Benevolent Creator God?

[Mister Agenda]

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.

Exactly, for a threat to be credible, the person making it has to be believably capable of carrying out the threat. I wouldn't be afraid of the president due to the US prez not being able to unilaterally nuke anyone, let alone individuals; but if the scenario was a madman with a suitcase nuke and their possession of the nuke was verified, I would be well-advised to run.

But in this scenario you're not the president or the madman with the nuke. You're a rando telling me the president or a madman with a nuke is going to atom bomb me if I don't heed your admonishments. The threat is not credible because the source of the threat has no means of carrying it out and their source is not only hearsay, that hearsay is contradicted by other hearsay and there are other randos yelling I better listen to them because it's really their dude who has the suitcase nuke and will nuke me if I don't heed them.

I don't believe any of them, so the threat does not intimidate me.

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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.

At least one human must have received some guidance from God does not logically follow from 'God exists'.

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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.

If I saw the Sun rising up from the West from where I live, I would certainly doubt my senses, it's physically impossible. I understand that the sun appears to go through some antics at or near the poles, so I wouldn't be so sure it was my senses or brain that was acting up. I know the direction the earth rotates, which is a very good reason to diminish my personal experience as delusional in that situation.

If I ever see the sun rise in the West I should get my head examined, and if you see that, so should you.