God is cruel, immoral and unjust.

Well, I do believe in a God. And this may surprise you but I do believe that God is cruel, immoral, and unjust. In fact, I believe in a God that is very much like mankind. Whenever I describe this God I often refer to it as an "organism". It's not all-loving, and it's not all-merciful. This God can be downright cruel, manipulative, murderous, and uncaring. Yet to me this all makes sense. God is like an "organism". He's a creature you respect, you acknowledge, you fear because it has more power than you. Let me give you an analogy, because I think it demonstrates man's relationship to God very well. Let's say you're out in the African safari and you come across a male lion. From a safe distance it looks majectic, beautiful. It' interesting to look at. But you know that if you get too close, if you poke it, it might dig its claws into you and even kill you. God is an "organism". This is the relationship man has to God. I'm actually a pantheist, and I believe that God is in fact the conscious, super-intelligent universe. Can I prove this to you? Well, not at the moment . . . but that's not the topic.The point is that God - the universe - is a very large organism, and man is a very tiny one. Man isn't even the center of the universe, just another creation inside of it.In the previous round I demonstrated man's relationship to a chicken. Man considers himself, because of his elevated intelligence, higher than the other organisms. We have no issues about eating other organisms to sustain ourselves, but when a human is devoured by a shark or an alligator we take a particular offense to it. Believing that we are automatically more important, we don't approve of other organisms that make a meal out of us (funny that we don't protest this way when a shark makes a snack of a seal). But we treat organisms far less equally because of our intelligence. We eat them, we kill them, we take their land, destroy their habitats - and it's all justified on the grounds that we are superior to them. God is in the same boat, particularly since I, a pantheist, perceive God to be the universe. The universe is far larger than man, encompasses far more, has existed a lot longer, created man and will still be around long after man goes extinct. Oh, don't kid yourself: man will go extinct one day; a new species may emerge from future human generations. But man - homo sapien - will eventually die off as the Earth changes, as the universe evolves.I understand this is a bleak way of understanding man's relationship to God but that's pretty much it. The point is that its a waste to cry and throw a tantrum. God has killed numerous species in the past (numerous individuals, too), and eventually God will kill everyone alive today when their time comes. It's a waste. God probably doesn't even have the power to alter this fact (I'll get to this point a bit later). God is cruel, God is immoral, God is unjust. But those are really just human wants. The universe is in fact quite immoral . . . and it tries to preserve what it can, in whatever means it has available. Biological life isn't free of this fact.Over the course of a lifetime, an organism sustains injuries that gradually wear it away; it's DNA accumulates errors (with constant cell division and replication) that will eventually kill it. Over the course of billions of years, the only way life could flourish under these conditions is if life constantly replicated itself; old cells and old organisms would pass away, daughter cells and new organisms (with fresh strands of DNA) would take their place. That is the way of nature. It hasn't found a way to construct heaven, but it's done the best job it could, given the limitations of nature.Earlier you asked why did God create a universe like ours, where bad things could happen, where injustice is possible. I believe that the answer is self-evident, as more and more evidence demonstrates that our universe was fine-tuned for complex biological life. God doesn't have the power to create a perfect universe - only imperfect ones. Our universe is the best thing (or close to the best thing) God could create to accomodate complex biological life like ourselves. The universe isn't perfect now, so our expectations, morally and philosophically, will not be completely satisfied. Our desire for a perfect world free of hurt and pain isn't achievable. But it's still possible to create a good world in this universe, but's going to require effort.Scientists like Paul Davies show that our universe is very special in that it occupies a very narrow place, by having just the right conditions for life, where matter can congregate to form stars and planets, where the liquid medium of water is possible, and where molecular chemistry exist because the proton and electron are unique stable particles [1]. Our universe is fined-tuned just right for biological life.Calculations demonstrate that if gravity had been stronger or weaker by 1 part in 10^40, then stars like the sun could not exist, which would make life as we know it impossible [2]. Additionally, calculations show that if the strong nuclear force, the force that binds protons and neutrons together in an atom, had been stronger or weaker by as little as 5%, life would be impossible [3]. Over the decades, more and more evidence has come to light to show just how well-formed the universe is for life.British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has this to share:"The laws of science, as we know them...contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron....The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life [4]."God did the best he could to create the universe. God can't create heaven. That's up to man. But we shouldn't make the mistake of expecting perfection. It just isn't attainable.[1] [2] [3] http://www.discovery.org...[4] http://en.wikipedia.org...