Bound by more than binaries.

One anxiety in our culture is that computers will eventually rule the world -- some day they will make all our decisions for us. This fear surfaces in science fiction stories and on the editorial pages of newspapers in response to events such as Deep Blue's triumph at chess. Although most of us do not truly believe computers will take over the world, we do not like even the possibility.

Computers are binary systems. Every choice is broken down into a 0-1, on-off, yes-no function. There are no grey areas, no half-ways, no maybes. As a result, most of us do not want computers, with their black-and-white outlook, controlling the complexities, ambiguities and paradoxes of human life.

Ironically, the binary system we associate with computers was around long before the first silicon chip was ever etched. Throughout most of history, people have believed in a black-and-white, 0-1, right-or-wrong code of morality. Skipping church on Sundays was wrong. Sex before marriage was wrong. Homosexuality was wrong. Disobeying your husband or your parents was wrong.

As our technology has moved closer to a binary view of the world, however, our society has moved away from it. Most of us now believe life cannot be captured in this way. Morality is more often seen as a spectrum, not as an either-or proposition -- and, more and more, where we draw the "line" on the spectrum seems arbitrary.

Sex is the easiest example to use because it has probably caused more controversy over the past hundred years than any other issue. Sex used to be black and white, with clear lines. Especially if you were female and middle-class, you followed a proscribed code of behaviour and rules. Now, though, a lot of those rules don't seem to make much sense.

A friend of mine tells a great story about a time when a group of us went camping. Talking with his mother afterwards, he discovered she had not realized the tents had been mixed, boys and girls.

"But I told you we were having pillow fights and trading backrubs and stuff, didn't I?" he asked. She nodded.

"And you knew we were in our pyjamas then, didn't you?" Again she said yes.

"OK, let me get this straight," he said. "As long as we are conscious, we can be in the same tents in our pyjamas and everything, and that's not a problem. But as soon as we are unconscious, we have to be separated."

The line deciding when girls and guys should be separated seems arbitrary -- even silly.

And, let's face it, there's a lot more to sex than just "sex." We can go a long way without ever actually having sex. At what point does sex become wrong? And why that point? Why are the actions up to that point somehow different than the actions after that point?

A lot of people will answer, Well, we have to draw the line somewhere. But why? And why there? And if it's that arbitrary, why draw it at all? Or why not decide our own arbitrary lines?

Our church has to answer these questions about issues broader than sex if it is to be relevant to today's generation and today's society. Most of us would recoil in horror at the idea of living with a computer's black-and-white rules. We have to come up with a system of morality that is flexible enough to meet the paradoxes of life but that can explain why this action is "right" while that action is "wrong."

Our faith leads us to the conviction that right and wrong exist and are relevant. However, reducing that faith to binaries, to zeros and ones, makes us nothing more than computers.