Someone on Quora asked, why do people have a "problem with God"?

When my younger sister — beautiful, brilliant, a talented photographer — died of brain cancer months after she turned 23, I stopped believing in the angry old white man in the sky and his God-in-a-man-suit blond “Son” and the “Holy Ghost” whom no one pays attention to. I loudly and often proclaimed that I had no interest in worshipping a deity who had murdered my sister.

And then eight years later, I met and married my first husband, who was a “cradle” Episcopalian. Because I wanted my children to have as good a Sunday School education as I did, I started going to church again. Even if God WAS a murderer.

I was packing to move in with Jerry when a book fell open to the floor. I picked it up, and read: “OF COURSE you believe in God. You wouldn't be this angry with the Tooth Fairy, would you?” Nope. Sure wouldn't! Was it a coincidence or was it a Sign? Who knows?

See, here's the thing: Assuming that God exists, there are qualities that an uber-deity must have: transcendence; immanence; omniscience; omnipresence; eternity, and most important, infinity. God is here on Earth, inside the atoms and subnuclear particles of your body. At the same time, God is 28.8 million light-years away, inside the atoms and subnuclear particles of Joe Alien. God is listening to our thoughts, all 8.3+ billion of us, while also listening to all the thoughts of all the thinking creatures in the Universe, all at once, all the time. And God has been doing it for at least 14.4 billion years, and will keep on doing it eternally.

How? you might ask. God is infinite! God has an infinite amount of time to pay attention to me and my little problems, you and your little problems, Susie Alien and her little problems....

But THAT is the problem so many people have with God. Most people don't think much about God except on days when they're going to a worship service, and Abrahamic religions’ dogma comes straight out of the Bronze Age (when the Hebrew Scriptures, the “old" 2/3rds of the Bible were inscribed onto tanned animal skins). Islam worships a warrior God whose idea of bliss is deflowering 72 virgins a night. Christianity ostensibly worships the aforementioned Trinity, but in practice focuses less on the angry old white man in the sky, more on his blond surfer-dude Son, and not at all on the Holy Ghost. Judaism is more restrained than either of its offspring, but still takes for granted that a transcendent, immanent, eternal, omniscient Deity who created both men and women in the Deity's image (Gen. 1:27, 5:1-2) must be exclusively male.

I think the fact that so many people have a problem with God comes from two major sources: they have been taught faulty dogma, especially as children (“God hates children who won't eat their peas"), and their moral exemplars are hypocrites (“I know he's a con man, a fraud, a thief, a rapist, a traitor, and a terrible person, but he's doing God's will!").

I don't know why God didn't save my younger sister, or my younger brother, or my parents, or my grandparents ... I don't know whether my ideas about God are any more profound than anyone else's. But I do know that each person who seeks a relationship with what I'll call the spiritual world should pretty much ignore what they read in holy books and hear from the pulpit and think for themselves.

Because God is infinite, any definitive human (i.e finite) pronunciation about God's nature, deeds, and intentions isn't just wrong — it's infinitely wrong.

A famous theologian named Frederick Buechner wrote, “Theology is the study of God and God's ways. For all we know, dung beetles may study our ways and call it humanology. If so, we would probably be more touched and amused than irritated. One hopes that God feels likewise.”