Gods and Monsters.

I was raised as a Catholic.
I was nearly 20 before I dared miss church. I even went through a period of being very involved in the catholic youth movement in my mid teens and was a firm believer for many years.
Can't tell you exactly when or how it slipped away from me, but it did, bit by bit.

Then a few years ago my mum was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease at the age of 60. She's in a home now. She went to church every week and was a pious woman.
I lost a close friend at the age of 30, another (who left 3 young children) a couple of years before that... Both religious in their own faiths.
LBJ told me last night about someone she knows who is terminally ill.

It seems so obvious to me that there cannot be, in any way, a loving god of any sort.
Why would a god let people suffer like this? There is a biblical argument that runs "you aren't good, you are tainted and evil" - oh, so you deserve it.
So why do good things happen to bad people? Well - God is so loving that he is generous to all, and though you deserve hell, you get forgiven.

Bollocks.

If god loved people so much he wouldn't leave mothers to die horrible deaths, or people who have never deliberately harmed anyone to struggle without love, or be unable to have children or without enough food, or let them slowly fade away to a mindless zombie while their family have to watch and hurt every day.
Either he doesn't exist, or he doesn't care in the least about us.
Or maybe he does exist and is so malicious that we must be tortured and still declare our love and obedience an the promise of some post fatality reward... really? I think we call that Control Freakery.
I mean, honestly, why would an omnipotent being really give a shit if I sleep with someone that I'm not married to? Or don't bow down before him on a Sunday? Or if someone eats pork, or a woman lets a man see their hair or has/doesn't have a foreskin or falls in love with someone of the same sex?
He doesn't care. Only stupid humans would care about such inconsequential things, and then only to give themselves power over other people stupid enough to think that the world will end if a man loves a man... or doesn't cut off the foreskin that their god created. I mean WTF people?

OK - so I'm ranting. Sorry about that, but it pisses me off...