Unfortunately, these arguments are NOT going to convince any believers, who are going to very easily come up with counter-arguments. For example, to the points above:

(1) Unknown greater good.
This does not imply that god is NOT all-powerful, as believers could imply that HUMANS are limited in their understanding, and therefore must experience evil in order to be aware of good.

(2) God is testing our faith.
It is an immediate sequitir that in this case god would not be testing the infant’s faith, but rather the infant’s parents’ faith.

THE POINT IS: That VAST MAJORITY of believers are not going to be convinced by plain logical thinking, that’s what BELIEF is all about.

If you think about it, each of us has 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great grandparents, 16 great great grandparents, etc. Thus each of us has thousands of ancestors that could be called human. The odds would be pretty small that one of them wasn’t a murderer.

It does seem odd that an all-knowing god would have to test our character. Yet we supposedly have free will, so we actually have to display our character before we can be judged – even though god supposedly knows how we will respond.

The second is at #5, which should have added: Why would an all-knowing god need to test anyone in the first place, having created the person and therefore knowing how they would respond?

Yeah, and when you call a Christian on that and say, ‘Well, doesn’t it bother you at all that he ‘chooses’ do work that way?’ a lot of times they will admit to that and say something along the lines of, ‘I plan on asking him about that when I see him [face to face, in heaven].’ (I actually have heard that response myself, btw) Ok, but what makes anyone sure God would tell them then since he hasn’t seen fit to tell any of us now or at any time throughout humanity why he does shit like that?
Just my two cents.

That’s got to be the worst. What mysterious greater good? No one knows. And yet this mysterious unknown greater good can be used to justify any horror committed by God or his followers. For this mysterious unidentifiable greater good, good people will do despicable things. Evil becomes, by this definition, good.

Thanks for mentioning Job. I never was comfortable with that one either. There’s so much in the buybull I never was comfortable with.

My daughter and I were talking about my escape from childhood indoctrination as she drove me to work this morning and I said something about it taking me 10 years and to my surprise, she asked in surprise, “Only 10? I thought it took much longer than that!” I replied, “Well, 10 from when I really started looking at everything but I guess I always did have questions. All those questions I told you I used to pester your grandmother with.”

I realized something then, she was counting when I was little kid and used to asked disturbing questions about what I was being taught in Sunday school, like why did “God” drown the little babies who hadn’t sinned yet and all the animals except the ones on the ark? They didn’t do nothing.” And asking in horror if she’d sacrifice her kid if “God” asked her to.

Job was another one that always bothered me. Here’s this extremely devout man who “God” just has to test and take everything from. It always seemed sick to me.

My daughter made me realize something this morning that I hadn’t really thought about before because, while I did question, I blindly believed what I was taught. But, just asking the questions, from when I was quite small, I was bound to discard the whole thing when I got old enough to see that the answers to those questions only led one way; that just by asking them, I was already a skeptic. Even when I was a Christian.

You do have to wonder how many remain with the religion they were raised with just because they have asking the questions peer-pressured out of them. Frankly, 100% or close to it, wouldn’t surprise me. “God” just doesn’t stand up to questions or close scrutiny.