The parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant goes something like this: A group of blind men approach an elephant. They decide to feel it in order to understand what kind of animal it is. One feels the ear, and concludes "It is like a fan!" Another feels the leg, and claims "It is like a tree!", a third the tail: "It is like a rope!" And so on. The moral of the story is supposed to be that the elephant represents God (or possibly Truth), and that each of our religions represents a sincere but incomplete (and therefore incorrect) understanding of what God is like. The message of the parable is that religious pluralism is true, that the world religions all get a piece of the puzzle and are equally true. (A longer version of the parable is available here.)

There are a few fundamental problems with this parable. First, belief in religious pluralism means that all faiths in the world are wrong, not right … except for religious pluralism, of course. Follow me here: It's logically possible that all faiths are false, but not possible that all are true. Atheists claim that there is no God; religions claim there is. Either there is an elephant, or there isn't! Muslims believe Muhammad was a prophet and all other religions are wrong. Buddhists are also exclusivist. Buddhist teaching excludes Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and all other "exclusive" religious faiths. So the idea of religious pluralism is just as "exclusive" as any other faith: It excludes everyone who's not a pluralist.

Second, the parable fails because it tells us they are looking at an elephant. We know it's not a tree or a fan or a rope. All four are wrong. It's an elephant. The parable assumes we are all blind and have no way of knowing what is really there. Moreover, it assumes that our inquery will be limited and superficial, when in fact it can be broad and indepth.

The emphasis on "seeing" here is appropriate. The blind can approach the elephant and touch it; but only the seeing man can know the elephant as it really is. It's appropriate that Jesus healed the blind to restore their sight: The first thing they saw would have been Jesus Himself looking back at them. As the famous hymn goes: "I once was lost but now am found; Was blind but now I see."