I understand and admit the philosophical stance of the atheists who have posted that they don’t believe in any god. And I’m not trying to play a game with their posts.
But I suspect that the first time you saw a post from FriendofGod, you had an idea what God he was Friend of. And the term “God” with capital G as bandied about by people evokes some sort of imagery to you, presumably not including the characteristics of invisible, pink, and quadrupedal. That’s what I was looking for from you, if you care to respond to the question again with that in mind.
I admit I was not expecting any of the answers I got, including the tongue-in-cheek ones. (The vision of God from the William Blake sketches in a country kitchen wearing an apron and a fishing cap and whipping up a batch of toll house cookies is delightfully incongruous!)
Glee, the situation you describe is in SDMB jargon a Glitch (after the poster to have first described having gone through the same thing, and having only his name in common with the computer jargon term). My answer is pretty unsatisfactory, I fully admit. It would be that he does what he does in his own good time and not when we expect him to produce. (One of the prerogatives of being omnipotent, I suppose.)
I think I can speak with authority that if you are open to him and he doesn’t respond, I can guarantee that you are not going to Hell. (I despise the Santa Claus Heaven/Hell mythology that substitutes for Christian theology in popular thought, by the way. The God I worship is a god of love who may be subtle but is not malicious, to quote Al. He paces his efforts vis-a-vis you to your spiritual growth, and may not be evident to your mind and heart when you might want him to be.
The “lack of evidence” thing has always bothered me. As David B. will attest, most historical events can be doubted with the proper skeptical apparatus. And the claims for God, particularly as revolves around Jesus, are so extraordinary that a higher degree of proof becomes needed. I believe that, stripped of myth, there is a valid story line running through the Bible about a real God who is truly interested in reaching people. I think the proof is there; you just have to weed out the improbable and go with what is left – IMHO, quite a lot. And remember that the earliest Christian formula about God is, when you see Jesus, you see God. The Jesus of Scripture, whatever his historicity, is an unmistakeable real character. You can guess with some degree of surety how he would react to a given non-Scriptural incident.
The O.T.? Remember there was a bunch of authors of papyrus scrolls bound together into one volume. Some of them were off in left field, some focused on one point and others on a different one. Contemplate the differences between comments by the Pope, John Shelby Spong, Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, and Martin Marty on any given issue. Same thing, with historical spread as well – you’d throw St. Augustine and Martin Luther into the mix. It points to the God of Jesus, more or less, but by gradually focusing in from a pretty nebulous concept of YHWH our tribal deity, who can take on anybody else’s God with both hands tied behind his back, through the mysterious guy of Job, the grieving husband of Israel-personified-as-a-slut in Hosea, down to the Suffering Servant of later Isaiah. Dredging out a piece of insufferable judgmentalism in Leviticus or some of those genocidal incidents in Numbers and Joshua and judging the whole OT by them makes as much sense as judging Western Civilization by Auschwitz and the Battle of Hastings.
