Plurationalist Dialogue 308, "Why Is God Apparently Silent?”

The reasoning theists, atheists, liberals, libertarians, & conservatives of Secular Bible Study, First Minneapolis Circle of Reason, Circle of Ijtihad, & Winnipeg Circle of Reason join Interbelief Conversation Café for our 308th Plurationalist (Interbelief Reasoning) Dialogue by Zoom, “Why Is God Apparently Silent?"

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” was one of the most compelling expressions of Man’s pain at the apparently personal abandonment by that which weaves our fates. But Jesus supposedly had an out: He was able to ask that question of himself.

What, then, about the rest of us?

Whom do we ask to speak for God, if God himself is, at least in the present day, passing on the option of public dialogue, and deciding to instead just listen?

Would God even allow himself the option of publicly appearing and talking to us anymore? In a world of immediately-recorded and permanently-accessible social media, would not God’s vocal intervention deprive us human beings of our choice to live in our world as if we had just our one evident shot at healing it?

Why, for example, in the movie screenplay “Oh, God!” did George Burns, playing God, make sure nobody in the courtroom was left with any independent evidence or record of his appearance to them, and of his testimony on behalf of his modern-day “Moses” (played by John Denver)?

What rationale would an all-powerful God have to create a universe and then entirely step back to passively see it run? Would his rationale become more evident, or less evident, if the Universe he created was, as in the opinion of Presbyterians, predestined -- where our “free will” to alter its destiny was merely an illusion?

Why would God seek to intervene in human affairs if the Universe in which we live already arboreally elaborates, in the opinion of “Many Worlds” physicists, as parallel timelines over which every possible outcome happens simultaneously? How could God respond to our questions about our future, or even selectively reward only the saints and punish only the sinners, when each one of us is both forgiven saint AND damned sinner?

Would a non-Deist God have a rationale to choose to intervene, in person and openly, doing so repeatedly throughout past history, but in the modern media era choose to never do so again? Or would God find a way to both give us free will, and in doing so agree to forever afterward hide his voice from us, to allow us to keep our freedom?

Is God, rather than a constructor of the human mind, a construction of the human mind? And, then, being so, being only able to speak to us through us? For example, are the moral codes that God (or gods) set in stone for us actually all that good? Is even one of our moral codes, so numerous across this planet, actually an objective moral code, or are they all subjective? Shouldn’t the creator of the universe’s objective laws of physics at least have been able -- and willing -- to offer us even just one objective ethical code? Was an objective morality too much to ask to be voiced, or even to be exemplified, by a God of bloody, expired Old Covenants and of burnished, but still armored, New Covenants? Or would God’s so-called objective moral code, if ever “dictated to us” directly from on high, steal from our own hands our right to finally grow enough as a species to be able to fashion one ourselves?

What if God were to speak, but tell us that his “objective” morality is to kill his non-believers? Or to kill those who refuse to believe such an order by God is even moral, and who choose to go to Hell instead, to minister to the other damned? Is such a conundrum perhaps not a reason for any god to remain silent, if His (or Her, or Their) existence manifests in the way we humans have previously speculated?

Were God to not be silent, what would God order us to adopt politically, economically, and culturally? Theocracy? Libertarianism? Anarchy? Kingdoms? Communes? Tax-&- Spend Democratic Constitutional Republics? Republic of Gilead-like Christian Dominions? White-Straight-Male-Racist-Misogynist-Incel Hegemony? “Religious Secular Humanists” who now become the ones who ostracize the Atheist Secular Humanists? Religious “Interfaith Pluralists” who will continue to ostracize Religious Conservatives and Atheist Progressives? Would a God worthy of the title perhaps not want to speak about what we should do with ourselves, and how we should express our worldviews to each other -- because to be worthy of having created us, God might then want us to figure out for ourselves how best we “can all just get along,” and so wait for us, with infinite patience, until we do?

At 7-9 pm CST Mo 2/16/26 by Zoom we'll reasoningly share our diverse or even disparate views on why a director might stay backstage when “all the world’s a stage.” Our reasoning dialogue’s agreements of open-mindedness, acceptance, curiosity, discovery, sincerity, brevity, & confidentiality should help us put some words in God’s mouth, if not in each other’s.