The thing that irks me about religious discussions is that they often need to take the word "religion" and replace it with "anglo-protestantism" to be accurate.
Religion is a very broad topic, and many critics of religion focus on a very narrow slice when talking about "religion". Christianity is not religion, it is a religion. One grain of sand in a vast beach. Even the concept of "God" is highly specific, and not universal to religion.
In many religions, there is little to no focus on the afterlife, but rather attempting to find some framework to understand man's existance by, or provide a lens through which to view the majesty of the Universe's machinations.
Abrahamic religious nutjobs irk me, but perhaps not as much as tween atheist hipsters playing at intellectualism while smoking their clove cigarettes. The latter claims to have thought about something (and hasn't), while the former is at least justifiably crazy and misguided.
While you plebeians sit in your ivory towers and sneer at the commoners beneath you, I'm going to sit in my fucking ivory space elevator, smoke clove cigars, and hate all of you before hating atheists was cool.
I think you might be overreacting a bit.
First, you acknowledge that not all religions center around the sort of God concept being discussed here. So why would you expect a threat which is about such a God (see the title) to focus on those religions? Second, it seems to me the only religions actually represented by participants in this thread are Abrahamic, so of course those get focused on.
But why would an all-knowing god choose to be evil? If the god created everything then a god created logic. And it doesn't seem logical to be evil. Evil doesn't create. Evil destroys.
[color="#1C2837"]Why not?
[color="#1C2837"]Humans are incredibly evil in our interaction with many animals, like chicken, domesticated cattle, etc. Yet we actively support overbreeding them. But the relationship between humans and those animals is roughly equivalent to the supposed relationship between Greek Gods and humans.
[color="#1C2837"]More to the point, it can be argued that a God who created this world must have been evil or at least was not benevolent. Most arguments in support of a benevolent God fall prey to Epicurus's Problem of Evil. On the other hand, it's relatively trivial to suggest that God, if he exists, is not benevolent thanks to the presence of death, destruction, suffering, and evil in this world.
[color="#1C2837"]In Christianity, provided one accepts that God is omnipotent and omniscient, one must also accept that he caused the tsunamis in Japan recently--at the very least, he knew about them before he created the world, then deliberately created the world in just such a way that they would still happen, and that's no different from causing them. You are now faced with the third attribute of the Christian god: all-benevolence. How do you reconcile the destruction of Japan with an all-benevolent God? Basically, you can't: you have to say something like "God works in mysterious ways" or "It's all part of the plan," but you can never say what those ways are or what the plan is. Or you have to make a despicable statement like "God was getting back at Japan for Peal Harbor," a statement which unfortunately flooded Facebook the day of the events. In short, it's much harder to argue for an all-benevolent God than it is for a partially evil God.
LOL
