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So, now onto the discussion... all atheist inquires are in dark red.

Why would a supposedly good god create all that is bad?

And what do you mean 'all that is bad'? Do you mean everything you don't like? Well, to supply an answer so I can get started, I'll assume you mean 'evil' in general and suffering. So, now we have the following propositions that you have raised.

a: God is omnipotent and omniscient.
b: God is completely good.
c: There is suffering and evil in the world.

None of which I will debate, they all make sense... however you go on to say...

d: A good an omnipotent God could eliminate suffering entirely.
e:There could not be morally sufficient reasons for God permitting suffering.

Well, since you pose those questions, I will ask you this: How do you know that there are not morally sufficient reasons for God to permit suffering?

Let me quote C.S.Lewis for a minute here:

"If God were good, he would wish to make his creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty he would be able to do what he wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either the goodness, or power, or both. This is the problem of pain in its simplest form."

If you choose to say "God can give a creature free-will and at the same time withhold free-will from it," you have not succeeded in saying ANYTHING about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire a meaning because we prefix them with the two others words: "God can." It remains true that ALL THINGS are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of his creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives, not because his power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense, even when we talk it about God"

Now, onto suffering. Suffering cannot be regarded as arising from lack of divine omnipotence. Far from it. If God creates a material universe and gives creatures freedom of action, suffering follows on as a matter of course. Having exercised his omnipotence in creating the universe and endowing his creatures with freedom, he cannot block the outcome of that free universe,which is suffering. "Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you will find that you have excluded life itself."

Now, onto goodness. You assume that the meaning of this word is self-evident, when in fact it requires considerable thought. Goodness is the natural outcome and expression of the Love of God.Is suffering inconsistent with a loving God? I would insist that you pay attention to the term love, and avoid reading into it trivial and sentimental human parodies of the divine reality. God tells us what love is like. There is no need for us to guess about it. The love of God is, as Lewis comments:

It is not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, not the care of a host who feels himself responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire itself, the love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes.

The love of God, then, is not some happy-go-lucky outlook on life that makes hedonism its goal. It is a divine love that proceeds from God and leads back to God, that embraces suffering as a consequence of the greater gifts of life and freedom.

REAL LIFE IMPLIES SUFFERING.

If God were to take suffering away from us, he would take away that precious gift of life itself. The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existance of a God who loves is insoluble only so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word 'love', and look on things as if man was the center of them.

So, what point does suffering serve?

Suffering brings home to us the distressing fact of our mortality, too easily ignored. It reminds us of our frailty and hints of the coming of death.

"It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul."

In short, it creates a climate in which our thoughts are gently directed toward God, whom we might otherwise ignore.

"God whispers to us in our pleasure, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts to us in our pains; it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world."

Painful as these points may be, there is enough truth in them to take them seriously. All must die, and any worldview that cannot cope with death is fatally deficient. Suffering gently prods our consciousness and forces us to contemplate the unpalatable but real fact of our future death and how our outlook on life relates to this sobering thought. It can sow the seeds of doubt about existing outlooks and lay the foundation for a new way of thinking, living and hoping.

Why did Jesus even have to die in the first place, as some sort of sacrifice, when all he needed to do was snap his fingers and make everything 'cool'.

I've already established why suffering is necessary, but why Jesus' suffering? God suffered in Christ. He knows what it is like to experience pain. He traveled down the road of pain, abandonment, suffering, and death, a road which Christians call Calvary. God is not like some alleged hero with feet of clay, who demands that others suffer while he himself remains aloof from the world of pain. He has passed through the shadow of suffering himself. The God whom Christians believe and hope is a God who himself suffered and who, by having done so, transfigures the sufferings of his people. You might say that nothing could ever be adequate recompense for suffering in the world. I ask you, "How do you know? Have you spoken to anyone who has suffered and subsequently been raised to glory? Have you been through this experience yourself? One of the greatest tragedies of much writing about human suffering this century has been its crude use of rhetoric. "Nothing can ever compensate for suffering!" which rolls off thetongue with the greatest of ease. These words discourage argument, but then again, who do those who make this claim know that? Paul believed passionately that the sufferings of the present life - AND HE ENDURED MANY - would be outweighed by the glory that is to come. How do you know that he was wrong and you are right?

So why the resurrection?

The situation would be rather different if we could listen to someone who suffers a pitiful and painful death and then returns to us from the dead. He would speak with authority and insight on this matter. Or if God himself were to declare that the memory of suffering and pain were to be wiped out. And the wonder of the gospel is that Christ HAS died and HAS risen again. God has indeed spoken on such matters. It is here that the resurrection of Christ becomes of central importance. The Resurrection allows the suffering of Christ to be seen in the perspective of eternity. Suffering is not pointless, but leads to glory. Those who share in the sufferings of Christ may, through the resurrection of Christ, know what awaits them at the end of history. It is for this reason that Paul is able to declare with such confidence that "our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us". This is no groundless hope, no arbitrary aspiration. It is a hardheaded realism, grounded in the reality of the suffering and resurrection of Christ and in the knowledge that faith binds believers to Christ and guarantees that we shall share in his heritage.