Are we the turkey?

I was visiting with my friend (and fellow PriusChatter) Allan today, and he was talking about a book dealing with how unexpected occurrences change our lives. The book mentions the situation of a turkey: Born on a farm, never having heard of the slaughterhouse, it spends its days peacefully eating, sleeping, and other pleasurable stuff. Two or three times a day a human comes along and gives it food. It does not have to work or search out its food. The human brings it. It learns to trust and love the human, because the human is always kind to it and provides it with everything it needs. The human is the provider of all that is good.

And then one day the human takes it to the slaughterhouse, where another human wrings its neck or slits its throat, and it dies in horrible agony so that (though it never learns this part) other humans can eat its flesh.

God (if you believe in him) created us and gave us life. He created the world we live upon. He provides us with all the bounties of nature and with everything we need to be happy and healthy.

But wait! Nobody has ever come back from the dead. Maybe god is merely fattening our souls for the cosmic slaughter, where beings who see themselves as superior to us, but who will seem like monsters or demons in our eyes, will feat for eternity upon our flesh.

Like the turkey, we revere and worship our provider. Will we find that in the end we were just as deceived as the turkey?

When one truly contemplates possible outcomes, I am glad that I am an atheist.

 

First of all, the turkey is a metaphor. God, being a spiritual being, is not going to literally eat our flesh. We already know that when you die, unless you are left out where animals can get you, you are buried and it's worms and bacteria that eat your flesh. But your flesh is dead by then so what do you care?

My point is that just as the turkey trusts the human because the human feeds it, but that trust is misplaced because the human has intentions that the turkey never suspects, so humans trust and worship god because god gives us this fine green world, but god may well have intentions we do not suspect.

People think that god is good because they are told so, and because (except where there's famine) god provides food. But nobody ever comes back from the dead to tell us what really happens. God might not be a nice guy who loves us, after all. He might be a farmer of souls who will devour our spiritual energy after we die. It would sure make more sense when you look at the state of the world.

If the turkey comes to understand the human's true intentions, he can attempt to escape. Most often, he will fail, and wind up in the slaughterhouse with the rest. But the turkey who trusts the human will have no chance at all. Similarly, an atheist's chances of escape are slim, but at least he can try. A believer will walk willingly into the waiting arms of god to be sucked dry, while an atheist may have one chance in a thousand to elude the divine devourer of souls.

 

Catholics are cannibals. They eat human flesh and drink human blood. Protestants believe in consubstantiation, not transubstantiation, so they are not necessarily cannibals, though of course on an individual basis there may be exceptions.

Turnabout may be fair play, but in this case we know that our flesh rots in the grave, so it's not our flesh we are talking about.

A interesting twist: Catholics eat the flesh of Jesus, but Jesus rose from the grave on the third day, so he's a zombie, as has been pointed out elsewhere. The idea of eating the flesh of a zombie is (pardon the pun!) a very distasteful idea. I'm glad I'm not a Catholic.

Eeeerrrmmmm... what's that again?