comment: >
  
  I think your argument hinges on the problem of free will. If God is all-powerful and all-knowing then He must have created you in such a way that you would either believe or not believe in Him. But these are assumptions of a natural world. Perhaps the exertion of free will is a supernatural process, it is independent of the laws of nature. Somehow your soul has made the decision not to believe, and this belief is independent of your genes or your environment in a way that God has decided not to intervene in any way. You may ask how is that possible, but frankly once you accept the premise of a supernatural being all bets are off, there's really not much constraining what is and isn't possible.
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  In catholicism, this is known as the Jansenist heresy. Refuting it is one of only three times a pope has used papal infallibility which ended any debate on the matter within the church.  that's just trivia though.
  The counter argument is that god wants you to choose to love and believe in him. God doesn't want to force you to love him. He wants to be chosen. Like the trope of the rich prince who can have any woman he wants pretending to be a poor commoner so that he can find a woman who really loves him. >
  
  Does the rich prince condemn the woman to eternal torture if she doesn't? >
  
  She stays poor and never has anyone love her. Isn't that the same thing? >
  
  I'm pretty sure she could just find another commoner who she does love and live a normal life. That's a pretty far cry from "choose between loving me and becoming wealthy beyond your wildest dreams and not choosing me and being tortured for all eternity." 
  I'm guessing that's why so many (non-Christian) religions had a "middle-of-the-road" afterlife - it makes the divine power in question sound like less of a spiteful, egotistical sadist like our prince here would have to be. >
  
  Yeah christianity was a lot more sane before the fire and brinstone gang. I never liked those sects or found their teachings to ring true. >
  
  I don’t exactly understand the response to the second theist arguement- why would your suffering contribute to a much larger good? You suffering in hell for being an atheist does, in no way, contribute to god granting his subjects free will. The OPTION to be atheist is what is integral to free will, and that exists whether or not you choose the option. If everyone on earth chose to be an atheist, the option would still exist. >
  
  I'm not sure if you're referring to the free-will theodicy or the higher-order theodicy. 
  But, anyway, I think it is reasonable to assume that a truly omniscient God could create a world in which people have free will and end up believing in God / choose to act in accordance with His wishes. This is an issue I personally have with that theodicy, and also my spin on it. 
  If I'm already assuming that God is omniscient and benevolent, though, I don't think it's unreasonable to accept that the math works out somehow, on some scale.
  (More cynically, I'm inclined to see it with more of a The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas spin, in which a small amount of suffering is capable of bringing about a much larger amount of good.) >
  
  The bit from Acts 17
  
  From one ancestor (God) made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him - though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For "in him we live and move and have our being."
  
  and the comment on suffering speak to an idea I've been exploring lately: that perhaps God's wish is not for humans to be happy, but something else—to know Him, for example. That thought process is sort of what led to this post. 
  Anyhow, thank you for the document\~ I had not been familiar with it, and it is interesting.