The Donkey and the Tiger, Revisited
I published this at Lew Rockwell, and I think it has relevancy here, both in terms of our churchly institutions as well as what it means to confess.
I have no ideas where this fable comes from. It sounds like a kind of homage to Aesop. It may have been sage advice in the previous age when reason held sway, but in our day and age of postmodernism, its advice is wrong.
The story goes like this:
The donkey told the tiger, “The grass is blue.”
The tiger replied, “No, the grass is green.”
The discussion became heated, and the two decided to submit the issue to arbitration, so they approached the lion.
As they approached the lion on his throne, the donkey started screaming: ′′Your Highness, isn’t it true that the grass is blue?”
The lion replied: “If you believe it is true, the grass is blue.”
The donkey rushed forward and continued: ′′The tiger disagrees with me, contradicts me and annoys me. Please punish him.”
The king then declared: ′′The tiger will be punished with 3 days of silence.”
The donkey jumped with joy and went on his way, content and repeating ′′The grass is blue, the grass is blue…”
The tiger asked the lion, “Your Majesty, why have you punished me, after all, the grass is green?”
The lion replied, ′′You’ve known and seen the grass is green.”
The tiger asked, ′′So why do you punish me?”
The lion replied, “That has nothing to do with the question of whether the grass is blue or green. The punishment is because it is degrading for a brave, intelligent creature like you to waste time arguing with an ass, and on top of that, you came and bothered me with that question just to validate something you already knew was true!”
The moral of this fable is given as:
The biggest waste of time is arguing with the fool and fanatic who doesn’t care about truth or reality, but only the victory of his beliefs and illusions.
Never waste time on discussions that make no sense. There are people who, for all the evidence presented to them, do not have the ability to understand.
Others who are blinded by ego, hatred and resentment, and the only thing that they want is to be right even if they aren’t.
When IGNORANCE SCREAMS, intelligence moves on.
However, we do not live in an age of reason. And so this advice is no longer sound. For in our postmodern world, those who say that a woman is a woman (“the grass is green”) are indeed being punished by being silenced, while those who say that women can be men (“the grass is blue”) are nominated for, and placed into, positions of power to run our lives into confusion and tyranny. They become the lions to whom we bring our cases for adjudication, as well as college professors, deans, and administrators who influence our students and silence our truth-telling tigers.
The lions of our age should reward truth telling (the tiger) and punish those who uphold falsehood (the donkey) instead of the other way around. The tigers need to confess that which is true even in the face of punishment.
When objective truth is silenced in favor of subjective confusion, civilization falls into chaos.
The real fool in this parable is the lion. He is either a useful idiot or a malevolent spirit.