Ya hit on something there that the fire n' brimstone 'zoids don't ever think about, or at least don't like to think about. If a perfect God started a project called 'Earth and Man' to keep him busy, why would it be all fucked up? Couldn't a god set up his hobby to where it ran a whole lot smoother than having to judge and burn a few billion souls?

If he gave man 'free will' why would he make that will anything less than perfect? If there was and is a god, somewhere along the lines, there's no getting around the fact that ultimately, He's responsible for all the evil as well as all the good.

Life feeds on life, therefore all life is a struggle for domination and power. We didn't set it up that way, so if there is a god, he's the one responsible for the order of things and its consequences. Every creepy,crawly thing down here is just doing the best it can to get by and survive. Loftier virtues are a luxury of those who've reached a level of dominance and are not so pressured by the struggle. Throw that 'free will' in a more deperate situation and all those virtues will go right out the window.

Emotions such as greed and fear are no more than just survival mechanisms just like all the warm n' fuzzy ones we think of as virtues. We're stuck here in a mechanism of Cause and Effect--a cosmic watch ticking away and doing it's own thing. 'Judging' how it operates and the behavior of the pieces of protoplasm caught in the mechanism is as absurd as a child passing moral judgements on ants in an antfarm.