But that makes god seem like Kim Jong Un to an exponential level, with some extra rules lawyering to avoid seeming like it. Humans lie, cheat, and steal, everyone’s done it once or twice.
Imagine you’re ten years old and hanging out with your friends. Your friends egg you on into stealing some candy from 7/11, which you do, and then your dad finds out. The way Christians describe the way they view god is like your dad finding out you stole that candy bar and immediately putting you on a plane to North Korea, where you’ll have to live in a work camp until you die, unless you let your brother take the punishment of going to North Korea for you. No sane person would be cool with that, it’s ridiculous and an incredibly extreme punishment for a dollar’s worth of stolen snack.
In the traditions I was raised in, to use the same metaphor, your dad catches you with the stolen candy, so he makes you go back to the 7/11, apologize to the clerk, and pay the cost of the stolen candy. 7/11 still gets the cost of the candy. You probably know not to steal candy next time, and you apologized for your actions. No harm done in the end, your pride might be damaged. But nobody has to go to Eternal North Korea. Obviously it’s not a one to one comparison, not everything a person does wrong is the moral equivalent of snatching a Reese’s cup, but to me, unless you’re literally Hitler or something nobody deserves torture forever. How do you square that with believing the Supreme Being is a good being?