Faith is central to living a good life – it may be faith in God, it may be in science, it may be in those we love. Frankly, I believe in them all even as I appreciate that they are not all exactly the same. And faith in things greater than us is a necessary ingredient in the recipe for a good life. But faith without questions is like a cancer – a force for growth that knows no limits has no regard for anything other than itself.
Examples of cancerous faith, in God and in science, both appeared in today’s news. The fact that the stories hit the net within hours of each other shows, once again, that the issue is not belief vs. no belief, but how we believe. It is how we live the faiths which animate our lives that marks the line between faith that nurtures life and faith that kills.

Crunchy Con blogger, Rod Dreher, posted about the danger of machines taking over the world because of “blind faith in technology” and CNN reports on hundreds of Christians fleeing their homes in Mosul, Iraq following a series of killings and ongoing threats that they should convert to Islam or die. And while the danger he imagines is far less pressing than the one on which CNN reports, it is the absolutism, the intolerance of questions or difference, and the surrender of all other ways of seeing things that creates the problems in each of their stories.
Contrary to what Rod fears and the evidence of the CNN story portrays, technology is not bad and neither is religion. But how we use them may be. So why not abandon them both? How about, because each is a defining feature of our humanity? How about, because both spirituality and science are ultimately about our affirmation that we are all part of something larger than ourselves and we can make a difference in this world working with the skills and information we have inherited.

Both science and faith are like fire. They can heat your home and cook your dinner, or they can burn down the house and kill all those who reside within. Does that mean we should condemn ourselves to raw food and frozen nights, or do we take responsibility for how we used the fires we are blessed to have?
I get Crunchy Con’s fear of giving ourselves over to machines. But I also think that he’s been watching a bit too much Terminator. The real fear should be following anything blindly. And the more you believe in something, the greater the danger is.
So here is a suggestion for the proponents of either strong faith or powerful technology: for every 10 great solutions to life’s challenges that your faith provides, articulate one big challenge/problem created by those wonderful answers of yours. For example, how does reliance on machines diminish human empowerment? And how does passionate faith often twist itself in to “divinely mandated” hatred of others?
Celebrating expansiveness and the sacredness of questions is one of the deep spiritual lessons of Sukkot, the biblical feast recalling the ancient Israelites journey from slavery to freedom, which begins tomorrow night and about which I’ll have more tomorrow. Stay tuned.