A Moral God??

As I wrote earlier, I am now a member of the NYCAtheists and in their current newsletter there is this quote by MarieAlena Castle: I have great success by telling people I'd be happy to believe in god if I could find one that is up to my moral standards. As jaws drop, I explain that if I were god, I would never allow all this suffering--"and neither would you!" I go on to tell them how decent they are and wonder why they worship a god that's not as nice as they are. Works every time. One of the myriad reasons I lost faith (though I might not have had any to begin with) was the unjustness of the Biblical god. He forces Abraham to kill his son though he lets the poor guy off the hook just in time, he wreaks havoc in the life of Job and his family for what is little more than a bet, punishes billions of innocent women with pain in childbirth because of one woman's disobedience and he lets countless injustices go unpunished eg the Levite in Judges who hands over his concubine to be gang-raped to death. When all the controversies about the Ten Commandments arose I looked them over. The one that bothered me the most was: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that [is] thy neighbour's. Now if you stole his house or ox you'd be breaking the "thou shalt not steal" commandment or if you killed him for his belongings you'd be breaking the "thou shalt not kill" commandment. In fact coveting is sort of the basis of life in America, that is keeping up with the Joneses; all ads are geared to making you covet stuff that your neighbor might own. Since it forbids thought, not action, it is basically a useless commandment. The commandments were supposedly given to Moses by god after he and his fellow Israelites escaped from slavery in Egypt. Now wouldn't a "thou shalt not enslave others" commandment be a far more just commandment? It would have placed Israelites on the moral high ground as the people who, remembering the misery of their own enslavement, didn't enslave others and would've spared untold millions the misery and death caused by slavery? But nooo we get "thou shalt not covet" :( Another injustice stemming from the way fundamentalists see things, is that everyone who doesn't know Jesus is condemned to hell no matter how decent they were. This includes everyone who lived and died before his birth. Now who is to blame for their ignorance? Why god is, as he didn't have Jesus come to Earth in the beginning. To make things fair, Adam and Eve should've given birth to Cain, Abel, Seth and Jesus. So god is responsible for sending all those innocent people to hell for something that is his fault as is his failure to connect the Old World with the New thereby condemning all those innocent Native Americans born before 1492 to hell for not knowing Jesus but then how could they? How just a god is this? Ms Castle has it right - not one of our gods* lives up to the moral standards we now strive for especially the Biblical one. *I'm not about to go into all of the religions of the world but from the amount I've read it holds true for them too.