misinterpreted metaphors Options

[boots]

Here's an interesting essay...
http://www.realitysandwich.com/the_resurrection_before_jesus

When you present analogies as living, breathing humans, you actually take away their humanness. Instead of personified ideas, you are left with the ideas of particular persons. This defeats the purpose of the prophecies, which is to educate and empower every individual with the lessons of religion. We spend more time wondering about what particular historical figures might have done when alive than doing what we need to do ourselves. There is a good reason "primitive" societies employed animals and imaginary figments as their gods: those figures couldn't be mistaken as human, so humans would not make the mistake of separating themselves from the rest of the world.

Having faith in a particular value system, and organizing your life around those values, is a noble discipline. But believing those values to be the only way a person should experience reality is the result of spending too much time not actually experiencing the world around you – not traveling, not engaging in conversations with people of other faiths, not being critical of your own faith. This leads to the false righteousness that the prophets of religions spoke against, not in favor of.

Whether or not a historical figure called Christ ever existed is irrelevant. The term "Christ," like the word "Buddha," is significant because it represents the individual who has given up his or her ego in search of something universal.

[dattaswami]

Here's an interesting essay...
http://www.realitysandwich.com/the_resurrection_before_jesus

When you present analogies as living, breathing humans, you actually take away their humanness. Instead of personified ideas, you are left with the ide...... individual who has given up his or her ego in search of something universal.

Only scholars can recognize the metaphor carefully. If you say that a person is like a lion, it is simile. The word “like� acts as the torchlight constantly to separate the person and the lion. In metaphor, we say, “The person is lion�. This misleads ignorant people to think that the person is actually the lion and they think that every lion (person) of the “Lions club� (A club of important persons who serve the people) is actually a lion, which will kill the people! Veda is the greatest poetry of the greatest poet, the God (Kavim Kavinam….Veda). Advaita scholars are also great scholars of all Shastras and they know this figure of speech very well. Alankara Shastra deals with figures of speech. They know the truth very well. But already they are so much intensively attracted by the concept of the soul to be God, that they cannot come out of this sweetest dream in which they get the highest without the least effort!

The dreamer knows that it is only dream but the sweetness is so much that he does not like to come out of it. A scientist is relatively better than such Advaita Scholar, who is caught by the powerful ghost of Mohini, because the scientist thinks himself as an ordinary soul and not God. You may say that the scientist denies God, which is the greatest sin. I agree to it, but if you analyze, even the Advaita scholar is also an indirect atheist. He is denying God apart from himself, which also means an indirect negation of God.

After the establishment of a simile, metaphor is used further in all contexts. A great person is compared to a lion and once this simile is established, the metaphor is used further and every important person is called as the lion. Thus, the lions of the lions club mean the important persons and not the actual cruel animals (lions). Similarly, it is established that the God is compared to soul and the universe is compared to the human body. Therefore, the word soul can stand for God as the word lion stands for the important person. Hence, in Veda the word Atman (soul) is used to mean God in some places. It does not mean that the word soul stands for the actual soul, just like the word lion in the lions club does not stand for the actual lion. At least in the first case the great person and lion are imaginable items and we can use the word ‘great person’ without lion. But in the second case, God is unimaginable and always needs an imaginable item for comparison. This problem becomes more significant when God comes in the form of a soul (human incarnation) where the word soul has to be used as the external cover (Upadhi) to indicate the direct address of God.