I have a lot of problems with the Christian ideas of God, and the personal soul, by which I mean an essential self, as well. The sort of qualities usually attributed to God (i.e. eternal, transcendent, omnipresent, omnipotent, etc.) don't appear coherent to me. What sort of "being" are we talking about for whom the normal categories of temporal and spatial existence no longer apply? What relevance or relation could such a "being" have for this universe and our notions of causality? The special pleading in regard to God's supposed qualities is the reason why he can't play a role in the chain of causality.

I've never experienced "creation" in any way that suggested a creator of any sort, let alone a benevolent one. I don't think we honestly argue that the source of all earthly problems is "sin," when so much brutality and death itself is inextricably bound up with just being alive at all. We constantly have to make pathetic excuses for the Biblical creation narrative ("all animals were vegetarians in Eden," "things just didn't grow old back then," "diseases only [spontaneously?] came into existence after the Fall," "childbirth didn't always hurt," etc.), but this frequently cruel and pitiless world is what we would expect if he played no role.

The way Christianity abhors impermanence and death, sees it as the "opposite" of life, strikes me as a misunderstanding, ignoring that the very impermanence that gives rise to death is the same context that gives rise to happiness and beauty. This is one of my main criticisms of the philosophy of Ecclesiastes. There's a great line from the poet Wallace Stevens about this: "Death is the mother of beauty." The Christian dualism between life and death is not at all convincing to me.