Benevolent Creator God?

[Spongebob]

Appeal to religious diversity -invalid objection. One isn't punished by a just God for getting a wrong answer, but for dishonestly dimissing all answers, by pretending they are all of the same credibility. 

That there are conflicting accounts of God and how to worship him doesn't mean they are all false. And some claims about God are more compelling than others. Christianity and Judaism, for example, are a non-starter since the words of Moses/Jesus are lost, and the Q source is unavailable, even its existence is a matter of debate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source

Mormonism for example is a subset of christianity, a subset of an invalid claim is a fortiori invalid. This leaves you with one possible abrahamic religion: Islam. There isn't much debate about the preservation of the Qur'an, unlike the Bible.

OK, I'm not all that educated on Islam, so you could be telling the truth about that religion though I doubt it, but Judaism and Christianity most certainly do not tolerate "other gods".  If you don't believe me, just Google it.  There's absolutely no doubt about this question and I'm a ex-Christian myself.  For the thousands of other deities out there who don't care about which god you worship, it hardly makes any difference.  Most of those deities don't profess love of humans and don't demand humans worship them to get rewards in the afterlife.  Some of them require other behaviors, such as fighting bravely in the case of Odin.  The point is if I decide that Wicca is the "True" religion and decide to follow it, I am damned by at least Christianity and Judaism and my guess is Islam as well based on what I know of it.  So my point still stands, just believing there is a "god" isn't enough, you have to determine which is the "True" god or you could still be screwed.

That there are conflicting accounts of God and how to worship him doesn't mean they are all false. And some claims about God are more compelling than others. Christianity and Judaism, for example, are a non-starter since the words of Moses/Jesus are lost, and the Q source is unavailable, even its existence is a matter of debate.

This isn't what I said.  I said that just believing in god isn't enough, I'm required to choose the "True" god.  Yes, some claims about "god" are more compelling than others.  Some are rather silly while others are somewhat reasonable.  But really none are convincing to someone who is skeptical and wants objective evidence.  And I agree that the Bible/Torah both have a questionable history and can't be taken as anything other than ancient stories that evolved over time.

Mormonism for example is a subset of christianity, a subset of an invalid claim is a fortiori invalid. This leaves you with one possible abrahamic religion: Islam. There isn't much debate about the preservation of the Qur'an, unlike the Bible.

I agree with you on the first part, but then you make this completely unsupported claim after that.  Just because Christianity and Mormonism are nonsense doesn't raise Islam to anything more than that.  The Q is just as much a human spun tale as Mathew, Mark, Luke and John.

The existence of a first cause can be definitively established, you can find extensive literature about infinite regress and why there can't be an infinite chain of actual casuses. There are also arguments for why this first cause is personal (along the lines of : creating something instead of nothing entails that this cause decided to create it, and decision-making involves a personal agent). 

Yeah, I've read about a dozen books on the ontological argument and the cosmological argument.  Guess what, they are still just arguments.

Actually, the difficulty is not to identify the "right" religion, but proving that this personal God must be just and omnibenevolent -there is nothing we can do about a malevolent God. To achieve that, one can appeal to the fine-tuning of the universe and the fact that it's governed by physical laws, making it (vastly) more probable than not that God doesn't leave things  - let alone people - without some kind of law or guidance.

Your logic here is nonsense.  The fine tuning argument is a specific argument for an omnipotent god.  It does not support the existence of a benevolent god.  A malevolent god could just as logically fine tuned the universe to allow for intelligent life so it could enjoy torturing said life.

The difference is, I am not an atheist. If I accept some version of God (the theistic God as described in Islam), I don't need to check the rest of the possible versions, because any two religions are mutually exclusive.

YES, YOU DO!  That's the point.  If you accept that Allah is the one true god, but it turns out you are wrong and it's actually Yahweh, you are screwed.  Note:  You have not in any way demonstrated that Islam is the true religion but Christianity or Judaism is not.

Think of it like this : you have 50 closed doors in front of you, only one door contains some prize. Let's say you open 13 doors randomly and none of them contain the prize, but the 14th does. It's clear that there is no need to check to remaining 36 doors, but checking the 14 doors in the beginning was absolutely necessary...

Uh, how did you determine the 14th door was the right one?  What gave it away?  What is his beard?



You are failing on the these basic points:

1)  Does god exist?  Neither you nor any other human being has demonstrated the answer to this question.  Arguments abound, but evidence does not and thus we have only arguments based on flimsy logic.

2)  If god was ever truly demonstrated to exist (and it has not), you MUST now demonstrate the nature of this god, meaning what it wants us to do.  This cannot be done until #1 is complete.

3)  Therefore, If I choose any god of the thousands available to me and I get it wrong, I could end up being punished forever if the "true" god does that sort of thing.  That's assuming any god exists.  If no god exists, which should be the default position, then my religious beliefs will have no affect on the afterlife, only on how I behave while I'm alive.

You have not established any logical argument that penetrates these stated facts.

Why did you rule out all the religious claims that you didn't bother to check? Unless you have some very good reason for dismissing each, your position is dishonest.

This question was directed at Astreja, but I just couldn't resist.  So, earlier you said you had 50 "doors" to check and you got it right on the 13th try, so you stopped there.  These were your specific words.  You stated that you somehow KNEW you got it right on the 13th try, but you didn't bother to check the rest.  So how could you know for sure?  You can't.  Now you are criticizing Astreja for not continuing to check all the doors?  That is called hypocrisy.

But the full answer to this question is that spending one's entire life experiencing all the known religious modalities is not reasonable.  It would take an entire lifespan to fully research every religion known to man.  I spent 20+ years as a Christian and it took me another 10 to decide it was nonsense.  I just can't do that with all the other religions.  The reasonable approach is to study a few religions and apply as much logic and reason as you can.  If your conclusion is that these are all nonsense, then it's reasonable to conclude that the rest probably are as well.  And the atheist keeps an open mind, unlike every religious person on the planet.  If some new messiah appears, I can always consider it, but the Muslim, Christian, Hindu, whatever, will just reject it because it isn't "their" religion, which just happens to be the right one.