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Top 10 Questions I Have for God

Top 10 Questions I Have for God

Last updated on: September 28, 2026 at 3:06 pm by Karl J. Forehand

Top 10 Questions I Have for God 2026-09-28T15:06:58-06:00 Karl J. Forehand

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Top 10 Questions I Have for God

(According to the narrative I inherited)

When I started my deconstruction, I assumed that God could handle my questions. When I found out he couldn’t, I lost all intention of worshiping or serving him. That doesn’t mean I can’t love my neighbor and treat people the way I want to be treated, but I can’t serve a God I can’t understand. Maybe I just haven’t studied enough, but the narrative says it’s not possible.

!0. Why don’t you communicate better?

Laura’s dad stopped talking to her about 30 years ago. No explanation. No excuses. He just disappeared, leaving a host of questions and assumptions about his intentions and our self-worth. My parents didn’t do this. In fact, they probably feel like I had done this to them. But why does God seem to mimic a deadbeat dad when it comes to communication?

I would never go for more than a day without talking to my wife. She simply wouldn’t allow it, and I don’t think she should. Just this morning, I responded the wrong way and surprised her. She was mad for a little while, and I quickly explained that I didn’t mean to react that way. Later, after we both regulated, she asked if we were okay. I said yes and explained why I think I responded badly.

But does God get dysregulated? Does God have bad days, weeks, or even years when he can’t speak to us? Is it, as some Christians might suggest, somehow our fault that he isn’t communicating with us, or that we cannot hear him? To me, that sounds more like my wife or me saying, “You should know the answer” or “You should know what is wrong!”

The superior person in a relationship should bear primary responsibility for communication, especially when their nickname is “The Word.”

Why didn’t you write a better book?

I’m an author, and I’m currently receiving lots of emails from people who seem to have read the summary of my book and decided they could market it better than I did. I have no doubt that’s true, but I don’t really want to spend the money. In addition, I realize that if I wrote better, people would gain more from my books, and sometimes I muddy the point I’m trying to make.

But if God really did write this book, we call the Bible, we must first admit that he has the best marketing crew ever assembled, starting with Emperor Constantine and his mother, who did a good job of insisting that we could use this book to unite the empire under Christianity. Since then, the marketing team has doubled down on all their assumptions about this book and has marketed it well.

But the fact that a lot of people have read it doesn’t necessarily make it well-written or effective. Some say you could study it for the rest of your life and still not really comprehend it. So even though I like poetry and things that are hard to understand, it eventually has to make some sense to me as a human being to help me navigate life.

It can’t have contradictions, even though it does. It can’t be so hard to find a consistent narrative that violates all the rules and laws of written communication. I live in a town of 1500 people with approximately 5 churches. I estimated that about 10% of our population goes to church, based on the number of vehicles in the parking lots. Among these 150 people who go to church, they felt it necessary to divide into five different congregations that interpret this book differently. In my estimation, these people are not fundamentally different, but I also know some of them hate each other because of the different ways they interpret the same book.

It should be better!

Why don’t you care for children better than you do?

In my first book, Experiencing God, I made the point extensively that God should be a better parent than I am. I think I did an above-average job of parenting my children, but if God is portrayed as a father, then he should be at least as good as me and even better!

My problem is noticing things in the universe that don’t seem to follow this rule. According to the narrative we have from Christianity, and the things we observe in the world, portray the creator as anything but an ideal father. If he is able to rescue starving children, heal people of incurable diseases, and stop destruction and violence, then he should!

The classic response people like me give is that either God can’t do these things or he doesn’t want to, because he doesn’t. Children starve every day. “Acts of God” kill scores of people every year. And “God’s People” are not deterred from starting endless wars and enacting policies that cause millions and millions of people to suffer needlessly.

I can’t imagine standing aside while anything bad happened to my children that I could prevent. The common response to this is to talk about skinned knees and learning from difficult things. But sometimes there is no recovery from violent acts done to us, and death is final for those killed, and their families suffer from things that could have been prevented. Just like my father-in-law, someone is asleep at the wheel, and we need to admit our narratives have inconsistencies that a righteous father shouldn’t allow.

Why does it appear that you are making this up as you go?

You may or may not know that I was once a computer programmer. It was a great experience, but I then detoured into the ministry for 20 years and have spent the last 10 years deconstructing that experience. One thing I have always believed, whether in computer programming, theology, or just in real life, is that it’s easier to do it right the first time.

In computer programming, we spent extra time planning and designing the program to meet the user’s specifications. We would run tests, create flowcharts, and diagram the process because we knew that we could catch many errors and save a lot of money in the long run by changing something on paper before it was actually used. Product recall is much more expensive than erasing a line on paper during design.

I say all of that to make this point. God should have invested more time and effort to get it right the first time, rather than making so many mistakes that cost us humans so much more, because he didn’t appear to do his due diligence in design.

We find God needing a new covenant to replace his old one. We see him killing millions of people because they were acting on their initial design. We find God, who is supposed to be perfect, using words like “regret” and changing his mind about so many things. Not only does the design seem flawed, but the inventor seems to need a long time to discover the bugs and even longer to correct them (if ever).

Even when the design flaws and poor execution of the rollout are harming people, it seems to take forever, or it never happens, before there is a reasonable explanation or a good plan to resolve the devastation that follows.

Why does it take so long to respond?

