Thanks for the response Stephen. On your last question about certainty, I am certain of nothing regarding God and his ways. But that does not stop me from making the best judgments I can on these issues even as you make your judgments. As for trotting out the "crock" of free will defense, what is there about this version of theodicy do you find objectionable? You may have heard it often before but some of the best minds in the history of the world have developed and supported this idea. I suspect your predisposition to reject the theistic and Christian account of existence and its history leads you to reject this out of hand. For me, it is a a hypothesis that has merit. God creating a world with creatures with minds of their own and the freedom to choose good or evil explains much. I don[t find the alternatives of a universe appearing without meaning including good and evil, nor a universe of puppet creatures to be as compelling.

As for your first statement that the greatest evil and misery have been perpetrated by followers of Christ, I agree that the history of followers of Jesus the Messiah is a terrible tragedy and greatly harms the message of the way of God. However, I don't think you can make that claim when we still have living memory of the tens of millions who died as a result of two of the greatest and most violent atheist leaders of all time. Faith in Christ, sadly, does not prevent the horrors and violence that is the nature of fallen humanity.