Water of Life

Somebody said to me recently, "Clearly you don't understand what a person's faith actually means to him or her. For me," she said, "It's like the water of life."

And I thought, what a great phrase, the water of life, without which, of course, there can be no life. But even the water of life needs to be contained and properly managed or it can run out of control, get into places where it doesn't belong and cause real damage. For example, if the water of life gets together with the water of other people's lives and they form a deluge, a rushing torrent of righteous certainty that sweeps all before it--including reason--well, then it's not so much the water of life anymore, is it? It's rapidly turning into the water of death, as everything in its path is crushed. Original thought, rational inquiry, free speech and their tattered remnants are strewn across the rocks of scripture and blind dogma. What's needed here, obviously, is a dam to contain this water of death, to convert it back into the water of life and give us all a chance to switch on a light bulb in our minds. And that's where secularism comes in. It's everybody's friend, believer and non-believer alike, which I think makes it the real water of life.