Sometimes I get paralyzed by analysis. I like to think things through, so I don’t make mistakes by responding too quickly. Hurriedly executing the wrong solution to an immediate problem doesn’t do much good. Sometimes our gut reactions are based on traumatic events in the past that we don’t want to repeat. But if we wait too long, problems can get worse and often create more problems.

A superior being worthy of respect and worship should not face this dilemma. They should know not only how things are composed, organized, and work, but also what can be done to improve them. Again, a perfect creator would have created them right the first time, but if they’ve made mistakes in their “very good” creation, they shouldn’t take thousands of years to fix it and/or improve it.

Why do you allow evil to prosper?

I argue way too much online because, in real life, the people I really want to talk to don’t seem interested once they learn I disagree with them on several points. If they respond at all, they tend to dismiss me, assuming it has to do with whatever motive they’ve invented in their heads to describe people who speak truth to power. I respect people who have tough conversations.

These people, often preachers or pastors, tend to assume that because I disagree with them, I don’t have peace, that I just want to sin, or that I’m thoughtlessly mocking them for personal gain. I tirelessly try to explain my motive: to prevent them and the systems they are involved in from harming people further. I want them to understand that the evil they profess to fight is often in their own leadership and sometimes in their understanding of God.

In politics and religion, men who were once well-intentioned often still sacrifice people on the altar of efficiency, groupthink, and personal ambition. Sexual assault, misogyny, racism, and mistreatment of ordinary people are not only prominent but epidemic. I don’t want people to agree with me; I want them to stop harming others.

In the same way, I want my pastor friends to step up and speak truth to power, and I also want God to tell me why he doesn’t intervene to stop the brutality, violence, and mistreatment of people. If he can’t, then he should say so clearly. If he can do those things and he is not, then he’s a monster we shouldn’t be worshiping.

Why do you allow wars in your name?

Over the years, I’ve lived in small communities. I grew up in Lone Wolf, Oklahoma, which once had more than 1000 people, but according to the 2020 census, it now has 373. Our first church, which we pastored, was in a town of 250, and now we live in a community of 1500 people. What always surprised me was how deep hatred could run for a town just 8 miles away, where the people were almost exactly like those in my hometown. Whether it was sports or something else, the disdain for others seemed almost inherent in our DNA.

We come from a long line of humans who seem to need an adversary. Even though I know this, it still surprises me that the people of God are often right in the middle of the endless stream of wars that began before Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. What I hoped for never came true when I examined history. I wanted to see that my religion was different and peaceful, yet I discovered that all of them are basically the same. When they think they are right and God is on their side, they will go to extraordinary lengths to provoke people into acting the way they want and submitting to their ideas of how things should go.

Hitler’s army wore belt buckles that read, “God with us,” and our American currency says, “In God we Trust.” We use these slogans to commit all manner of violence. Jesus seemed to debunk this thinking, but it only took about 400 years for Constantine to reunite Christianity with the empire and perpetuate violence in God’s name. Europeans exported this violence through colonialism and larger wars, and when nations grew large enough, they eventually escalated the scope of wars to the world stage, all in the name of Yahweh, Christ, and Allah (Abrahamic religions).

This points to root causes of religions being founded on the nature of the gods we create.

Why do you allow weak-minded people to control your narrative?

It is tempting to label all pastors and politicians as narcissistic, but they are simply representative of the larger population, in which leadership roles attract individuals with higher-than-average narcissistic traits. With that in mind, I still wonder why those most interested in preserving their power are ever allowed to remain in power. If a leader’s primary objective is to maintain their popularity or power, they will likely be less proficient at loving their neighbor or caring for the least of these.

When we notice that our leaders have power-hungry inclinations, I would do everything I can to extricate myself from the situation. Their decisions will likely harm their congregations, their citizens, and even themselves. So, if these fathers, pastors, and politicians are truly appointed by God, why wouldn’t God be quicker to remove them from power? The JP Miller story recently highlights this inconsistency. If God’s leader is acting this way and hurting people deeply, why didn’t the people of God, and even God himself, stop this from happening or end it sooner by exposing them?

The terroristic nature of a narcissistic leader demands precise action, not apathy.

How can we worship you when we can’t understand you?

When we dialogue with religious people, we are often met with the confusing idea of God, who is said to be perfect, holy, and worthy of worship, yet also told that God cannot be fully comprehended. As a human, this creates a dilemma for me.

I get really excited about new ideas. When I discover a natural remedy like black garlic, I often jump in and start using it even before there is evidence that it is safe, effective, and better than the remedies we have now. I want to believe there is a magic answer, and that is how I approached Christianity. At age 7, I committed myself to being a Christian, and for about 50 years I put great emphasis and effort into discovering exactly what that remedy was.

When I discovered systematic theology, I was excited to prove the validity of the God I was worshipping and the holy text I had committed to. I thought to myself, “Finally, I’m going to have a lot more proof that I am right, that God is on my side, and that this holy text is the right one.” But the harder I studied it and the more logic and reason (logos) I applied, the more it unraveled like an old sweater when you pull on the main thread holding it all together.

What was holding it together was my ignorance and my blind trust that the people I inherited my faith from had done their due diligence and proved their hypothesis (beliefs/assumptions). They did not. Try questioning a pastor and notice how they not only lack good, solid answers about their god and holy book, but they often quickly resort to gaslighting when you bring up the inconsistencies. They expect a verse to settle it, but they still hope that you devote your life to their assumptions without questioning the logic and reason for it all.

Are you real, and what is the afterlife?

The two questions no one can answer.

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