Blind Women and the Elephant

Why would there be different systems of belief to describe the divine?  It may be helpful to think of different religions attempts to describe God by using the Indian legend of the blind women (and men) and the elephant.

A group of blind women and men are all led into a room with an elephant, which they examine using their hands. Afterward, they have a disagreement about what an elephant will is like.

“An elephant is long and slender like a snake” said one who felt the trunk.

‘No’ said another who felt an ear and claimed, “an elephant is long flat like a big fan”.

Another blind person reported “the elephant was like a big tree” after he felt the leg.

Others described the elephant as a rope (the tail), a wall (the body) and a spear (the tusk).

Each blind women and man, with conviction, felt that they knew the true feature of the elephant - only because each of them was narrowly focused on the part that they were exposed to.

Perhaps religions are like this too. Like the blind person who each felt a different part of the elephant each religion identifies a specific part of the divine and mistakes it for the whole of God thinking the others are wrong. If this is true, then the different monotheistic religions are united by the attempt to describe and express human beings’ relationship with the divine.

  z