There is an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent being.

Okay, I'm new to this site, so sorry in advance if I stray from proper protocol, but here it goes. As I understand it, your position is that the existence of a 3-O god (omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent) is irreconcilable with unnecessary suffering, or even more broadly, evil in general. In order to successfully counter that point, I believe I must show that it is possible for a 3-O god and evil to co-exist. So here it goes. First off, indisputably, evil exists in the world. It just does. There are plenty of senseless acts of natural violence and destruction to point to without even having to bring man into the equation, but when you consider the capacity for evil men have displayed for centuries, the conclusion is irrefutable. So evil exists. Secondly, I firmly believe that men have free will. Now this assertion is fairly easy to defend: atheists don't really have much ground to stand on in disputing this fact, and theists must make the case for a deterministic world that would be little more than God's Rube Goldberg machine. So if I may, I'd like to move forward under the premise that men have free will. Now we come to the tough part: how can a 3-O God, evil, and free will all exist at the same time on Earth? Well here's my best shot: God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, and He did in fact have both the power and the proclivity to create a perfect world. That world is Heaven. The truth of the matter is that in His perfection, anything God comes in contact with is perfect. Think about it: an all-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful being cannot help but make whatever environment He finds himself in perfect. That is simply the nature of God. So now let's try to go back and think about what that world was like when God first created everything. Men (or their souls or whatever you want to call all of us) were created by God along with everything else, and were in His presence. Now here's the interesting part: because we were in God's presence, we weren't really free. I'd be very interested to hear a logical rebuttal to this supposition, but at the end of the day I maintain that no man (or angel or soul or whatever) would be able to act against God in His presence. Why not? Well rather than going the route so many religions unfortunately travel down, which is power or fear or authority, I would like to suggest that the love of God is what deprives those in His presence of their free will. The unconditional, absolute, inexplicable love that God has for each and every one of us is overwhelming, and to feel that directly, to be in the lord's very shadow is to be enveloped by that love entirely. In Heaven, or whatever you want to call the perfect world that God resides in, there is no hurt or pain or anger or anything of the sort because that darkness simply cannot take hold in the presence of the lord's blinding light. So in Heaven, everyone was happy, but there were a number of problems. First off, think about your perception of light. You understand it, you appreciate it, you know what it means. You can fully conceive of what I mean when I say "light", and the reason is because you have not only experienced light, you have experienced darkness as well. Now without that experience of darkness, you would not fully appreciate what I mean when I say "light", nor would you be able to appreciate the sun's blinding rays after a week of cloudy skies. Without the clouds, the sun loses its power; without hunger, food couldn't taste as good as it does after a long day's fast; without having felt alone, how could we ever fully appreciate what it means to be loved? The point is that when we were all in God's presence, everything was perfect, and no one but God could know what that perfection truly meant. We had never felt anything but love; we had never seen anything but light; we had never wanted for anything at all, and thus our ability to fully appreciate what was in front of us was drastically diminished. So one reason for creating the world was to give us a theater wherein we could experience everything, the full range of action and emotion, a corporeal world wherein we are supplied a body, given a relatively small amount of time to run around, and granted the boundless ability to do whatever we want. That leads me to my second point: free will. Let's think about this in the frame of a real world example - how would you like to find your soul mate, that one other person in the world that is absolutely perfect for you? Would you rather a) grow up on a deserted island with one other person and just always know that they were the one, or b) go through life constantly searching, and have good relationships and bad relationships and crazy experiences that you never saw coming and then one day, through a crowd, catch the eye of that one special person and know in a heartbeat that you have just found the man or woman that you are going to love for the rest of your life? If I haven't already given it away, my choice is b, and the logic between this reason and my first one about opposites is the same. How can one be right if they've never been wrong? How do you have courage or honor if there's never cowardice or shame? How can men consider their actions to be moral if they could never be anything but? In order for us to be anything more than automatons, God had to grant us free will, and in order to give us that free will, He had to create a world where He was not necessarily present (i.e. present out of necessity). And so He created Earth, and gave men (or more probably their souls) the ability to come live in this finite, corporeal, free realm. And so we came, and we live, and we make decisions everyday that God does not control. Some of those decisions are bad ones, and men, not God, are responsible for them. God created the canvas and the paint and the brushes, but we are the artists of this world, and what we make of it is our own doing. So that accounts for man-made evil, but what about the natural stuff? What about hurricanes and tornados and forest fires that kill innocent people? I would respond that these are simply rules of the game we are playing: in order for our world to be cogent and logical, God could not reverse weather patterns or smother lightning sparked blazes because then He would ostensibly be cheating on our behalf, and he would be cheating us out of the soul-enriching nature of this earth. There's no question about it, we are roughing it out here, and this is as bad as it gets (Hell is an entirely illogical proposition, and I'd be more than happy to tackle that one later), but that danger and achievement and survival we secure for ourselves every single day is all part of what life is about. Now I can already predict that somebody is going to call me out for being a wuss on this topic. "Sure," my potential critic will say, "forest fires and people being mean are easy. But what about babies that die for no reason? What about rape and torture and all the really bad stuff?" Well, it exists, and I don't know if I can perfectly describe the reason, but I'll try. Without experiencing the loss of a child, how can you ever appreciate forever holding one in your arms:; without being burned by a fire, how can one cherish the soothing balm of God's touch?; without seeing the very worst of man, how can you ever truly comprehend the perfect one? I have no doubt that God has tears roll down His face every single day, but He allows it and He remains in his heavenly realm not for His benefit, but for our own. In the infinity of space and time, this world is but a speck, and so for us to take a millisecond in order to gain perspective on the lord and the perfect reality we will be spending the rest of eternity with is time well spent. Evil exists so that we may experience it and learn from it and grow closer to God. God loves us always and forver, and He always will