Our Spiritual Heritage: A Guest Post by Erin Hicks Moon

There are days when I really miss MySpace.

I grew up on the newborn Internet. We had Prodigy, dial-up, Internet Relay Chat. Our family computer lived in the kitchen, and our household was a battleground for supremacy between talking on the telephone and AOL Instant Messenger. In 2003, being chronically online meant you had a MySpace page where you passive-aggressively rotated your Top 8 Friends and spent untold hours customizing your page with the perfect wallpaper and music. The Internet, in all its feral glory.

One of my absolute favorite thing was MySpace quizzes. Dozens of inane questions like:

If you could plan your last meal, what would you pick?

What’s your most annoying habit?

When was the last time you cried?

If you could go back in time, where would you visit?

What’s your silly fear?

The quizzes would start out pretty tame, but soon they revealed their true purpose: they were meant to send a very specific message to your crush.

Have you ever had a crush on your best friend?

Would you kiss anyone on your friend list?

When was the last time you had your heart broken?

Do you believe in love at first sight?

Would you ever take one of your exes back?

Have you ever been in love with someone who didn’t love you back?

You get the picture. The idea was to craft your answers in a way that would pique the interest of the person you liked, but not so much so that if they didn’t feel the same, you could cower behind the armor of your vagueness. If your crush filled one out, you’d comb it for untold nuggets like their favorite book (“You’re reading Walden? That’s so amazing. I love Walden.”) or information regarding whether they preferred lips or eyes. (“Brown eyes for me.”)

The questions, silly and insipid as they were, were meant to help anyone who came to your MySpace page learn more about you. To find out what made you tick. They offered your visitors a glimpse into what you liked, what annoyed you, why you did certain things. Like a weird little shorthand now lost to time.

But questions have always done this. When we meet new people, we ask them where they’re from, what they do. We go on dates, we ask questions to get to know the other person: what do you do in your free time, is your family normal, how do you like your steak? When we pick up our kids from school, we ask them how their day has been, what did they eat for lunch, was anyone a jerk today?

It’s all in service to getting to know the other person. To better understanding them. And it’s interesting that there’s one arena where questions tend to be taboo. Questioning God is where we draw the line.

Those in religious power don’t like questions because honest answers will sometimes chip away at their strength. Those who don’t doubt or prosecute their faith get uncomfortable because they might be forced to face a hard truth. For all the ways our society is built on the give and take of questions, posing questions about faith and religion is met with disdain at best and accusations of heresy at worst. When we assume a posture of curiosity around our beliefs, not quite accepting what we’ve been told, we’re often ostracized and demeaned. But questioning God, being honest about doubts are the ways we form a stronger bond with the same God we’re cross-examining.

Questions and doubts are our spiritual heritage. We’re not asked to fall in line like robots. The wrestling, the questioning: it’s not the problem. It’s the point.