Reply #36: ok, try this [View All]

[DonCoquixote]

We know that when we talk about "fairy tales" that we do not expect them to be literally true. Some may be based on something that happened, others may have been nothing more than the telling of Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers Grimm, however, the truth and morals that the stories illustrate are patterns that show themselves again and again. For example,"the Emperor's New Clothes" As far as I know, there was never a literal emperor that got tricked into believing in invisible thread, and thus, walked down a street naked. Not that History is not full of rulers who were indeed, that crazy and worse, from Caligula to King Ludwig of Bavaria to Kim il-Jung.. However, if you read the tale, you will read that the way the "tailors" pulled their heist off was to convince people that anyone that could not see the thread was either stupid, or incompetent for his job. This, all the learned men and noble ladies bought into this, and at the end of the tale, only one person bothers to call out the lie.

Now, is the "Emperor's New Clothes" literal fact, no. Is it a pattern that plays itself again and again, proven by experience, oh yes. So, fairy tales can illustrate a spiritual truth, in that there is no way to use empirical data to measure whether the "Emperor's New Clothes" phenomena is real, but any read through a history book, or for that matter, the daily news, will show hard evidence that this "pattern" makes itself manifest, again and again. Now, the Social Scientists will try to boil this sort of thing down into things like "archetypes" or "memes" and indeed, perhaps one day we will be able to map out human behavior the way we do stars in the sky, but right now, we are not anywhere near that point.

Does this mean that we should tell science to hang, no, but it does acknowledge the fact that, at the moment, we cannot lay out our life like coordinates on a Cartesian plane, so we have to use estimates, which, in the end, is all any myth is. But to bring up your question again, I humbly define spiritual truths as:

"Aspects of our existence that, at the moment, cannot be proven or measured with empirical means, but nonetheless manifest themselves in our lives consistently."