Hello, I'm a questioning person with fifteen years studying the Bible. I was recently kicked out of a church which was very traumatic and I'm now questioning everything.

I've started researching atheist arguments recently and noticed that the arguments pull from Christian doctrine very often. However, as I'm sure you know, doctrine of a group does not always match its explicit text. For example, the Christ says he came to fulfill the law and that the law of the spirit now says to love your enemies. But Christianity is so entrenched in God and country and patriotism and believes we should kill both enemies of war and also the innocent civilians that happen to be nearby.

With that said, I would be more interested in the Atheist perspective of the *Bible* as opposed to the religion that sprang up from it. It's very easy to not believe in the God of Christianity, but the God of the Bible is much more complex.

I will provide all scriptures that I base the following assertions on if anyone asks but am eliminating them here for brevity.

1. God creates good and evil.
2. There is no free will, because God has predetermined everything (including all good and all evil)
3. Judgment is purifying and temporal. It is not a physical place or eternal.
4. God deceives and God reveals (ties into #2). So the confusion in the world is intentional.
5. God gives his truth only to a few intentionally.
6. Christ says there are two groups, the group that is judged (saved first) and all the rest of creation after that. Christ brings all creation under himself and then subjects this then under God in the end. Essentially that in the end all of creation will be purified of the natural mind and we will all adopt the spiritual mind of Christ.

I've started really thinking about these core foundations of how the Bible describes God and creation, and I've wondered the following:

Is God evil for creating evil? Even though he created Satan to do the evil work, why is God not complicit?

Ok, and then I get super in over my head:

The Bible says to lean not own your own understanding....except you can reason why God is good or real. The Bible says the heart of man is deceptively wicked....except when it desires God. The Bible says to try the spirits to see whether they are evil or not....but never the spirit of God.

So take the evil of child rape as an example. I take that evil in the context of explicit passages in the Bible here:

God causes rape of children to create suffering in man to teach them that the spiritual mind and reality is more important than our physical experience. That he will right all these wrongs immeasurably. He will wipe away the tears he created. In this framework we are all sacrifices for all of creation in this gigantic work of saving all creation. Is this any less cruel than a God that punishes people in eternal torment? It becomes a comparison of lesser or greater evil. Is it more evil to rape a little girl or to eternally torment billions of people? It becomes an argument about if the atonement negates the evil. It raises the problem of, if evil is created by God then in a sense it's just a construct in the reality he's creating and he can somehow not be seen as a monster because this reality is not the true reality. Nevertheless, he created us in this reality and to react accordingly as if it's real. And if the fact that this physical reality is a constructed one to lead us to the value of a higher reality, then wouldn't the higher reality only be meaningful if we believed the lesser reality to be real? In the same sense that we look back on experiences in our life, memories, and compare them to the present. If the physical reality were, like a dream, not actually real life...then we are relieved and we think nothing of it. If entering the higher reality can be compared in the same way then why would we need atonement or the wiping away of tears for something which was not reality and just a dream?