4. God, while all good and all powerful, is not attentive--he just doesn't pay attention to us and our actions, so evil in effect goes on behind his back.

Doesn't work, Uncle DaveO. My understanding of christer dogma is that the big g (lowercase here is intentional irony...) is also all knowing. You cannot be unattentive to my every thought & everything I might do & still presume to judge me for all eternity. If your point is valid, then god is convicting us either because he feels like it, or because a minion is "fitting us up a treat!"

You cannot be all powerful without being all knowing. How can you stop something that you are ignorant of? This is the staple of Fantasy fiction & the bane of many a Dark Lord! *grin*

You cannot be all knowing without knowing everything that has been, everything that is, and everything that will be. This is where christer dogma falls entirely apart, IMO. God cannot be all-good & all-powerful.

If he is all-powerful, he knew what he was doing long before he ever did it (so he is a complete bastard, considering he's put people through Genghis Khan, the Crusades, Spanish Inquisition, Hitler/Stalin, & so forth, quite deliberately, & then reckons he has the right to judge us). Or he is the ultimate incarnation of Good, in which case the notion of him being all-powerful is logically indefensible & there must be someone else hanging around that has, at the least, the potential to beat the ultimate crap out of him (& we're back to the bile, I mean, the bible being no more than propaganda).

The only other alternative is that god is entirely beyond human comprehension. In which case sticking labels of "good", "powerful", or "knowing" on him is utterly meaningless. If god is truly "all-powerful" he is rather further in advance of us than we are in front of Homo Erectus (which Fundies deny all knowledge of, (un-)naturally!).

It can be claimed that we would be unequivocally benevolent towards HErec. But does anyone really believe that A) we would be; & B) that HE would have the slightest comprehension of what we were or how we were treating them, however we did? Anyway up, they'd bow down before us as gods... Funnily enough, how the monotheist theology has us behave towards the infinitely superior Ultimate Deity.

God is either all-powerful or all-good. The two are not compatible in any human frame of reference (except blind, obedient, gullible faith). Or you accept that he is beyond human comprehension, in which case anything you claim is pure speculation (i.e. complete self-serving bollocks) on your part. This is why I'm pagan. I prefer to talk to higher beings I can understand, ones who aren't so godalmightyfuckingarrogant that they claim to be the be-all & end-all of existence.

Rædwulf

P.S. Unlike georgiansilver, I don't claim that the higher beings talk back. I don't have any transcriptions from god, jesus f-off christ, or any of my lot. I just do the best I can & hope I'm doing about right.