Speaking With God 1

Note: To Reading the Signs: my first attempt. I would run into problems if God were to speak. For one thing, speech is used to disagree, to argue, to puzzle, to scam, and to mislead. So also have many people through history argued and mislead over what they believe God has said. If God speaks, it unfortunately is not immediately recognizable as divinely inspired truth. Unless, that is, we are born into a certain religion and learn its beliefs and symbols and icon from our earliest days. Then we may view the world and readily reach back into our accumulated fund of learning and see, hear, touch, and feel the things we have already learned and committed to memory. But this strikes me as a consistent use of symbols over time, from year to year, and not divinely inspired truth. If God were to speak, I would think He speaks to me. I would become arrogant and peremptory. I would shout heresy. I would no longer have feelings and tolerance for the lesser human beings around me, the poor ones who do not have the same privileged speech I have with God. I would pester the Deity for gifts and trinkets. I would believe everything I did was O.K. In fact, if I believed God spoke to me, my incredible arrogance would be as great as if I believed God did not exist at all, but rather all my accomplishments were due to my native genius and shining celebrity. Thus, the attitude of the Atheist and the one who thinks God speaks to him are the same. If God were to speak, I would puzzle over His meaning. I would debate the origin of His Name. I would wonder if "hawah" meant "to be" or "to fall, occur". Thus I could escape the ethical net wherein I must love my brothers and sisters. By debating...by speaking...I could evade all moral responsibility, for I could argue on and on forever about meanings, yet never live the way I should. When I wrote about Moral Relativism in http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2008/07/moral-relativism.html the gist of it was that we of the present age were so conflicted and so prone to hatred and discord that when we are presented with the Immoral in the form of dead Palestinian or Israeli children, we can not be silent in awful dread of this slaughter and discover in our silence some new way to hope, but can only perform a perfunctory moment of silence, and then determinedly return to hating and arguing. If one cannot recognize the Immoral, one cannot recognize the Moral. Hence, any talk of Moral Absolutes disappears. God disappears. What is God anymore, except a political partisan in our debates? What good is a God who speaks to an age which cannot tell right from wrong? They will turn the divine words into rhetoric and folly. Yet I fully concur that God speaks. He speaks when our life begins, before we have any ability of speech, yet we understand. God speaks in the language of life and growth, the language of His Creation and its Logic and Grammar, not human speech and its vagaries. To recapture this speech, we have to go back to the time before we spoke: when we were silent.