Faith & Spirit Quote by Lemuel K. Washburn

Washburn’s line is a dare disguised as a polite question, the kind of secular needle that slides under the skin because it sounds so reasonable. If an all-powerful deity is real, why the coyness? Why the reliance on secondhand accounts, contested scriptures, and the permanent fog of “faith” as a substitute for basic disclosure? The wit is in the inversion: believers often frame humans as the ones who must seek, interpret, and submit; Washburn flips the burden of proof upward. It’s not the skeptic who should feel awkward for asking. It’s the alleged omnipotent being who looks oddly evasive.

The subtext isn’t simply atheistic swagger. It’s an indictment of the way religious authority works in practice: God is silent, but institutions are loud. The vacuum gets filled by clergy, creeds, and power structures that translate divine absence into human certainty. “What objection can he have?” reads like a legal cross-examination, treating revelation as something a confident truth would happily provide, not ration.

Contextually, it lands in the modern tradition of American freethought and post-Enlightenment skepticism, where the problem isn’t just metaphysics but accountability. A God who can’t be bothered to clarify the record starts to resemble a concept maintained for human purposes - moral leverage, social cohesion, political legitimacy. Washburn isn’t arguing about heaven; he’s pointing at the convenient design of ambiguity, and asking who benefits from it.