I have to go to bed now, but I'd like to leave you with one thing. From an essay I like:
One More Burning Bush - Daylight Atheism
If there is a god such as many religions believe in, then he clearly has the ability to reveal his existence to us – not through some unreliable, subjective inner sense, but through the far more reliable outer ones. Why does God, if he exists, not reveal himself in some unambiguous way? Why does he not manifest himself in the world as something that we can see with our eyes, that we can hear with our ears, that we can touch with our hands? This would obviously be well within the power of an omnipotent being, so if there is such a being, why doesn’t it happen?
I am not suggesting that God, if he were to manifest in the world, could only appear in some dramatic, cosmic form, such as a huge Michelangelo-like figure tearing open the sky. A far more down-to-earth manifestation would be more than sufficient for most purposes, just as long as it was detectable by the ordinary senses and as long as we could communicate with it in a meaningful fashion. In other words, all I am asking is that God, if such a being exists and desires that we know him, interact with us in the same way we would expect any human being with the same desire to interact with us.
But this simple and reasonable strategy has not been carried out. Instead, the theists say, God has adopted a strategy for getting human beings’ attention that can only reasonably be described as bizarre – always remaining hidden, never clearly showing himself despite it being well within his power, but dropping coy hints from time to time. Imagine if you loved a person with all your heart, and wanted them to love you in return; but instead of approaching them, introducing yourself and explaining your feelings, you chose to remain hidden, never letting them see or hear you, but occasionally trying to get their attention through indirect means: leaving money where they might find it, or creeping into their bedroom while they were asleep and tucking the blankets around them, or sending a steady stream of representatives to knock on the person’s door and tell them that you loved them and wanted to spend your life with them – but ordering those representatives to turn down any of the person’s requests to actually see you as indicative of a hurtful lack of faith on their part. Is this how a rational person behaves? In such a situation, in fact, would you blame the other person for beginning to doubt whether you really existed at all? And yet, if we accept the claims of many theists, this method is how God chooses to relate to humanity. What could possibly be the point of this behavior?
