Brethren: Peace and Good to all in Jesus Christ our Lord.
At various times I've been asked, or challenged, rather, to explain why we give so much credence to "Bronze Age" ideas, formulated by tribal, pre-scientific peoples, regarding the literary corpus we gather in our bibles as "revelation from god." The wording varies but the substance of the question remains the same.
I wish to propose an answer: silence. No, is not that I'll remain "silent" but that silence was a property of tribal society that our purported civilized society has lost in spades. We're surrounding by noise, and I don't mean only the noise produced by machines, but also the garbage we put in our minds thanks to the media, as wells as the multiple worries and preocupations we're always ruminating. We are enveloped by inner and outer noise and this noise buries the soft, quiet voice of God.
It occurs to me that desert nomads in the tradition of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses, and the prophets, did not have to contend with an environment as noisy as the one we've been laboring under since the dawn of the industrial age. It is rare when God speaks through thunderous theophanies and more often he speaks "in a gentle whisper" (1 Kings 19:12).
Despite our scientific and technical achievements, we have drowned God's gentle whisper with numerous other voices from within and without. Worse, we often confound his voice with our own inner stream of thoughts, hopes, ambitions, wants, and hatreds until we become convinced that there is no other inner voice than our own monologue.
I think that these "Bronze Age primitives" were light years ahead from us in the need they recognized for our inner environments to be quiet and contemplate things escaping words and meanings. As such, they were more wholesome human beings than the run-of-the-mill atheist who denounce people who pray as engaged in a monologue, when the opposite is the truth. It is the unbeliever the one who lives preoccupied with his own thoughts; believers set aside that preoccupation in silent contemplation to capture, as it were, the voice of God.
We Catholic Christians are called to cultivate periodic silence in order to hear God's gentle whisper, like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and Jesus. In this inner silent temple, we meet God again.