I recall several years ago talking to a devout Christian about Hinduism and their pantheon of deities and the various incarnations of each and what not. She suddenly stopped me and emphatically disagreed that the religion is inherently flawed. I initially assumed she figured Hinduism was flawed because they don't believe in Jesus (though many sects of Hinduism consider Jesus to be an incarnation of Krishna). Turned out that she simply did not understand how their entire vast pantheon is really the incarnation of one deity. I remember her saying something like : "It just seems so silly that Krishna, Siva, and Brahma are all Vishnu. Why would they be different gods and yet the same god?" I explained to her that she already understood the concept, and that the same concept existed in her own faith as well : God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are all separate and the same. And that is how two people of differing beliefs (though I am not Hindu, I just like studying religions) made an accordance.
Essentially the idea of the Christian Trinity was already a concrete concept to her. Where the Hindu pantheon was rather preposterous and unfamiliar. Her own concept of the Trinity was used a metaphor to understand the Hindu pantheon. Though she doesn't have to convert to Hinduism she now has an understanding of their belief structure.
The question that really exists right now is : is it necessary for social hatred to exist? Exactly what good does it produce? We all have roughly the same idea on many thing, just same ideas are a little different from another. For instance, is it necessary for Communists and Democracies to hate one another? In their own way both believe in equality of individuals, albeit each has different means of construing this equality. Is it necessary for Red Sox fans to hate Yankee fans? (Something I have to deal with everyday). Both groups like football! What exactly is the problem? Or is it necessary for Mac and PC users to hate one another? They both use computers, but the OS so happens to be a bit different.
But a funny thing arises in many social interactions when context of origin is removed, i.e. away from homeland : differences tend to disappear. A Yankee fan may hate a Red Sox fan at a sports bar in New England, but if the two encounter one another in Germany they will probably buy one another drinks and happily discuss football. Sometimes context is not necessary at all. For instance, anytime I encounter another Patrick we tend to act like good buds, though we may have just met (this happened at work the other day).
That is the gripping aspect of metaphors : they allow us to achieve an understanding and accordance with something that is unfamiliar or foreign to us. Metaphors can do that because of a certain similarity between the unknown and known, and the unknown is made agreeable via a concrete concept, i.e. the metaphor. A Yankee fan may be foreign and, therefore, disagreeable. But once we are no longer in America we realize that that little difference doesn't matter, we are both American and we like football! (I must stress here that I don't actually like football).
Metaphors allow us to have flexible notions of reality and, therefore, a flexible world view. They allow for mutual understanding, as the function of metaphors are to provide an understanding of the unknown through something that is already known. They potentially allow us to understand one another, regardless of our differences.
Inflexibility in our conceptions of reality typically results in mutually indoctrinated hatred and looks a little bit like :
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