You may be a fantastic person, and you may have some wonderful religious views that might even turn out to be true, but the religion you'd be following would not be Christianity.

Reality has a way of injuring people who don't take it seriously. If you don't believe in gravity, for example, and then step off a tall building, you won't just float away.

Trouble, hardship, difficulty, pain, suffering, conflict, tragedy, evil - they're all part of the [Christian] Story. Indeed, the problem of evil is the reason there's any Story at all.

Sometimes (at least in principle) God might allow some evil because doing so will prevent a greater evil, and sometimes He might allow evil because it will produce a greater good.

Man had freedom to choose the good, but this same freedom also allowed him to choose the bad. This is called moral freedom.

Everyone has a belief system in his or her mind, a story about the way they think the world actually is, even if they haven't thought about it much or worked out all the details.

People are tempted to think (understandably) that if God were really good He'd never allow any evil in the world at all. But I don't think a perfectly good God would never permit any evil, and neither would others, I wager, if they thought about it. Rather, I think that a good God always prevents suffering and evil unless He has a good reason to allow it. That's the crux.