the timboucher experience

Earlier, I noticed an ad on the side of my blog with the title “God like an elephant.” Turns out the site is actually some kind of Christian site, trying to convert people. Not surprising. I seem to get a lot of those types of ads on my site, where they are non-specifically spiritual and triggered by related words I am using in a horrendousaly different context.

The weird part of these ads is that when you look at their sites, they aren’t even selling anything. They are just trying to convince you to commit your heart and soul to Jesus. They are spending money without expecting an obvious return. I mean, if you looked through their site, you could probably find SOMETHING to buy, but it’s not obvious. Perhaps its just bad site design and business practice. Thats definitely part of it with a lot of these sites… But the thing is that they really seem to want to just preach to you and that’s it. Maybe once you’re converted that’s when you give them the money.

I’m trying to figure the whole thing out without necessarily reverting to the explanation that they “really do want to save my soul.” I certainly appreciate the sentiment, but nobody can or should do that but me.

In any event, the page linked by the ad is a revisiting of the old story of the blind men and the elephant. The story goes, quickly, that one guy touched the elephants trunk and says, “It’s a snake!” and the next guy touches the tail and says, “No, it’s a rope!” and one guy touches the leg, and is like, “No, it’s a tree trunk!” Oh, I forgot to mention that they’ve never seen an elephant and have no idea what one is. People often use this story to justify the validity of all religions. The point is that each person or group perceives the divine according to images which they know and understand based on their cultural context. And since cultures are different, depictions of the divine are different. To me, this is a perfectly cromulent image.

But it is just that, an image. This site tries to take the metaphor one step farther, to the point where it breaks.

…[A]ll four blind men are, in fact, mistaken. It is an elephant and not a wall or a rope or a tree or a snake. Their opinions are not equally true — they are equally, and actually false. At best, such an analogy of religious pluralism would show that all religions are false, not true.

First of all, this is bunk, and I’ll explain why in a second… I hear this argument all the time that all religions are fake and merely used to control people. But I don’t believe that. Sure, people do bad things with stories, but its much more complex and interesting than all that.

Then they go on to talk about how if some guy were to come along who could actually see and who knew about elephants, then the blind guys should listen to him. Basically, they are saying that “guy who could see” was Jesus and he revealed the nature of God to us. Fine. But, in keeping with our analogy here, the only way which Jesus could explain to us what God/The Elephant looks like is by describing it in terms which we already know and understand. We are the blind men, so he would have to say things to us like, “He has a long nose like a snake, and a great round belly like a barrel, and his skin is rough like sand-paper and his legs are like tree-trunks and his tail is like rope.” While this is all true, none of the blind men are actually going to be able to construct an accurate visual image of what “God” really looks like. They are just going to have a weird jumbled beast in their head which is actually not even as accurate as a caricature of what the elephant really looks like.

And for the blind men, should they give up the search for the truth because some other guy told them what it looked like? No, they should keep going, and they should take into account what he said, and compare notes with the other blind guys, and above all, they should trust their own experience and their own intuition. It may be ultimately just as wrong as the conglomerate image the sighted man told them, but at least its theirs.

• God & the Burden of Proof
• More monkey business
• God Brand
• Evidence for God?
• Buddhist Nirvana & the Apocalypse