Defeating the Elephant and the Blind Man parable: "The elephant story casts a vision of harmonious spirituality, a world community in which people of different faiths acknowledge that God is a veiled mystery toward whom we all reach but do not fully grasp—a community in which we might have different opinions about the divine, but those differences don’t mean that we are right and others are wrong, a community in which we all acknowledge that God is far bigger than our disagreements about him. The story envisions a future in which religious people choose unity over division, community over conflict, dialog over division. It is a powerful vision in a world rent by political and often religious discord. And yet when confronted by a popular story of this sort it sometimes pays to ask the question: Why do people love it? Why does it have so much traction? Does it seem plausible to so many because it is truly persuasive or is it seen as plausible not because it persuades but because it affirms already existing cultural values or ideas? There are a number of problems with the story itself. The stated moral of the story seems to be that everyone is right in part but no one is right in full so we should all get along…but that’s not really what the story says. There is someone who is entirely right and correct in the story. Who is it? The “wise man”. And everyone else, anyone who claims to “know” the elephant, “know God” is wrong. The wise man, the in the story, actually makes a bold and startling claim. Every religion sees part of God, but they are blind to the fullness of God that we see—the wise man is able to correct the blind men because he sees the entire elephant and therefore knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that the others only see part. So really, those who adopt that story as true are claiming to know the fullness of God in a way that enables them to say that the truth claims of other religions are only partly true—and partly false. How can you know that unless you yourself claim to possess the truth about God to which all others are blind? Now, it’s fine for the wise man to make that claim (we Christians do the same) but it is interesting that the claim is disguised as an appeal to tolerance and diversity when in fact it is a radical claim to possess the absolute truth about God in a unique way—a claim that sets those who adopt it in conflict with every other religion on the face of the earth."
Posted on: Wed, 10 Jul 2013 12:29:52 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015