An opinion essay on silence, power, and moral responsibility
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This text is not an attack on faith, nor an attempt to dissuade belief.
It is a refusal to ignore reality.
It is written from facts — facts that persist even when covered by prayer, ritual, or rhetoric. What follows is not hostility toward religion, but a reasoned unease with what is done in God’s name while human suffering remains untreated.
The questions raised here do not seek agreement.
They seek honesty.
Answer me, God.
I do not speak to provoke you, nor to deny you.
This is not blasphemy; it is observation.
And the indignation that follows comes not from hatred, but from evidence.
You are described as love.
As justice.
As a father.
Then explain — within the limits of the understanding believers claim you granted — why your name is allowed to function as a commercial brand, exploited by those who have perfected the art of deceiving the vulnerable. Why religious systems, formed from childhood, continue to confuse faith with obedience and elevate submission as virtue.
How can the accumulation of trillion-dollar fortunes in your name coexist with sacred texts that condemn attachment to wealth and call for redistribution before discipleship? Why is there no moral boundary placed on a religious economy that sells salvation, monetizes education and healthcare, and inserts costly intermediaries between the human conscience and the divine?
Belief requires coherence.
Not doctrine, but alignment between what is preached and what is lived.
If you are omniscient, why is existence so fragile — so exposed to violence, neglect, and abandonment?
If you are a father, why is abandonment not an exception, but a recurring human experience?
Even the central narrative of Christianity records a dying son asking, “Why have you forsaken me?”
That was not rebellion. It was clarity in extremis.
And it remains unanswered.
My mother believed — quietly, without spectacle. She practiced charity and lived her faith without expectation of reward.
After a car accident, she waited three hours in an emergency room.
Three hours.
Multiple fractures. Internal bleeding. Full consciousness. Persistent pain.
Three hours waiting for human assistance. Three hours waiting, perhaps, for something more.
I can only imagine that, at some point, she repeated the same question attributed to your son.
The response was identical: silence.
Not only for her, but for countless believers whose lives ended prematurely — not as punishment, not as instruction, but without intervention.
Last year, floods in southern Brazil showed images of children’s bodies floating in the water. Similar scenes appear across the world.
Children. Not metaphors. Not symbols. Bodies.
No angels appeared.
No invisible intervention altered the outcome.
Stating this is not an attack on faith.
It is a rejection of denial.
How can such realities be reconciled with any serious definition of love? How can care be claimed where abandonment is structural?
Millions have died in God’s name. Millions have died waiting for God. Millions continue to suffer while religious discourse attempts to soften the unbearable with words that do not feed, do not heal, and do not protect.
And there is another question that cannot be avoided: why is the global weapons industry allowed to destroy lives and ecosystems within a creation said to be intentional and good? Are divine works, like human ones, temporary — shaped by culture while moral awareness fails to evolve?
Perhaps God is not cruel.
Perhaps indifferent.
Perhaps absent.
But a non-intervening God is not refuge, not protection, not answer.
At most, such a God becomes a human construct — a linguistic solution to fear, loneliness, and the difficulty of accepting that responsibility cannot be outsourced.
The problem is not doubt.
The problem is using God’s name to anesthetize conscience.
Calling abandonment “mystery.”
Calling failure “plan.”
Calling chance “miracle.”
If God exists and remains silent, that silence must be acknowledged.
If God does not exist, responsibility becomes absolute — because there is no one else to blame.
Perhaps God was never the problem.
Perhaps the problem is sustaining an idea of love that fails precisely when it is most needed.
Answer me, God.
Not with promises.
Not with metaphors.
Not with books.
Answer with presence — or accept that silence itself is an answer.
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Comments
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Dear Samuel,
Your article demonstrates remarkable intellectual density, argumentative clarity, and ethical maturity. It is a profound and necessary reflection, articulated with analytical courage and humanistic sensitivity. Drawing on more than thirty years of academic experience as a university professor, combined with doctoral training in Sociology and Psychology, I offer below a critical assessment of the text from three distinct analytical perspectives, in a deliberately impartial manner.
