MONDAY, 14 MAY 2012
Earlier tonight I wondered how it would be if everyone thought out loud about the big questions: Who am I? Where do I come from? What happens when I die? How did the earth and everything come about?
After thinking that I had answers to most of these questions up to a point in my early twenties, I realised that religion is like having access to a search engine loaded with a particular ideological database. You type in a question, and within seconds you have an answer.
Each religion, of course, has its own database with different answers. There are similarities between the databases of all mainstream Christian denominations, and some more obscure sects have databases with completely different answers.
The point is, it’s fantastic! Can you imagine it? You type a question – and boom! – there’s your answer! Another question … another answer.
The problem kicks in when the search engine breaks down, when it becomes increasingly clear that the database is corrupted, or that the answers are not credible.
This is when the real work begins: to build a database from the ground up.
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