Facial recognition app for sheep and goats

Separating the sheep from the goats…

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Disciple: What’s the meaning of the parable of sheep and goats?

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Priest: Sheep, by their meek and docile behavior, shall inherit God’s kingdom. Goats, however, are more aggressive and independent and are sent to the other place.

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Disciple: So God can tell a sheep from a goat.

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Priest: Of course. He has an app on his smartphone. He points the phone camera at the applicants and the app makes a decision on who can enter the kingdom, or not.

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Voice-over
There really IS an app for smartphones to distinguish between sheep faces at least. Here. Surely there are ne’er-do-wells even among sheep?

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Easter Island Moai

Two stone statues discuss what happened to the humans who created them.

Big Moai: There were trees here at one time. Then people came. They cut down trees to grow vegetables. They cut down trees to make fishing boats. They cut down trees to make rollers to carry us stone statues here.
Little Moai: No more trees?
Big Moai: No more trees. Wind blows the soil into the sea. No more vegetables. No more trees to make fishing boats.

Little Moai: No more people?

Big Moai: No more people. Just us. Gods don’t need vegetables, don’t need fish.

Little Moai: They created us, they believed in us, we destroyed them. Funny old world.

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Voiceover
A resource parable. Easter Islanders used their resources for food and for erecting their religious statues. Had they restricted their tree cutting to clearing just enough land for food and fishing boats, left trees for shelter, and not cut trees for rolling the statues, they might have survived. Perhaps the religion they created helped destroy their society.*

This may be germane to modern progress. The world’s population just hit 7 billion. Resources did not run out according to Malthusian predictions at 2 or 4 or 6 billion. It’s not to say that the ingenuity of our species will continue to find new resources or new ways of solving conflicts. Any of our activities could tip us into the extinct bucket: shopping, traveling, religion.

*Of course there are many other possible reasons why the Easter Island population declined. However, there’s the bones of good parable here.
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Starfish story

Father O’Hara is going into parable mode with Elizabeth, an economics student.

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Father O’Hara: Do you know the starfish story, then?

Elizabeth: Aah… it’s got to be one with a metaphor or a moral to it, it’s probably a PARABLE, or you wouldn’t be setting out to tell me, right?

Father O’Hara: Just listen. There’s a boy walking along the beach and he sees thousands of starfish washed up by the tide. They’re stranded, see, and then the boy sees this man who’s throwing the starfish one by one back into the sea. And the boy asks, why you doing that, it won’t help, there are thousands of them stranded here. And the man picks up another starfish and throws it into the water, and says, “Well, it helped THAT one.”

Elizabeth: Something like what Zig Ziglar meant when he said, “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.”

 Father O’Hara: Not quite the same. What the man did in the starfish story was altruistic. What’s implicit in the Ziglar observaton is the idea that some people who you have helped might help you in the future.

Elizabeth: Possibly, possibly.

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Voice-over

There are more than 50 parables in the New Testament alone. That probably means there are thousands of parables from other reefs scattered along the Beach of Theology.

Parable: a story whose sum is greater than that of its parts?

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