Let me say first of all that I wish I could be religious. It must be great to have some belief that allows you not to have to face the universe alone.
But for me one of the crunchers is the cruelty of nature.
If there is a God, why does HE find it necessary to subject HIS creatures to cruel suffering deaths. I exclude homo sapiens from this because, with the exception of accident & illness, he has the intellect to avoid cruelty.
But when I see eg. a new born antelope crouching in the grass while the mother tries to distract a predator, I wonder why the system is designed so that beasts rip each other apart.
Why couldn't a Supreme Designer arrange things so that one species fed off only the dead of another?
What's the need for the savagery?
Does the Supreme Designer actually hate HIS creations?

(NB masculine gender used to be provocative . .lol)

An extract from the "Lucifer Principle" by Howard BLOOM
........Unfortunately, these authors held a distorted view of pre-industrial reality. A pride of lions at their ease enjoys the kind of nature the radical environmentalists dreamed about. You can see the smiles on lions' faces as they lick their paws and stretch out on the ground side by side, clearly pleased with the comfort of each other's warmth. You can see the benevolence with which a mother keeps a cub from playfully tearing her tail apart. She lifts her huge paw and gently shoves the infant aside when his nipping becomes too painful. But nature has given these lion mothers only one way of feeding their children: the hunt. This afternoon, these peaceful creatures will tear a gazelle limb from limb. The panicked beast will try frantically to avoid the felines closing in on her, but they will break her neck and drag her across the plain still alive and kicking. Her eyes will be open and aware as her flesh is gashed and torn.

Suppose for a minute that lions were suddenly stricken with guilt about their feeding habits and swore off meat. What would they accomplish? They would starve themselves and their children. For they have been given only one option: to kill. Killing is an invention not of man but of nature.

Nature's amusements are cruel. A female sea turtle crawls painfully up the beach of a tropical island, dragging her bulk across the sand. Slowly she digs a nest with her hind flippers and lays her eggs. From those eggs come a thousand tiny, irresistible babies, digging out of the sand, blinking at the light for the first time, rapidly gaining their orientation from a genetically preprogrammed internal compass, then taking their first walk, a race toward the sea. As the infants scoot awkwardly across the beach, propelling themselves with flippers built for an entirely different task, sea birds who have been waiting for this feast swoop down to enjoy meal after high-protein meal. Of a thousand hatchlings, perhaps three will make it to the safety of the ocean waves. The birds are not sadistic creatures whose instincts have been twisted by an overdose of television. They're merely engaged in the same effort as the baby turtles the effort to survive. Hegel, the nineteenth century German philosopher, said that true tragedy occurs not when good battles evil, but when one good battles another. Nature has made that form of tragedy a basic law of her universe. She presents her children with a choice between death and death. She offers a carnivore the options of dying by starvation or killing for a meal.....

Having had an out of body experience, I figured that religion is one big waste of time. Perhaps save for the social aspect. When you die, no matter what you have done, you are going to experience a type of bliss (free from the restraints of the human body). Spending time hoping that the man in the sky will forgive you for kissing Janie-Jane behind the shower block in year 7, is a waste of time.