Following on from my original post.
God is omniscient and all-powerful, but he’s nice and gives us free will (nevermind that this is impossible). This the greatest gift of all, surely, because he’s willing to have us endure great suffering for it (see my first post). Yet, if we don’t do what he wants and follow his instructions (written in a book of doubtful veracity, in the case of Christianity, which is the religion whose concepts I am mostly focusing on) we’ll go to hell for eternity.
He must have known that is what would happen (omniscient). I don’t know about the inner workings of the God Company, but I imagine he even does the damning personally. His creations do something wrong on Earth (often in a minor way*) and, in exchange for a maximum of around 100 years of ’sin’ (going against his wishes, even though those wishes are unclear and he personally gave us the ability to do so), we suffer greatly (one might even say infinitely) for an infinite number of years? That hardly sounds like the masterplan of an all-loving god.
* Like not remembering the Sabbath. What’s the deal with that anyway? Why does God so desire our worship? Also, a related tangent: even with free will—even with ‘true’ free will (the impossible, incompatible-with-omniscience kind)—God created us and so should be responsible for our actions. Even if he couldn’t have guessed that we’d hurt others and exploit our free will for our own gain, he would have noticed that was the case and would have been able to remove our free will or replace the free-willed humans with non-free-willed humans (you can’t argue that he wouldn’t do that, because he’s killed off vast numbers for less convincing reasons before; see the Great Flood of Noah**). Everything seems to come down to the fact that our all-powerful, all-knowing God created us, wasn’t pleased with much of his creation (isn’t this his failure?), and so makes a great many people (his people) suffer.
** The LORD sez:
I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky; for I am sorry that I have made them.
Uh, apology accepted? Our all-loving God didn’t just wipe out mankind, though—he also killed almost all of the animals too, which is just pointless violence. I didn’t know animals could be evil; even if they could, Noah didn’t specifically seek out “pure” animals, so the whole slaughter was totally pointless.
(All of this is pointing towards the conclusion that God isn’t all-loving, isn’t all-powerful, isn’t all-seeing, or isn’t at all, i.e. God isn’t who religion says he is.)