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That’s more or less what Samuel (1 Samuel 3) could have said to God one night when he heard an unidentified voice, three separate times, which woke him from his sleep.  You may never have heard God speak to you, but lots of people in the Bible did.  Matter of fact, the people who wrote the sacred texts were claimed to have received their message from the mouth (?) of God Himself.  The Old and New Testament authors were often depicted as taking divine dictation.  Mahomet, of course, continued the tradition.

Hearing the “vox Dei”, “the Voice of God”, is not limited to Jewish, Christian and Muslim Scriptures.  Oodles of saints have made the same claim.  Joan of Arc is perhaps the most famous example.  Her claim cost her her life.

It ought to be surprising to believers who spend so much time talking to the God they imagine to be listening to their prayers, that they never hear him say a word in return.  It never seems to occur to them that this perpetual silence, which one could qualify as at least impolite and insensitive, is surely a reasonable indication that they are in fact talking to themselves.

But the pretension – and pretense – that the Bible is the Word of God is for believers a never-to-be-questioned fact.  The principal foundation for this belief is that the Bible’s divine authorship was decreed by Jewish and Christian authorities themselves !  This is without doubt the most staggering example of credulity and conmanship one could imagine.  The established churches laugh, in petto – so as not to appear unecumenical – at the fantastic story of Joseph Smith and the “sacred text” on those conveniently since lost golden plates he found, translated and published as the Book of Mormon.  But the supposed divine origin of their own Bible is just as ridiculous.  God, for obvious reasons, notably the fact that He doesn’t exist, never spoke to anyone.

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