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Look, no offense, but when you post a series of random quotes and links, I don’t read them. If you can address me directly and succinctly in your own words, that would be great. Otherwise, don’t put yourself through all the effort because I don’t even understand what your point is.

If we separate ourselves from Him (we who are made in God’s image) and endure the suffering that ultimately results from that action, is God to blame for it? We are, individually, free to cut ourselves off from our Creator, even if the action is ultimately self-destructive.

After all, Satan is the one who suffers most in the Hell of his own making.

You wrote: "...when you post a series of random quotes and links, I don’t read them."bttt

That's too bad, since my series of quotes and links were NOT "random" They were in direct response to what you said is your "bottom line".

You wrote: " I don’t even understand what your point is."

My point is that, based on the perceptions you hold, you seemed only to have been exposed to "religion and its practitioners", rather than "Christianity".

Christianity is not intended to be a religion, but the cure for religion

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It is simply a truism that no one is more blind to his Christian assumptions than the anti-Christian atheist who is the beneficiary of 2000 years of Christian conditioning. Thus, he values all of the precious things that uniquely developed in the Judeo-Christian West and nowhere else: democracy, individuality, liberty, science, freedom of conscience, etc, but then attacks the metaphysical roots of these things -- as if any of them were developed by atheists living in purely secular cultures. In reality, the most atheistic cultures are tied (or is it hanged?) neck and neck with Islam for producing the most cruel and barbaric cultures (with the possible exception of primitive tribes). Even it you entirely reject the Judeo-Christian tradition, if you live in the West, I can pretty much guarantee that you have a Judeo-Christian unconscious. (In the past, I have recommended Gil Baile's brilliant Violence Unveiled, which traces the profound anthropological consequences of the Christian revelation, which, in a certain very real sense, was the "cure" for religion -- including bad forms of Christianity)

So maybe what you SAID was your "bottom line", is not REALLY your bottom line because you also said, "I’m a loner at heart, my fantasy afterlife is just to wander around inside some weird, red-sky landscape that’s like a permanent sunset. Black trees. Silver, glittery ponds. Mountains on the horizon. Caves to explore. Very silent, no wind. Just me and my cats. That would be fine. I just want to be left alone. Most humans irritate me."

"...Christopher Hitchens' acknowledged immoderate consumption of spiritual lubricants to escape the implications of his own dead metaphysics comes to mind. In reality, he cannot tolerate the infrahuman, crimped little world he has created, so he must secretly escape it. If he were to be completely honest, he would say that this is his truth and his metaphysics: that there is an escape! You just call it God, I call it booze!

[My interjection: A_Perfect_lady would call it, "wandering around inside some weird, red-sky landscape that’s like a permanent sunset. Black trees. Silver, glittery ponds. Mountains on the horizon. Caves to explore. Very silent, no wind. Just me and my cats." End interjection. ]

"Likewise, I think we can agree on what would constitute "hell" for Hitchens. It may or may not be hot, but it would certainly be dry.

".. beneath [an] anorexic's rejection of food are issues of trust, control, and fear of dependency. Food is imbued with all of the ambivalence felt toward the original love object, so the control of food is ultimately a strategy for controlling this unconscious Other. ....

"When I saw Hitchens flogging his new anti-theistic puerilemic on the Daily Show the other day, it occurred to me that I was seeing the intoxicating power of the cosmic No in all its nakedly cynical glory. ...."

The Cosmic No: Truth and its Oppositional Opponents

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"..in the absence of God, there is no reason to be impressed by anyone or anything, since 1) there is nothing we can know with certainty, 2) loveliness and beauty are simply illusions of the nervous system, and 3) believing untruth is morally indistinguishable from believing truth, since there is no ground for truth or morality anyway.