A picture of a godless universe

A few months ago, in a post talking about a GC member being on TV, I wrote,

The idea that God is listening to your requests and will fix that prostate, or give you that new job, or raise, or protect you from danger, is hilarious. While you're sitting there asking that, mothers are raising their dead children to the sky, after pleading with God to spare them. People are rotting from leprosy and mentally rotting from Alzheimer's. To think that God is letting all the billions of people on earth suffer and plead with no reprieve, but that he cares what job you have or mate you pick, is the height of hubris. The problem of evil has destroyed the faith of giants like Charles Templeton and unknowns like me.

If you want to distill atheism down into a picture, here it is:

That picture is probably a lot like the one that Charles Templeton saw in Life magazine during a famine in Africa in the 1960s that he claimed shook him free of his last remnants of god-belief. It was taken by Kevin Carter, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for it. He took his life three months later.

I've read plenty (including Bart Ehrman's talk on how the Bible portrays suffering) of attempted justifications of how a god could exist and still allow human suffering on this scale. None of it convinces me.