Free Will

While I am getting to grips with the control interface I want to put forward one of the main difficulties that I see with the traditional Christian worldview. It is the Problem of Evil. I will state this briefly now.

If God is omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenificent, how can there be suffering in the world?
This topic has been dealt with at length by philosophers and theologians and is still debated on blogs and message boards to this day. What really makes me curious is this:
What is it that makes people find the argument that suffering is a result of us having free will convincing?
I know that all the predicates such as omnipotence have limitations such as avoidance of logical contradictions. It does not follow from this, however, that the world we see is the best of all possible worlds given those necessary parameters.
It just does not seem credible, whether you take this metaphorically or not, that God should create a universe bounded by the categories of time and matter in order for it to be a habitat for humans. Further why, foreseeing every move that the feckless, weak willed and covetous creatures would make, He nonetheless created them only to be outraged by their sin? The notion that He would then sacrifice part of Himself to Himself in order to atone for sins which are breaches of moral absolutes that He encoded into the universe in the first place is counter-intuitive. All this so that despite a lack of good evidence for His existence, we, as rational beings could have the free will to chose to have a relationship with Him via his sacrificed son? Why is the concept of atonement morally acceptable anyway? How does somebody else's sacrifice influence the moral status of what I have done? Nor does the suffering seem related in a simple way to free will and sin. Malaria, earthquakes and the like are morally indiscriminate, they kill innocents and guilty alike. The remark that we are all sinners after the 'fall' seems an outdated and morally abhorrent concept. Why did God not create us to enjoy eternal bliss, without the wish or predisposition to do evil? Would any loss of free will that this would entail be a bad thing? I think not.
So as a whole picture, the Christian solution to the Problem of Evil seems incoherent.

Secular Thoughts

Secular Thoughts

Control of the interface for my own blogs is the first priority so I hope you will bear with me while I figure this out as I am a complete noob.