"The conclusion I dread is not 'So there's no God after all,' but 'So this is what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer.'" - C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
In 2007 I went to Burning Man. I liked to hang out at the tent where people are interested in entheogens because people tend to be interested in deep spiritual conversations, like I do. The guy next to me explained that he had been raised Catholic, but that he couldn't believe in a God who "sent babies to hell for failing to be baptized before they died." A fear of Catholics, that seems to drive the tradition of having their babies baptized, is the belief that one of the requirements for going to Heaven is that one be baptized. Since even a baby could die at any time, it seems logical then to baptize the baby as soon as possile to prevent the damnation that would reselt in the event of their untimely death. What doesn't get discussed from the pulpit is the ungodly idea of a God who would arbitrarily reject and/or punish an infant for failing to be baptized in time by their parents. To think of a human parent doing such a thing seems outrageous and monsterous, but because there is no outlet to address this outrage in the Catholic church system, it remains unaddressed and leads to traumatized former Catholics like my friend. I immediately assured him that I, too, could not believe in such a God, and that he was right in not believing in one.
But let me be quick to add that I see the same problem in Protestant churches, and in Moslem mosques, and would expect to see the same thing in Jewish synagogues. The model of running these things from a leader who presents themselves as a teacher and not a student, and which expects the congregation to participate in a listen-only mode and not a collaborative one, paralyzes spiritual growth and leaves the profound and reasonable concerns of the congregation unaddressed. It is deplorable and extremely unfortunate that just about everyone is left to forge ahead alone. If people want to get real answers about what God is like, answers that address our greatest fears about what God is like, my experience is that there is little public support. This website is an attempt to offer the beginnings of the support that we should all have, but it is godawful that there isn't a better system in place. One thing holding this situation in place is the enormous pride we have in our materialistic sophistication, behind which we hide our spiritual immaturity. We do everything in our power to avoid addressing the immaturity, until calamity strikes, which it inevitably does.
The question, what is your greatest fear, might itself seem frightening to ask. But the answer I've found might, I hope, lead you to a place of less fear. Our greatest fear is our fear of God. This is logical, since God represents the greatest unknown, and people are afraid of the unknown because it opens a space in which we can imagine painful and uncontrollable possibilities. God, if defined as omniscient and omnipotent, would be frightening if we imagined that He is evil. Even if God is promised to be loving and good, we are still afraid due to our incomplete comprehension of what these things mean, and also because of the clash that these attributes have with the world we experience. The "problem of evil" is the question of how to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering with an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient God, and I consider it the most difficult problem that we are faced with as human being, but not impossible to solve. The challenge in addressing this problem is in questioning all that we have been taught is true by our family and society, and reconsidering what we believe is true about the world, other people, ourself, and reality. It takes a long time to reevaluate all these things, but time is only limited according to materialism. If God is real and materialism is not, then there is no time limit. In fact, all the causes of hurry and worry can be held in question if the God in charge of our ultimate reality is all-powerful, loving and eternal.
The most effective way I have found to be reassured that God is good is to observe that there seems to be good in the world and its people in our experience, and that if God is the source of everything, then that goodness we experienced must come from God. The obvious doubt this raises is that we experience evil in the world too, and if this also comes from God then it would make God not good, but schizophrenic. To address this doubt requires a more sophisticated idea of God. In the Bible we are given the concept of a devil that is responsible for the evil we experience, but though this might explain how God is not evil, then the question is why there is a devil at all and where his power comes from. The concepts offered by the Bible need to be pondered, because on the surface it seems to say that the devil gets his power from God, which would make God responsible for what the devil does, unsolving the original problem. But there is a key in Genesis, when the devil tempts Eve to eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Since God knows only good, this tree would confer schizophrenia, not the knowledge of God, or knowledge at all because the good truth is not compatible with any ideas of evil. My suggestion is that this event, the "fall of humanity", redirected the power that God gave to us to the devil. The power is not going directly from God to the devil, because God does not know of the devil. It comes to us and we continually, mostly unconsciously pass it on to the devil, resulting in all the imperfection in the world we have been experiencing.
The idea in the paragraph above is the most valuable thing I can offer anyone. It is central to salvation because it explains why God is good and only good. It also explains how God can save us from everything not good, why this has not happened yet, and may give a sense of what we have to do to solve our only ancient problem.