I suspect that the radical right Baptists will soon leave the SBC for their own group. US Religion is mostly about building walls around one's beliefs to keep out the troublemakers: gated communities.
Probably true of all protestants. As soon as they have a minor dispute, they splinter and form new churches. No sooner had Luther nailed his
Ninety-five Theses to the door of All Saints' Church in Wittenberg, then Zwingli and Calvin had set about doing their own thing.
Any word on which religion is the correct one yet?
I like the parable of the three rings for this.
"Nathan when asked by Saladin which
religion is
true: an heirloom ring with the magical ability to render its owner pleasing in the eyes of
God and mankind had been passed from father to the son he loved most. When it came to a father with three sons whom he loved equally, he promised it (in "pious weakness") to each of them. Looking for a way to keep his promise, he had two replicas made, which were indistinguishable from the original, and gave on his deathbed a ring to each of them.
The brothers quarreled over who owned the real ring. A wise judge admonished them that it was impossible to tell at that time – that it even could not be discounted that all three rings were replicas, the original one having been lost at some point in the past; that to find out whether one of them had the real ring it was up to them to live in such a way that their ring's powers could prove true, to live a life that is pleasant in the eyes of God and mankind rather than expecting the ring's miraculous powers to do so. Nathan compares this to religion, saying that each of us lives by the religion we have learned from those we respect."
I also quite like the idiom of the blind men and the elephant for this.
"A group of
blind men (or men in the dark) touch an
elephant to learn what it is like. Each one feels a different part, but only one part. For example, one touches only the side and another touches only the
tusk.
The blind men discover that they disagree when each describes what he has learned from touching the elephant."