A Parable

One fine morning, walking down the street, an ugly woman met a man dressed in a fine Italian suit. The ugly woman nodded politely, and the man said to her, "Isn't it beautiful, how the sun revolves around the earth."

"Oh, but it doesn't," the woman replied. "The earth revolves around the sun. It's a proven fact."

Impatiently, the man brushed an imaginary bit of lint off his sleeve. "You are wrong!" he said. The woman was ugly, and dressed in rags – obviously she was morally inferior and unable to discern reality. "Look! You see the sun, rising in the east? Every day it goes across the sky to set in the west. Clearly the sun revolves around the earth!"

"No, look," the woman said, pulling a tattered map of the solar system from her knapsack. "See? This is a scale model of the solar system. See how tiny the earth is in comparison to the sun? See the orbit paths of the planets? The earth revolves on its axis, so we see the sun rising and setting – and the earth itself orbits around the sun."

"Aha!" the man said. He pulled a Bible from his briefcase and scanned to the first chapter of Ecclesiastes. "Look!" he cried triumphantly, pointing to verse five. "Incontrovertible proof that the sun revolves around the earth!"

The woman shook her head. "That's not what it says. It just talks about the sun rising and setting. This…" she pointed at the drawing of the solar system, "… is the model of the solar system."

"Hmmph!" the man exclaimed. He reverently put the Bible back in his briefcase and lifted his nose in the air. "You are obviously a creature of base morals. What would you know?" And he walked down the street, comforted and confident in his own inherent moral and intellectual superiority.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear.