[Platt] I'm still confused about the difference between metaphorical and literal.
[Arlo] I can address your question in more depth when I return home Monday (am visiting family). I posted this passage from Pirsig recently to Ham, perhaps it can offer some help here. "To use an Oriental metaphor, it is just another finger pointing toward the moon. The static language of the Metaphysics of Quality will never capture the Dynamic reality of the world but some fingers point better than others and as the world changes, old pointers and road maps tend to lose their value. Religious orthodoxy is composed of old pointers. Classical science is now an old road map, and modern science keeps looking for new ones. It is this looking for new pointers, not the pointer itself, that is the essence of Dynamic philosophy." (MOQ Summary, Pirsig) In this sense, there is no "One True God", or "One True Philosophy". There are only "maps". And when seen this way, a fundamental shift occurs, stated in the adage "it is not the destination, but the journey". "Literalists" argue over "which God" said "Thou shall not kill". "Metaphorists" see the "name of God" to be a cultural, situated metaphor. Asking "is Christianity right and Islam wrong?" is like asking (to paraphrase Pirsig) "are polar coordinates right and Cartesian coordinates wrong?". In many ways, I'd argue, the "Deist" movement was a modern, Western movement away from "literalization" and towards metaphor. From Wikipedia, "Deists typically reject supernatural events (prophecy, miracles) and divine revelation prominent in organized religion, along with holy books and revealed religions that assert the existence of such things. Instead, deists hold that religious beliefs must be founded on human reason and observed features of the natural world, and that these sources reveal the existence of one God or supreme being." (And, if I recall, some have made the argument that the "founders" may have been Deists rather than Christians. Whether that's accurate or not, I can't say.) The Deist movement had its failings, however, and I think this is in part because it never was able to see itself as "metaphor" (just every other tradition). As such, it said "all this is just an analogy, except this statement". The MOQ, I think, drops that and would say "all this is just an analogy, including this statement". moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
