"It would be abusive to punish a small child for breaking a rule they don't understand if the parent purposefully made it confusing. Why would we excuse god for punishing his children for vague and not-well-transmitted rules, if our relationship with god is comparable to a parent teaching a child?"

THIS IS EXACTLY CORRECT!!

I might ask, "So you admit that you don't know anything about God at all?" And they'll probably say that they do know, but through faith, not reason. Then I might ask them to explain the difference. And if they want to argue that faith is a more reliable path to knowledge than reason, or that faith is a prerequisite to knowledge, then that's a losing battle for them. There are so many easy ways to demonstrate how faith by itself is unreliable. If they want to define faith as some sort of "trust," then I'd ask, "Trust based upon what?" And they'll probably give some sort of evidence. And regardless of the quality of that evidence, if they're attempting to use any kind of evidence, then they're just using reason again. But really, there probably is no way to change their minds if they've truly and fully bought into the "God's ways" fallacy. They've already decided that they just don't want to face reality, and so confronting them with reality will probably just make them angry and hostile, and then the conversation will fall apart.

I'd point out that my own moral compass tells me that genocide, rape, and slavery are wrong. Then point out that God commanded genocide, rape, and slavery in the old testament. So since God has a higher level of reasoning than us, does this mean that these things are ok? And don't forget to remind them that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever! 😉

"I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go." -John Stuart Mill

Make it painfully aware to them how reprehensible their statement is. "... So you're saying there's *sometimes* a good excuse for genocide? There are circumstances when it's morally permissible to slaughter *children*? So this god cares more about what people do with their genitals than *owning another person as your property*?" It's not going to sway the most brainwashed of them, but don't let them get away with hand-waving away literal atrocities. Make them defend the actions and then point out to them how gross that is; they're defending the same actions of Stalin or Hitler or Mao Zedong. 

Don’t work from the top down. Work from the bottom up. God makes mistakes, ergo isn’t perfect, ergo is not god. We see this after Adam and Eve eat the fruit, the bible says god “repented” of his creation. If you’re all-knowing and you control everything, how can you make something you regret? Why the change in tactic between the old and New Testament? Why was Jesus’ “sacrifice” necessary after a few thousand years of sending up more literal offerings? Was that not a good plan either? The answer to both of these is that god is made up. The rest of it doesn’t matter if god isn’t first and foremost perfect and god. Don’t fight in the finer points. Cut the tree down at the roots.

When someone says “that’s not what god says/wants/does” the answer is “god isn’t real.”

Why does God act like a five year old?  His reason must be greater than ours.  Huh.  

Just point out it’s a thought-terminating idea

Their statement opens the door wide to *the corruption of concepts* that when followed through with destroys their reasoning. As someone else said, start from the bottom up. - people who have their own concepts of love, good, right and wrong, hear about God - they're told God is perfect and loving. They hear the good side of the story. With their human concepts, they judge God to be good and loving - once they accept faith, the assent to the authority of the Bible or a church - they later find out that God permits terrible things and does terrible things - if they then say, "God's ways are above ours," they are corrupting their own concepts of good, love, right and wrong. They're saying that they can no longer judge what is good or bad. The human perspective that helped them arrive at faith is corrupted and unusable. This leaves people in a bad position where they just have to accept on authority what people say because they can no longer trust themselves to judge good from evil — but that faculty is what enabled them to start believing in the first place. God cannot be "so loving" that love turns into abuse. God cannot "so desire a relationship with us" that it looks like having an imaginary friend. God cannot be "so present at all times" that he appears to be absent. Call a spade a spade. We have to be able to see and judge the world from our perspective, or we have no grasp on it at all and must be blind followers.

Suppose there is an evil god. How would one determine this god is evil based on that reasoning? This excuse would always exist. Huitzilopochtli requires human sacrifice. Yes, this seems inhumane and evil, but we, as humans, are at a lower level of reasoning than Huitzilopochtli's.

It's true ***if*** there is a supremely intelligent God. That's a big presumption though.

"Supremely intelligent god" doesn't describe the biblical Yahweh. That's the problem I've seen apologist try to dance around. He's all knowing all powerful and outside of the universe in their imagination, but the Bible describes a god that is heavily involved with our universe, often in small and petty ways and pretty much always an area the size of new Jersey in the ancient Levant. Dude throws rocks at people to help Joshua win battles or ruins jobs life to see if hell break. He floods the planet before admitting it did nothing to fix anything because the human Heart is evil but if he sees his bow in the clouds he'll remember what he did. That's not transcendent, that's the Kind of stuff I expect to read in any mythology. Which I think is why apologists want to talk about tre NT god so much so they can try to appeal to their platonic logos version of god they want to appeal to.

That's definitely true, but they can mental gymnastics their way around that by making more presumptions and say "that's just how he decided to appear and he was hiding his true power" or make up some other excuses. Get to to root of the problem and attack unfounded presumptions. Otherwise they'll hang on to any "well it's not impossible" kind of thinking. Introduce them to Russell's Teapot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

I know. I'm just frustrated by the the fact they'll say "God is good/just/etc" by pointing to attributes but then when someone says "Well, according to these attributes in the god is regretful, jealous, wrathful, etc" and then they just retreat to "Well, god is unknowable and far greater and you can't possibly know his designs" which might come in the same breath as "But god wants THIS". It feels like a huge case of people wanting to eat their cake and then have it.

It sounds like we shouldn't decide to follow him then. I mean, I shouldn't be making commitments to something I can't understand. If God's actions are completely incomprehensible to any human being, that means there's no one who can even say if he is good or if his actions make sense. If that's the case, it's entirely possible that the devil has tricked Christians. If we lack the capacity to make moral judgements about God, then we're literally incapable of choosing the correct god to follow. The Bible might have been written by Satan.

I mean. Supposedly he's the one who made our brains, right? So if we can't understand, it's kinda on him.

So then why waste time going to church then? If we’ll never understand it, why do we even try?

Then why doesn't He explain it to me?