On Sun, 29 Sep 2002, Reggie Bautista wrote: > Here's an analogy I've heard: Imagine a statue the size of the entire > United States. Imagine that this statue is incredibly detailed. You can > spend your whole life studying the details of one small area, maybe > occasionally stepping back to get a bigger picture view. But the further > back you stand, the less detail you see. > > I think the point of this analogy is that there are a lot of different > beliefs, a lot of different ways of believing, but maybe all beliefs (or > most, or at least many) are simply describing details from different parts > of the statue.
The natural consequence of the metaphor, however, is that the God of any given theism is just a way of describing one of these miniscule details. To then project that God as a definition of the entire statue would be a theistic fallacy, but that is what theists do as a rule in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions. Marvin Long Austin, Texas Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, & Ashcroft, LLP (Formerly the USA) "Two bits, four bits, six bits, a peso. If you're for Zorro, stand up and say so!" _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
