modern people to accept.

Some of you, having come this far with me, may here say "Okay, we as a species in the Chain of Being have gone haywire and become unable to perceive our Creator. So what? Why doesn’t God just leave us alone? We leave Him alone don’t we?" Or more likely "Why don’t we all just get along?"

That’s the subject of my next metaphor.