More on Imagining the Real

Will Buckingham in his post, Lies in Which Everything is Not False.
has been playing with similar ideas. Closer to mine than Blake's far more daring formula, Everything Possible to be Believ'd is an Image of Truth. While I avoid the question of "truth;" Buckingham is braver. He writes:

According to Wendy Doniger, in the South Sudan storytellers begin their tales with the following intriguing formula. This, by the way, calls for audience participation, and so the lines in bold are the ones spoken by the storyteller, whilst the italicised lines are those spoken by the audience.

This is a story.
Right!
It is a lie.
Right!
But not everything in it is false.
Right!

This, more or less, is how stories begin in the South Sudan

I'm going to skip to the end of his post. You can read the rest on his blog, Think Buddha

This is a Buddhist text.
Right!
It is a lie.
Right!
But not everything in it is false.
Right!

If any reading of a Buddhist text started like this, it would have an interesting and, I think, extremely positive effect. Because to relate a story knowing that it is a lie in which not everything is false is to place an ethical demand upon both the teller and the audience alike. (Italics mine)

This is how I've always read religious texts and demonstrates what's wrong with the kind of categorical dismissals you find in that flurry of militantly atheist books of the past few years--as though there were a power of influence in the texts themselves independent of their readers: a mirror reversal of what the fundamentalist believer in biblical inerrancy would claim! The one denies and the other ignores the responsibility of the reader in our relationship to the text. No text has any power over our lives other than that which we lend to it in the willing surrender of the ground of our experience.