This question assumes that faith is related to external events and that believing means things will work out properly in the life of the believer. As such this question is a parody on both faith and life.

Life is not fair. It is full of cruelty and pain. Good people die young. Scoundrels live to ripe old age. Despots thrive, idealists perish.

Faith is not a good luck charm. Believing does not provide life insurance or assurance.

Faith means that we live in trust that God is life calling us to live, God is love calling us to love, and that God is the ground of Being giving us the courage to be all that we were meant to be. Faith means we do not engage in pious self-deception. It means that we walk boldly into the unknown. It means we transform the present with a vision of the reign of God.

Only worshipers of an idol of their own wish fulfillment could ask this particular question in the way it is posed. Only one who uses faith as a drug against reality could answer it in this form.

I doubt if it will change it much. All it demonstrates is that religion is important to a significant part of the American population and no serious candidate for the presidency will ignore that block of voters. Hot button issues like abortion and homosexuality have been used primarily by the Republicans to bind working class Roman Catholics and Evangelical Protestants to their banner.

God, however, is not in the service of any party and the excessive religious claims of Republicans, particularly on such issues as Terri Schiavo, the war, and limiting the availability of approved birth control medications and attempts to amend the Constitution to discriminate against homosexual people has already convinced most Americans that they do not want either party pretending that their policies and God’s policies are identical.

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There is a vast difference between the experience of God and the explanation of that experience. God cannot be captured in human words, but human concepts of God can be.

Those concepts are, however, always time warped and time bound as all things are when reduced to words. If one does not question, doubt and challenge his or her own faith assertions and creedal affirmations, then one becomes an idolater. God becomes little more than our own creation.

The Bible is a human explanation of the God experience, first of the Jews, then of the Christians. The Bible is, therefore, not the “Word of God” in any literal sense. It is a human creation. So are the creeds, doctrines, dogmas and traditions of the Christian Church. The idea that anyone would suggest that it is inappropriate to question these human concepts lies somewhere between the ridiculous and the absurd.

Only people and institutions fearful of the adequacy of their version of truth would suggest otherwise.