Religion manipulates people to feel they need an ultimate reason for life and that they will find this reason in God. That is the sledgehammer that is often used to get them to be okay with God's evil in principle and in practice.
We suffer. We fear the advent of suffering. No matter how boring and sometimes painful your life is you show it means something to you when you simply live it. The meaning of life talk makes people think, "Oh I can have a future of happiness." The sensible person knows that life can be horrid and still mean enough to you. Wanting a paradise future is only making your life tougher. You face enough in life without pining for the pie in the sky.
The real reason people want religion to help their lives mean something to them is not for the lives but for telling themselves that suffering has value. This lapses into total incoherence. Suffering is not pain but something that attacks your reason for existing and living. It is the experience. It lies to you that your life should be extinct. Suffering having meaning makes as much sense as saying an absurdist movie has a rational plot.
People may go along with the lies of religion about suffering when they are not suffering. They seem to think the lies will somehow help them deal with suffering and its cruelty when it hits for it surely will. They are cruelly misled for nothing prepares for it. They are en route to taking on suffering in the form of disappointment and self-blame.
How can God be called good when people suffer? He is able to stop it but refuses. He makes the brain and nerves that have the power to create suffering - and one person who is tortured the same as the next person may be made in such a way that the torture is more agonising for her.
Despite religious assertions to the contrary, it is nonsense that God does all he can to help us have an ultimate reason for living. One person who believes life has no meaning may still be reasonably happy. Another reacts a different way. The feeling of despair takes its grip. The reaction then totally depends on how the person's brain and nerves are. It is not the belief that life is useless that does it. If God makes all things then God is to blame.
If God is what gives your life meaning then surely you crave being with him? Thus your suffering will only be worsened by belief in God. Suffering calls you a failure and makes you feel it. You will feel like a bigger failure than ever for you will think it must be your fault that you feel such a way when God is there trying to help you. The believers think that the more you suffer the more you will want him and to be with him. But encouraging them to believe is encouraging them to feel worse. If they crave happiness they are being encouraged to add to their problems by craving God! To tell a sufferer that God loves them and has a purpose for them is cruel and fanatical for these reasons.
If a person experiences meaningless existence it is harassment to tell them their life has meaning and that God cares. It is virtually dismissing their experience. Suffering would be a stronger experience that there is no God than any alleged religious experience that seems more benevolent and desirable and which conveys that there probably is a God. What gives you the right to claim that suffering can agree with the loving care of an all-powerful God? You can't know how another person suffers so how dare you say their suffering does not refute God. If you said, "Annie was abused by her father. But she should see this does not disprove his love for her" you would rightly be seen as a do-gooder and a hypocrite. Why? Because you don't know what it was like for her. And so it is with God and suffering people.
And don't forget the religious teaching that the father is not God but nevertheless God is closer to him than he is to himself so his not being personally good is only a small detail. Jesus spoke of seeing God in all.
Most people do not need belief in God enough to say, "This belief gives me a purpose and that overrides any concern about why God allows evil to happen to me or what evil comes to me." If belief in God is that important to you that you will still worship God even if he sends you a billion years of Hell then your psychology is abnormal or you are kidding yourself and everybody else.
The good side of unbelief in God is how the unbeliever does not have to risk accepting and approving a God who is to blame for evil. Or approving of God's alleged spokespersons who could be the ones trying to water down harm and evil for virtue-signallling, religious and cultural ends. Or adding insult to injury to sufferers or adding injury to injury.
If we believe that if there is a God and that he is good we only believe it. Thus we show we have to admit we could be wrong. So believers risk worshipping a God who is evil or partly evil. We must think about that in light of how human nature does not like raw insane violent evil but likes other forms. So they already partly hope that God would do an evil they actually like. The risk is very reckless.
Their taking such risks is evil for the reason vowing unconditional obedience to some divinity who sometimes lets bad things happen would be bad. It is irresponsible. And then there is the doctrine that evil uses good for its purposes and latches on to it and disguises itself a lot. So that adds fuel to the fire. If God does not care that makes him in fact worse than a bad God for all bad people have to do some good and they mix evil and good together. So an evil God could seem likeable to some and to all in some ways. The risk is incompatible with the believer's doctrine that complete opposition to evil is necessary in order to love a perfect God.
The sense that your suffering has a purpose is really a misperception. We are confusing this-too-shall-pass with a purpose. We try to heal the memory of the terrible suffering and how inexcusable it was by telling ourselves that we are so important that we had to be tragically hurt in order to bring about some wonderful good. We want to feel we are bigger than the suffering. Feeling that is okay if we are indeed bigger but there is a chance we might not be. And what right to I have to condone the suffering of those who suffer with me like that? What right do I have to turn my or anybody's suffering as evidence of my indispensability?
We conclude that we should not risk condoning God doing evil for we might be praising an unworthy God or praising a God who is not the real one but one in our heads. To imagine or invent a God and condone his ways would be terrible. To have a God who is really about what we want to think and get from him would mean we are the ones doing the condoning and playing God by assessing like that. No justification for taking the risk works. A risk taken with no justification is not a risk but foolishness.