Benevolent Creator God?

[R00tKiT]

If by infinite loss you mean living in damnation for eternity if we are wrong about god, then consider this.  One doesn't have to be just right that god exists; that's short sighted.  You also have to pick the "right" god.  And how does one determine that?  If I grew up on Pakistan I would most likely be Sunni Muslim, mostly because the culture there reinforces it so strongly.  If I grew up in China I would likely practice Taoism or folk religion.  If you grew up in Mississippi I can almost guarantee you would be Baptist.  Whatever you are exposed to early in life is most likely what you will believe.  If you do decide to challenge your cultural beliefs and explore other religious modalities, you come to realize there is no objective evidence to support one over another.  It just comes down to what people want to believe or whatever beliefs they can accept as close enough to truth.  I have yet to find any religion deserving of that.

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.

First you have to definitively establish the existence of god.  If that were to be accomplished, there are lot of things I would be willing to consider possible.  Although, again, you would still have some work cut out for you.  Different gods have different expectations of human beings.  So you would still have to objectively identify god and its nature/expectations.  Good luck with that.  Thousands of religions on earth and none of them can agree on that.

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). 

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.

You realize you just changed positions, right?  If you can't rule out the invisible dragon, then you can't rule out any version of "god" or just about any subjective claim someone makes. 

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.

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...

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I'm prepared to take that risk, as I consider the possibility itself to be infinitesimal.

Is this again your personal opinion, or do you have some objective way to assign probabilities to religious beliefs ???

The problem with that:  Infinite punishment for acts committed in a finite lifetime is infinitely evil, and a god that would behave in such a manner is simply not to be trusted.

Completely false. The length of a commited act is disproportionate to the length of punishment. Murdering someone can take less than a few seconds, the punishment can be a life sentence, etc.

I've already deduced that religion is not for me, and I went through my ontological phase many decades ago.  Waste of my time to reopen issues that are already resolved to my satisfaction.

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.