Is God good?

I would question why you equate intelligence with authority - and what either of them has to do with goodness.

"Responsible" is the key word there. The Biblical God comes across as a kind of deadbeat dad who can only be counted on to put His own interests first. We have to be responsible because He isn't.

In this life, the innocent suffer while the evil live in luxury. An "ultimate accounting" in a hypothetical afterlife is a copout and inherently evil.

You're missing the point. Whether or not my gamble pays off is irrelevant to the topic. My point, which is on topic, is that the hypothesis of an afterlife in which accounts are settled is evil in itself. It's like raping somebody and saying, "Don't worry, I'll pay you next Tuesday." A god who would set up such a system is evil.

You're still missing the point. It is the hypothesis itself, the system,"God's plan" that is inherently evil. Itmakes no difference whether I believe it's true or not. Your belief is in an evil system, based on your definition of evil. We're not talking about what "he" said or did. We're talking about what God says He will do, according to your belief. What you say God will do, punish people after death while literally letting them get away with murder in life, is evil.

Kidnapping slaves was outlawed before owning slaves was abolished. The Bible seems to have little to say against owning slaves.

Yes. That certainly throws absolute right and wrong out the window. The god of the Levites seems to be content with itsy-bitsy improvements instead of outright repentence. That's why the commandment says, "Thou shalt not kill as many people as thou did last week." No kidding. Another way of preventing starvation is by feeding people.

Maybe you man that mean needs some leading to accept God's grace. Grace would be meaningless if you needed enlightenment to obtain it. You see, you keep describing your own theology in terms that expose it as evil. What you're describing is like a fireman putting out a fire a little bit at a time or a doctor curing a disease a little bit at a time. Their inability to prevent suffering all at once should not be projected onto an omnipotent God. And blaming the victim is, again, downright evil. What does atonement have to do with repentence? To repent, all you have to do is stop. I didn't say a word about war. I said that your idea of stopping slavery a little bit at a time is the same as murdering a few less people than you did last week. Nor do all drunk drivers kill people. Yet we do ban all drunk driving because of the potential danger. We hope to prevent deaths. But your "good" god with his "absolute justice" is content to have the drivers a little less drunk.

Grace is like a present under the Christmas tree with your name on it. You have to accept it - i.e. open it - to derive any value from it but you don't need to understand it. It might turn out to be an electronic gadget that you couldn't operate to save your life but it's still yours. You might appreciate it more if you acquire a jaywill-like understanding of it but you can't own it any more than you already do.

God said that grace was all he was getting - i.e. he wasn't going to be healed. What he had to learn was that grace was the only gift from God that he could count on. All other things he was expected to endure or fix on his own.The only thing to be learned about grace is its limitations. The present under the tree is yours for the taking but you have to get your own Christmas dinner.

It's true that I don't consider, "I could kill you but I won't," a treasure. I would consider your god just leaving me alone a treasure.

Since He can't revoke mine without revoking yours too, that's a non-issue. My friends can thank God for the gift of me if they want to. Of course, I don't hate the Bible. I come to Bible Study to correct the misuse of the Bible. Funny how I keep butting up against you. Where I would like your god to leave me alone is by not killing me for correcting you.

I'm thankful for the creation. I'm just not thankful to the god that you portray. It's your portrayal of God that's harmful to anybody's humanity. I resent your portrayal of God and Jesus. You seem to read my posts the same way as you read the Bible; you make up your own version as you go along.What I said was that I would like the god that you portray to leave me alone. If there actually was a God, a real God, a good God, that would be a different matter.

Yes. You conveniently ignore the parts where it says he's going to torment me eternally.

A pretty good one. The only ones hurt by sin are us. When people are already hurt, it is not "good" to hurt them more. That's exactly what I've been saying. God is not good - because he'd rather be righteous.