I became a lapsed Catholic a number of years ago for a variety of reasons, but this particular epiphany was one of the biggest:
God cannot be both omnipotent and all-loving.
The example which "proves" the above is that of a 3 year-old girl dying of what is essentially throat cancer. The girl is completely innocent and yet slowly (over a period of many years) drowning in her own saliva. She experiences a massive amount of pain over her short life, likely more from the treatments than the cancer, and then dies before reaching her sixth birthday.
Now, I could envision a benevolent, all-loving God knowing that the girl was dying a tremendously horrible and painful death, but being otherwise powerless to ease her suffering. I could also envision an omnipotent God that knew the girl was dying, but chose not to interfere for whatever reason. I cannot, however, see both an all-loving and omnipotent God letting a little girl (and by extension, anyone) die from this form of cancer (and by extension, die painfully at all).
I could not explain or otherwise rationalize this contradiction, and lapsed a short time later. If omnipotent and all-loving are two mutually-exclusive qualities of a deity, who would want to worship any deity? Worship an all-powerful god that does not care about his followers, or worship a god that loves his followers but is incapable of doing anything... a choice I have found to be impossible (and intellectually dishonest) to make.
-Red Raven
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