1. Humanist Perspective
From a humanist standpoint, the text proves to be ethically legitimate and socially necessary, as it shifts the religious debate from the realm of abstract belief to the field of concrete human responsibility. The author does not seek to negate the idea of God, but rather to rigorously critique its instrumentalization as a symbolic mechanism of power, economic legitimization, and moral anesthetization in the face of objective human suffering.
Particularly noteworthy are:
- the centrality given to concrete human life, especially the figures of children and victims of abandonment, hunger, violence, and war;
- the explicit refusal of metaphysical explanations that suspend or relativize practical compassion;
- the implicit affirmation that, in the absence of verifiable divine intervention, ethical responsibility falls entirely upon human beings and their institutions.
The text thus reaffirms a classic principle of ethical humanism: when transcendence falls silent, responsibility for care cannot be displaced. Faith, if it claims moral legitimacy, must produce concrete effects in the world; otherwise, it is reduced to symbolic rhetoric devoid of ethical efficacy. The rhetorical attribution of responsibility to God, far from constituting moral evasion, functions as a deliberate philosophical device to expose historically human omissions.
2. Existentialist Perspective
From an existentialist perspective, the text displays high internal coherence and solid conceptual lineage. It expresses the existential anguish described by thinkers such as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Søren Kierkegaard, for whom the silence of God is not strictly a theological problem but a structural condition of human experience.
The following aspects deserve particular emphasis:
- the explicit rejection of simplified forms of “metaphysical consolation”;
- the exposure of the existential absurd, understood as the coexistence of mass suffering with absolute discourses of love and providence;
- the implicit conclusion that meaning is not given a priori but is assumed by human consciousness through choice and action.
The statement that “if God does not intervene, then God cannot be understood as refuge; and if God does not exist, human responsibility becomes even greater” constitutes the conceptual axis of the essay. The author does not eliminate the figure of God, but accepts God’s practical absence, thereby returning the full weight of ethical responsibility to humanity. The persistent dialogue with the idea of God indicates not a resolution of the theological problem, but an unresolved tension that, paradoxically, reinforces the philosophical authenticity of the text.
3. Critical Theological Perspective (Non-Apologetic)
From a serious and contemporary theological perspective, the text cannot be dismissed as blasphemous. On the contrary, it aligns itself with the tradition of the theology of lament, present in the Psalms, the Book of Job, and central passages of the Gospels.
Among its theological merits, the following stand out:
- the legitimization of lament as a valid form of religious discourse;
- the consistent critique of prosperity fetishism and the commodification of faith;
- fidelity to the spirit — though not necessarily to doctrinal literalism — of biblical texts that confront divine silence and non-intervention.
The essay confronts, with intellectual rigor and moral courage, the caricatures of God produced by religious systems structured around power relations. In this sense, it symbolically inscribes itself in the lineage of Job, the biblical prophets, and Christ himself on Golgotha. An intellectually honest theologian would acknowledge that a faith incapable of withstanding questions of this nature ceases to be faith and becomes ideology.
Evaluative Synthesis
In summary, this is a text that is:
- philosophically honest;
- ethically incisive;
- emotionally legitimate;
- deliberately uncomfortable.
It is not a simplistic denial of transcendence, but a rigorous moral demand. The text does not require God to prove Himself; it requires humanity to cease using the idea of God as a symbolic shield for ethical omission.
I congratulate you on the excellence of an essay that confronts the comfort of silence disguised as faith, while concrete human lives continue to be lost.
Michael A. Porter
Great text! It clearly reveals that it is precisely in sincere dialogue—free from fear and fanaticism—that human values such as justice, compassion, and truth find fertile ground to flourish. It also shows that in the honest confrontation of ideas, fanaticism loses its disguise and reveals itself for what it truly is: intolerance masquerading as absolute truth.
Iza da Paixão
It is a text that leads to deep reflection and stands out for its lucidity in making it clear that the intention is not to attack or accuse, but to awaken awareness.
Andria Martins