Since you are quoting my post with your response, I thought I would try to be brief (I see I totally failed) and expand a little on my thoughts. It seems Trump's Sunday scripted statement seemed to be very different than his "on the fly" responses to questions at his Tuesday news conference. Unfortunate in my view which side he ended up on as his real feelings.
I am glad I didn't grow up in a Catholic church environment, as ritual and wrote recitation of verses isn't always accompanied by classes of discussion of meaning and purpose. I find the services a bit tedious but not all of them*. But at least the Bible is being put out there. In my case, due to a difficult situation in my life that I never expected, I rejected most input from pastors and others and launched into really trying to understand the Bible much on my own without a lot of outside input (I did have a commentary that I referenced sometimes). I spent 2 1/2 years very much wanting to understand the Bible thoroughly, and I also had a friend with whom I would go back and forth with during lunch breaks at work to try to understand and make sense of many of the passages, as we were both grappling with Christianity at the same time and neither of us desperately wanted to be fooled or become some kind of "chump". After finally getting a good grasp on what it was saying, I concluded that no man could have written this book and that its counsel was worth examining in real life as I have grown older. Bottom line, it seems the Bible is the only religious book that claims to have been authored by God (through the Holy Spirit), and that was compelling to me to begin with. I have also concluded that the God that created this universe, including us, is capable of getting a book into print that accurately reflects His will for our lives, and that if he loves us, then it is worth putting his counsel to the test. All I can say is that I am amazed that his counsel as expressed in the Bible works long term, every time in my experience. Putting his word to the test is what compels me to strongly believe it is all real and true. To answer your question, "where is God now", I would only say that he often seems to let us go our own way and lean unto our own understanding to solve our problems, neglecting His counsel, and let us see what the outcome yields. I think that is going on now.
Like you I infer, I am a "college puke". I went to UCLA, Berkeley, and Univ of Mich, and ended up with a Masters Degree in Engineering. I think the greatest outcome of value of all those 7 years was to be a person that thinks like a systems engineer - i.e. kind of looking at the "big picture" in our current affairs in this country and trying to put all the pieces together to gain understanding as to how we got ourselves into the messes we are in at present and where the critical failure lies. I believe the discrimination and hatred today are a result of our capitalism getting out of hand and benefitting only a few at the top, where the middle class isn't being adequately rewarded for its working harder than ever and getting ever deeper in debt, and the very poor being basically desperate with little to nothing to give them hope or even put food on the table. This tends to put people at odds with each other and cast blame for our poor predicament and look for scapegoats to blame and hate. Unfortunately, that ends up with certain races blaming others for all the welfare costs as our big problem and the people coming over the border that take our jobs and so on. But these costs are not what are the biggest pieces of our spending or cause of our problems. Our endless wars like in the middle east benefit the military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned against, and the oil companies and businesses that serve the military. These wars cost us trillions of $$, but we keep them going to ensure our continued supply of oil and other industrial gains. Then we have stock markets where individuals with some discretionary income can invest in businesses and expect ever increasing dividends from their investments. So CEOs of companies are ever worried that the stockholders are well and increasingly rewarded as thier primary goal if they want to keep their jobs and their stunning salaries (look at the firing of Mark Fields at Ford recently, even though he was doing a stellar job in my opinion of making them world class, but the profits during his watch where investment in electric vehicles and self driving cars really dramatically decreased profits compared to his predecessor, Alan Mullaly, so he was fired). Thus CEOs increasingly are looking for cost reductions to boost profits and end up shipping jobs overseas increasingly where labor is cheap, rather than invest in a way that benefits our country in the long term or in many cases their own company long term. So we get a well-compensated upper middle class and rich who really didn't do any physical or other kind of work other than make wise investments in the stock market, and then also benefit at tax time with income tax breaks that allow them to avoid paying much in the way of taxes on their rewards (our politicians are in the upper middle class too, so why not give themselves more gravy for all their "hard work")? So we end up with a desperate middle class especially in the midwest and south who just may not know why they are in their predicaments, but the do know they want change, and demand it at election time. So we now have Trump. Unfortunately I see little to nothing in his plans that will improve this situation, so I do expect increasing strife in our country until we might even tear ourselves apart and end up at odds with the rest of the world. I do not believe Trump's principles are guided by the counsel of God, so I am not expecting a good outcome from his term in office. Unfortunately our godless congress in total doesn't offer much hope. It is all about money, is my conclusion, and money never satisfies, no matter how much you have. And the wealthy just keep wanting more for themselves in order to gain their ultimate goal, that will continue to elude them. That is why I say that until we decide to make the Lord the lord of our lives, we will continue to go downhill and suffer for it until our self pride is broken. The Bible also counsels that "seeking riches is the root of all kinds of evil" and also that "it will be easier for a camel to thread the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven". There is a reason for these grave warnings.
Sorry it took so long to get this all out, but that is where I am at (if anyone even bothered to get through all this).
* some priests are really gifted!
