Forum theists: when you have a moment, please...

[Tartarus Sauce]

What about a topic on why god is good despite doing bad stuff

I find discussing theodicy with atheists very frustrating, because they are not able to supply a valid moral standard by which to judge God. Most atheists with whom I have discussed this make an argument from incredulity. They base their judgment of God on their own personal moral standards or relative to social norms of Western culture.

This could just as easily be turned around as a weakness to theistic arguments of moral absolutism, though. Whether absolute morality exists is a different matter from whether it can be logically and unambiguously demonstrated.  Unless an authentically binding moral absolute could unequivocally be demonstrated not only as true, but capable of being infallibly understood by all with no human error or limitations constraining its comprehension and acceptance of legitimacy, all your doing is discrediting those who hold a different set of subjective standards for criticizing your own subjective conviction in a different set of standards that claims  objectivity. In other words, welcome to the same opinionated ballpark the rest of us are playing in, we got a dozen more batters waiting to take their swing after you. 

I also find it puzzling that you fault others for having their values influenced by sociocultural norms, yet this assumes that Christianity itself is free from the purview of sociocultural influence. Unless you're willing to argue that the tenets and values of Christianity were generated in an ideological vacuum free from the tainting reach of cultural interference and distortion --- an extremely foolish argument to make since literally every single religion has grafted the preexisting and organically developed cultural norms, values, and concepts proliferating in the society they spawned from --- your dearly held morals have been just as heavily pushed through the filter of sociocultural influence as everybody else's ethical principles.

There's nothing wrong with that either, feel free to join us, the water is fine. But if that's honestly what's frustrating you in your talks with atheists, perhaps you should reconsider how much the same biases might be influencing your own thinking.