The Mackelmore Fallacy and the Elephant in the Room

"Whatever god you believe in
We come from the same one
Strip away the fear, underneath, it's all the same love"

There is a story, more of a parable really, that is quite frequently used in the modern world to describe what is quite possibly the most simultaneously well-intentioned, arrogant and diminutive generalized perspective on "religion".  The parable goes something like this:

There were, walking along the road, a number of kind, old, blind men.  As they traveled together they happened upon a large elephant and began describing the great beast to one another.  "It is long, slender, and flexible," said one man, gently petting the trunk.  "No, it is large, strong, and rough," replied another, holding onto the beast's leg.  "No," said yet another, as he lightly stroked the elephant's ear, "it is soft, and thin, and light; it moves freely like a butterfly."  Still another, grasping the tusks, chimes in, "You are all fools!  It is hard, smooth and very sharp!"

The idea in this amazingly didactic parable is that religion is a single, general, complex and multifaceted entity, and because of this, individual religions and religious perspectives are not so much expressions of truth as they are useful pieces of truth.

This is, I think a major problem in modern (generally secular) religious thought that I believe is fully present in Mackelmore's song Same Love, and although I'm willing to admit I may be reading a perspective I hate into a song over which I feel cautious, doing so because of the perspective's prevalence in the city of Seattle from whence the song comes, I think that within the full context of the song the lines quoted above provide evidence of the perspective.

And, if this perspective is not present in this song, it is quite certainly as virulent as a plague in America and it's still worth talking about.

Just in case you haven't heard the elephant parable before, you may recognize the same perspective as typified in remarks like, "All religions lead to the same place eventually," or "I'd say I'm spiritual, but I try not to isolate myself to one particular tradition."  I don't want to demonize this perspective, but I would like to point out some of its key flaws

1.  The Elephant

The first big elephant in the room with the parable of the blind men and the elephant is, well, the elephant.

The problem is that the moment you typify or symbolize a broad-painted (and thoroughly western) conception of "religion in general" as one entity, you have begun from the individual perspective that there is such a thing as "religion in general" and that, furthermore, all religions are expressing in different ways the same essential essence.

This is a notion that is very easy to romanticize, but it is far too simplistic.

Muslims conceive of God as completely transcendent of humanity, and believe that his goodness lies in his arbitrary decision to make us, to sustain us, and to love us, absent any notion of compulsion and definitively not in any way identified with or existing in any plane of existence we can understand

Christians conceive of the same God as three entities in one entity, a doctrine called absurd by critics that at least one believer has called "so absurd that it must be true."  We believe that the infinite being in whom Muslims and Jews place their faith made himself finite and, what's more, definite in a single person and then assumed that definite (read: human) nature into his own infinite nature.  So the infinite becomes finite and makes the finite infinite while being at once one single being who is three infinite beings who can be defined as not the same thing as one another.

Meanwhile, those who fall under the great variety of traditions and schools normally labeled Hinduism believe that all substances, both visible and invisible, are ultimately one substance, which they call Brahman.  So all finite things are ultimately a part of the infinite reality of all existence, while still remaining definite from one another: after all, within the Hindu conception it is crucial that "atman is brahman", the individual soul is also the world soul...

But this is made explicitly distinct from Buddhist teachings (at least within the Theravada school) that the self does not ultimately exist.  Actually, when you get down to the core of it, Theravada Buddhism insists that what we call existence is only an illusion and that the ultimate reality of all things is that there is no ultimate reality of anything; or, for that matter, any reality of anything, ever.

At the modern edge of all of this, Scientific Atheists like Richard Dawkins tend to insist that the physical universe as we observe it is ultimate reality, and that furthermore that reality is, by the very principles that govern it, multiplied across dimensions into every conceivable possibility that has ever been, well, possible.  There is, understandably, no God in atheism, but there is a radical, beautiful, and sublime cosmology of possibility and instance that firmly deserves consideration within the spectrum of the religious systems it denies

At the very least, can we please acknowledge that the perspective which says that all of these incredibly different perspectives are the same thing is DEFINITELY in and of itself a completely separate perspective?

Furthermore, the "blind men and the elephant" perspective assumes that where the greatest religious and atheist minds of human history have tried their hardest to understand the ultimate meaning (or absence thereof) of all things and come up quite genuinely disagreeing with one another, modern, casual, impious speculation has found the real answer and can see that in the end there is, in fact, an elephant for the blind men to see.

2.  The Blind Men

I don't have much to say on this point, except that the perspective and the metaphor that best exemplifies it is just fundamentally offensive.

"No," says the modern spiritual person to the religious person, "you don't really know what it is that you're talking about.  It's all fine and well that you've spent your life in prayer and contemplation, that you've gone to worship services and dedicated your fear and trembling to the questions of your existence.  As a matter of fact, good for you, so very good for you that what you're doing makes you happy, but really you're like a blind man grasping at a thing that only a lack of commitment can help you understand.

Jesus?  Saladin?  Ashoka?  The Buddha?  All of them were blind men, and even though they disagreed (probably because they were silly enough to endorse individual perspectives) they were really looking at the same thing and apparently just didn't realize it.

Sorry, but this whole model is diminutive.  I am a Christian, others are Muslims, others are Vaishnavites, others Buddhists and others fall under innumerable other categories I cannot list here.  We can all respect one another, hell, we can all believe that maybe we'll all be more or less on good terms, whoever ends up being right.

But we do not have to resort to saying that everyone is wrong and everyone is right to do that.  We can believe, actually believe something that is fundamentally different from something that someone else believes and we can still have respect for one another when we do that.