As has been made patently clear through my years of either spectating or participating in theological forum discussions, indemnity and scorn are part and parcel.
Therefore, not wanting to be the target of a verbally-lambasted and logically-exhausted fervent ideologue or tendentious doctranaire's wrath, I feel it is necessary to provide this thread's participants and lurkers—be they seething or sardonic religious skeptics, or an equally-insufferable diehard and obstinate (maybe daft?) theist—with a caveat.
I have been a veritable atheist (or just an incredulous agnostic, as are all atheists) since about 12-years-old. I would obsessively ruminate on my former religion, and I would always find some niggling inconsistencies, blatant scientific incongruity, or suspiciously athropocentric perspectives and cognitive earmarks. Some of these could be comfortably and swiftly reconciled with verbal virtuosity and an admittedly beguiling application of logical argument.
About 4-5 years after, whilst, as per usual, finding myself tediously culling through YouTube's infinite stockpile of pabulum and inanity —like a miner arduoudly shoveling through dirt and rocks all for that improbable discovery of striking gemstones and precious metals—I managed to exhume from the deeply-layered mounds of media ordure videos of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens (a great and admirable man with an almost-preternatual vocabulary and lexical dexterity).
With a careful, buddha-esque concentration, and hours of my time to expend, I watch perhaps 2-3 dozens of these soi-disant "New Atheists" videos. Having grown fond of these men, it hurt deeply to see them all utilize such egregiously unsound argumentation with such an asinine and utterly sophomoric monomaniacal focus on Christianity. There arguments may be abstracted thusly,
A is the set of all religion.
B is an element of set A.
B is proved false.
Therefore, all of set A is proved false.
Abrahamic religions are unmitigated malarkey. The veracity of, say, Jainism, is not contingent on the veracity of Islam, Judaism, Christianity, or the Bahá'í faith. Noah's mendacious and uncorroborated animal raft, the impossibility of Jesus' Benny Hinn-esque medical magic, etc, says what of Hinduism?
I presume that debating a sagacious and knowledgeable Hindu scholar is unappealing to Western atheists as the religion (or technically, the myriad of mildly inter-related and incredibly disparate sub-religions that Westerners negligently and lazily subsume under a single word «Hinduism») contains sects of atheists, as well. Atheistic Hinduism at least predates the birth of Christmas, and one may argue even his great-grandparents.
Moreover, amongst the incalculable quantity of distinct Hindu deities (not including the yet incalculable amount of each deities manifestations and supernal and/or corporeal transmogrifications) their exists malevolent, benevolent, callous, empathic, destructive, creative, etc, deities.
But I sincerely do acknowledge the convenience and advantage allowed for by this disregard prepense. With such a politic way of circumventing unwritten rules of logical discourse by employing selection bias, hasty generalizations, etc, one could not—without at least a suppressed smirk—proffer such erroneous arguments of the form:
1.) The Bible/Qu'ran/et al affirm (ad nauseum and quite obsequiously, I find) the Abrahamic God's benevolence and love of His creation.
2.) With biblical exegesis, one may notice this benevolence and loving disposition frequently imputed to God only manifests itself intermittently and usually before or after God's commanding or permitting some deplorable and savagely brutal act(s). Thus, God contradicts his lovey-dovey, copacetic, and benign (cult of) personality. Therefore, he is either not omniscient, as surely His profound and all-knowing self would have the faculties to avoid sanguineous tantrums and contrariety.
However you—that is, OP—seem to not argue against the bible through the Bible. Instead, you're presumably contrasting the countenance of the New Testament's God 2.0 with the condition of the world as it presently is. This works, too.
The world's abject misery and despondency does not fit in with the Abrahamic God as His "divinely-inspired nonfiction" literature tries incompetently to demonstrate.
Not wanting to be discursive and therein upset anyone suffering from ADHD, dyslexia, borderline-retarded IQ, or those "tl;dr" oafs—the latter being one of a mere soupçon of American-made products, these days.
Your thread's main post seems tantamount to this New Atheism movement's quaint and sophistic notion that challenging the veracity of Abrahamic religions logically dismantles every other religion.
Envisage a hypothetical Wildebeest getting chased by a pack of hungery hyenas, ultimately collapsing from attrition in its legs and then—the wildebeest too enervated from its chase to fight, yet fully cognizant of what terror it faces—gets torturously gnawed, bitten, and masticated by a starving posse of ruthless hyena. While trauma doesn't kill it soon enough, it is slowly smothered by its own weight in a shallow puddle of its profusely transuding blood. Another wildebeest joins the Yawning Grave in Tanzania's Serengeti.
Now, to the bleeding-heart, emasculated, Western "male" with a case of Bambi Syndrome, such natural atrocities must impugn a God's every existence, as such animal mass-murder cannot exist under the management of a compassionate, caring, and omnibenevolent and omnipotent and omniscient entity.
Can it? Hmm.
Why not presuppose an omni-malevalent deity? Or an omni-ambivalent diety? Or an omnibenevolent diety such that His benevolence and morality are so ineffable and recondite as to be effectively impossible to theorize their whys and wherefore. Especially is this relevant if you're using merely the concensus and laws of your own culture's highly malleable, ephemeral, and cross-culturally very disparate to those notions of what constitutes morality in a different milieu.
A biblical critique is child's play. An attempt to seem like a budding Bertrand Russell by regurgitating the faulty and myopic reasoning you likely heard in a YouTube video is commiserable; concealing it within the diaphanous pretext of an interrogative statement is censurable.
I know the pain and consternation of having run out of ways in gainsaying or verbally one-uping your opponent(s) and their argument's—finding and mutilating their Achilles Hill. But you're not much unlike someone who, in playing a video game, purposely sets the difficulty to "Easy" so to seem like sort of an AI "pwning" United cognoscenti.
To up the difficulty and lower your cognitive distortions of dialectical grandeur, I proffer to you the following challenge:
Learn Classical Sanskrit to an advanced degree of communicative proficiency (like, say, a philologist or linguistic Indologist may).
Procure the prerequisite reading materials (untranslated versions have the advantage of retaining their original syntax and semantics, and thus don't suffer from lexical ambiguity, gauche and nonsensical paragraphs, heretofore untranslated lexical items, and generally a book of page after page of untoward drivel, guestimated lexemes, and an utter loss of the original Sanskrit author's tact, poetry, and wordplay. Yech! )
The religious Hindu texts I'd advise you delve into first —assuming you haven't failed learning Sanskrit without ripping your hair out and going mad—are thusly:
Mahabharata
Rigveda
Yajurveda
Samaveda
Atharvaveda
Samhita
Brahmanas
Aranyakas
Upanishads
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
And all the Puranas.
It should take about 2 years to learn Sanskrit like you know you notice tongue. And maybe 4-7 years to survey and debate the pages of those times tomes.
At the outset, it may seem interminable and insurmountable a task, but cannot the same be said of any intellectual pursuit?
Oh, and don't think I took your terse OP seriously or as though it was more worth the time and cognition as expounding to an 8-year-old why the earth orbits the sun and the moon doesnt. I simply enjoy language.
______________________________________________________________
Acta est fabula, plaudite!
-Augustus Caesar
