Is God to Blame?: Beyond pat answers to the problem of suffering. (2003)
First off, full disclosure, I consider myself to be an atheist. I was brought up Lutheran and have many Catholic cousins. In living around the country I came to know all kinds of different people with different beliefs, including Jewish faith, and Mormonism. When I was little, I had my doubts because every week the pastor would preach about how we are all sinners and owed money to God to get his forgiveness. Then they passed the collection plate. Well, my parents did not seem like sinners to me. My dad was a WWII hero. However, the Germans on the other end of the bombs from his B17 probably had a different perspective on things. Maybe because of the immediacy of the presence of the war in my childhood, and with it, the Holocaust and the evilness of Hitler in particular, but later of course I learned of Mussolini, Stalin, Franco, Pol Pot, et al, I had good reason to question the very basis of there being a “kind and loving god” at all. Tens of millions dead across the world because of a handful of despots. The cruelty and pervasiveness of the torture and brutality did not seem to indicate there was an omnipotent god.