This business about God is tedious and onerous if nothing else. We go in circles when trying to figure out why anyone would be led to accept the concept of God, especially in terms of Western religion.

Maybe we can boil this down to: We are not smart or good enough, so there must be something that is. Where this line of thinking goes wrong is in the belief that we are basically incapable of understanding we should also be held to a standard that God has set regarding morality, love, treating one's neighbor well, but not too well, because we don't want to covet his wife, and so on. It's all silliness, but it's a brand of silliness that's accepted by billions of people.

You wrote, "...Christian apologist Richard Swinburne says, 'obviously God has good reason to inform us of those moral truths which hold independently of his will..." And yet it is God who is so immoral that it makes one's head spin on its axis. It's all right there in the Bible, with all the smiting and vengeance going on at the hands of the Almighty beneficent being.

You wrote, "he would have continued to recommend pacifism and would have lamented the wars’ outcome. But would his faith in God have been shattered once he’d seen the Romans destroy Jerusalem and the Jewish Temple? Would that catastrophe have made him more skeptical, perhaps even cynical?" This depends how we regard Jesus — as a human being mired in the problems of this world or as one who has seen the light, as is said to have done. The former version would take it all in stride, while the former may have grabbed his yarmulke and sandals and boarded the next ship to Acapulco..

In your closing you wrote, "The Eastern approach to “divine revelation” is much wiser and more realistic." I would agree, but alas, we are speaking of human beings here, so all good theories and ideals, no matter how wise or compassionate, fall prey to human corruption and self-serving agendas.