That post about WWJD? got me thinking a bit more about the importance of questioning. One of the paths I started thinking down involved search engines, and how they have become such an important part of how we find information nowadays. I’ve heard plenty of talk about it as a technology, but almost none about it as a metaphor for a change happening in our culture.
In that other post, I put forward the idea that maybe religions aren’t there to answer our questions, so much as they are to help articulate them. It’s interesting to think about how search engines are training millions of people all over the world to construct and use “queries” and how by asking the right questions, in the right way in the right places, all the doors are thrown open to you. Of course, on the internet, once you ask Jeeves one question, you end up asking him another and another and another. So maybe a religion is, in some sense, a search engine. It doesn’t actually do anything by itself. And it doesn’t give you the answers. All it can do is connect you to the sources, but only if you’re asking the right questions.
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