Marshall, I wasn't going to answer but your post brought me back.
You've been told that an Omnipotent Entity Who Loves Us is impossible b/c we suffer, right ? I mean, it's one of the oldest arguments against the Christian (or Islamic or Jewish) god in the book.
Christians insist that God is omnipotent and loves us. Suffering proves this god doesn't exist.
Omnipotence: you get what you want, right away, without effort, no excuses.
Love: you want the loved ones to be happy.
If A, then B. NOT B, therefore NOT A.
If an omnipotent entity loves us, we are happy. We are not happy. Therefore an omnipotent entity does not love us.
Theists hear this all the time and simply redefine love, redefine omnipotence or make excuses for a supposedly omnipotent being.
The reasons theists believe is as follows:
They want heaven.
They fear hell.
They've been told that all evidence and argument against their theism is a magic trick from Satan to lead them astray. So they intentionally ignore evidence and argument against their theism and glorify this as a virtue they call 'faith'.
This is what we see again and again. You'll now insist that theists are capable of being intelligent, completely missing what I've actually just said. Read it again. Carefully this time. Faith is fear and desire and NOT a failure of intelligence. If it were a failure of intelligence, then theists would be honestly literally retarded and we'd have to feel sorry for them.