Benevolent Creator God?

[R00tKiT]

This something I've put a fair amount of thought to, and have concluded that it is in fact rational to not worry about the possibility of a great or even infinite loss if the possibility isn't credible. When someone threatens you, the first consideration is not how horrible the threat is, but how likely it is to materialize. If a ruffian with a cudgle threatens to beat me unless I hand over my wallet, that's a credible threat. If they threaten me with nuclear annihilation, I'm not going to worry that they will carry out that threat, even though the threatened outcome would be thousands of times worse than getting beaten, because the threat is absurd. How could they have access to a nuke? Why would they use something like that just to get my wallet? Wouldn't the nuke get them too? It's a silly threat.

It actually depends on the person threatening you with nuclear annihilation, if that person is the President of the United States personally, you better run away as far as you can from your residence. There are many considerations when it comes to whether we should take a threat seriously, and people rarely consider them honestly.

In the case of hell, someone is telling you that the creator of the universe has created a place of eternal torture which will be your fate after you die if you don't do certain things. How could a mere human possibly know this? 

Well, if you are assuming God exists, at least one human must have received some guidance from God. In the case of major religious experiences (Abaraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, etc.), the mechanism of receiving revelation and recognizing it's from God is only accessible to the recipient of the revelation. The question is of course whether one should accept their experience as true.

If you see the Sun rising from the west, you would believe that the Sun rises from the West, plain and simple -unless you have very good reasons to dimiss your personal experience as delusional. Similarly, Muhammad saw an angel instructing him to recite some message and broadcast a religion, Muhammad went on and did it. Was he justified to do so? Well, of course, to do otherwise would be to deny his senses. Are we justified to accept his experience? Since we don't have access to his personal experience, we evaluate the content of his revelations and see how improbable it is that he could come up with it from available knowledge.

Why would the creator of the universe care so much about a human on the edge of one galaxy following a list of rules that they would track them every minute and then make sure they suffer eternal torture? It's absurd and I'm rational enough not to worry about absurd threats.

Oh. So the more rational course of action was, according to you, to neglect the human species because they are of tiny size compared to galaxies?................... What does that do to God's omnibenevolence..?

People keep objecting to eternal torture because they think it's inhuman to torture someone forever, all these objections disappear when some tragedy involve them personally, the mother of a murdered child won't have many objections to the murderer being tortured for eternity.

You do have to check them, all of them.  The compelling threat hangs over your head in each case, if it’s a compelling threat in any one.

No, you don't. The compelling threats are mutually exclusive. Once you find the "right threat", you don't need to check the rest -all false automatically.