The deity in question is allegedly omnipotent, omniscient, perfect, and omnibenevolent, but on closer inspection of the scripture it becomes obvious that the document is very flawed, and that doesn't reflect the perfection of the supposedly perfect deity, and that imperfection will lead humans into error which may condemn them to Hell, and that is not remotely benevolent, and an all-knowing (omniscient) deity must know this fact, and if they are all-powerful (omnipotent) then they have more than enough power to intervene to fix the problem, and yet the deity chooses not to intervene. The only logical answer is that there is no deity to intervene. Is this a system? No, it is a refutation, and a refutation is an argument, not a belief system.
(My emboldening of the snip from your post.) I'm an atheist myself and have reached that position after much careful consideration. However, I disagree with your "only logical answer".
Another logical answer to consider is that one or more deities exist but do not conform to the proposed description of perfect and omnibenevolent. Humans are pretty expert at misunderstanding things and projecting our own desires and prejudices onto others. For the sake of argument, there could be a creator God who is intentionally cruel, or indifferent, or mad, or even who no longer exists, or has moved on to other projects.
Another logical answer to consider is that God is indeed perfect and omnibenevolent, and has a deeper purpose that we cannot possibly understand. What appears bad or undesirable to us may, for the sake of argument, be good or desirable from God's perfect perspective.
There is a common mistake, from ordinary every day believers in monotheism, through to Descartes in his Meditations. (Yes, I have read them.)
They start off trying to establish whether God exists. Somewhere along the line, they feel that they have justified the conclusion that God exists. They then somehow do a shuffle, sidestep and a hop and conclude that the God that exists is exactly like the one they believed in in the first place.
So Descartes started from a position of complete doubt and "proved" his own existence (
cogito ergo sum) and briefly wondered what he, Descartes, was. Then, with a little bit of mental gymnastics and some dodgy reasoning, he concluded that he must have been created by God, that God must be perfect and benevolent, and a perfect and benevolent God wouldn't lie to him, and therefore... everything else he already believed must be more or less true.
Proper analysis would require a complex series of questions, including but not limited to:
- Was the world deliberately created or does it just exist?
- If the world was created, was it created by one god, two, any other specific number, or an unknown number of gods?
- What is that god (are those gods) like?
- Are they benevolent, malevolent, consistent, inconsistent, disinterested?
- If there are many gods, are some "good" and some "bad"?
- Is his/their power infinite or limited?
- If there is one God, is he immanent, omnipresent, fixed in one place, or able to be everywhere, but not all at the same time? (Other options are available.)
- Indeed, having created the world, does that god (do those gods) still exist? Why assume that He is eternal?
- Just because we were created by that god (those gods) does that mean that we should worship him (them)?
- And so on.
Instead, people tend to go for the all or nothing: does God exist? Yes/No. If Yes, then He is exactly as expected. Believers in polytheistic religions tend to have much more nuanced ideas.
Imagine the same approach to something as familiar to Forteans as the Loch Ness Monster.
The similar
faulty approach would be:
- There is a long tradition of thinking that that there is a monster in Loch Ness that to some extent resembles a plesiosaur.
- Is there any reason to believe that there is an unknown species of megafauna in Loch Ness?
- Yes, therefore it must be the plesiosaur.
The
better approach is:
- There is a long tradition of thinking that there is a monster in Loch Ness that to some extent resembles a plesiosaur.
- Is there sufficient evidence to believe that there may be one or more species in Loch Ness which (collectively) explain some or all of the monster sightings?
- If so, what might it/they be? Eels, sturgeons, giant otters, a surviving species of saurian?
- Can other analysis suggest the most likely explanation? Water volumes, surface area, temperature gradients, oxygen and nutrient calculations, estimated biomass of known species in the loch, etc.
- How might we gather more reliable evidence?
- What is the right way for us to behave in respect of a potentially vulnerable rare species?
- And so on.