Are all atheists this ill-informed about religion?

[Redbeard The Pink]

I do understand the difficulty in the problem of evil and specifically of suffering that we cannot explain.  It is especially difficult if we or someone we love is the one suffering.  The issue I believe with this argument is that it focus's on and put's above everything else, only one or a few of the qualities of God.  

It is setting up a false dichotomy.  It wants to say that benevolence must do X to the exclusion of everything else.  That benevolence  would not allow suffering in any circumstance if it could be prevented.  I don't believe this to be true, and don't believe that the definition of benevolence requires this.  An honest judge may sentence someone, and cause suffering, but this does not mean that he is not benevolent or caring.  However, caring for the person does not mean that the judge needs to exclude other responsibilities.

Except that the "judge" in this scenario allegedly created everything in the entire Universe with full foreknowledge of which parts were guaranteed to involve wickedness, suffering, and death on any scale, and is thus personally responsible for the actions of every criminal and warlord who's ever lived, and allegedly destroys whole civilizations and even global populations himself (making him worse than any human could ever be). The only one who's guilty of anything in that situation is actually the judge himself.


Either he's so evil that he used his omniscience and omnipotence to lay out a plan that expressly involves the pointless suffering and death of multitudinous innocents (most of whom are children), or he's so incompetent that he can't create a Universe without his very creations mucking up all his plans by somehow creating evil and suffering in a system that was designed to exclude those things.


So which is it? Is your Gaud evil or stupid?


(spoiler alert: he's both)