Parables- a problem ?
Are these a problem for people on the spectrum? Its says in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable :
Years ago in religious education class at school we were told the Allegory of the long spoons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_ ... ong_spoons.
We had to write about it. I got bad marks for saying " Why would the bad people be stupid enough not to feed each other?" I wasn't really thinking of any abstract or hidden meaning.
Many people on the spectrum have difficulties with metaphors and parables because they involve making inferences, something spectrum folks often struggle with. I have had to learn how to make inferences and so have my parents and my sister. My NT brother picks up on things quickly. I know plenty of NTs that have trouble making inferences as well.
Not necessarily - parables are often used as a teaching tool, to illustrate a point. They're meant to be fully explained by a teacher. They're not meant to just be dumped on you in isolation. Many of the parables used in religious teaching especially are taught merely as an outline, into which the teacher fits the meanings of that teaching.
Once something is well explained, I doubt autistics would have much more problems than anyone else following the reasoning. But the crucial bit is explaining it, not just letting it stand on its own.
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Alexithymia - 147 points.
Low-Verbal.
Thanks C2V. Interesting to me is I have heard two contradictory views. There is the one you have shared just now and then an opposite point raised in discussion a long time back that Jesus used parables because they were obvious enough that a teacher was not needed to interpret for the audience.
A caution to the second point however is that while many would be very obvious to the people hearing them from Jesus, circumstances change to make the same parable less obvious to a modern audience, viz the tale of the good Samaritan had a big punch to the first audience because they tended to look down on the Samaritans very heavily.
Back in the seventies a recall a few school assemblies where the tale was re-told substituting a contemporary group of people who were held in low esteem by respectable people, I recall "Skinheads" being used in one re-telling of the tale; today I could feel sorely tempted to re-tell the tale with a woman being the person who fell among theives (or equivalent), Julie Bindell and Germaine Greer would be the ones who "Passed By on the other side of the road" and the person who rendered assistance and went out of their way to help would be a transwoman.
I thought this was about maths
But, no, I am quite good at abstraction and finding patterns, not only in formal stuff like maths, but also in poems, parables and metaphors. I like literature a lot and I also like to analyze it.
Everything needs practice. I guess the natural reaction to a parable - especially when you're younger - is to read it like any other story you know from movies, tv shows or novels, and that is to empathize with the characters and look for logical explanations for their behavior. We are just not used to these kinds of stories.
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