Does God Have the Moral Right to Do Whatever He Wants To Us?

Here's a question I received via e-mail: "I was recently having an argument on the morals of God when I came across an interesting theory on ethics which I am having a little trouble refuting. It says that God created us and therefore has the right to do whatever the **** he wants to us. Comparisons to Hitler and Stalin were made, but they said that neither of those two were the Creator of anything, and therefore it was inadequate. I asked if, since the mother makes the child, does she have the right to kill him? The reply was that she did not create the original matter, God did. Am I really stumped here, did I fall prey to a mind game, or have they just created an unfalsifiable argument? I know there was a recent post on NO MAGIC BULLETS!, but I honestly can't find a way around it."

My response:

The short answer is that if God created us then he can do whatever he wants to us. But that doesn't make him a good God. Goodness means at least treating people as you would want to be treated, and such a God would have no respect for us as human beings. We are worse than a proverbial ant farm to him. God would be the ultimate Josef Mengele, experimenting on us and torturing us for his own purposes. That's the kind of God that's being defended here, and it's very repulsive.

As a human in God's ant farm I have every reason to object to his treatment of us. I have every right to rebel and try to thwart him (even if futile) just like a captive person who has been kidnapped has every right to escape and to harm his capturers. And if this is the case I have every reason to deny him, to reject him and to cease believing in him. Let him do to me as he wants. He will anyway. It would be my way of rebelling against the biggest bully in town. He has no moral right to treat us this way, even if he claims that he does. He doesn't have any moral right from my perspective, and that's the only perspective that matters to us as humans if he causes us to suffer.

However, the actual situation is that the presence of the amount of suffering in our world stands as evidence against the existence of any God, from our earthly perspective. If such a God existed he would be incompetent, lame, and ineffective. It's the handiwork of a buffoon, a duffas, a dimwit. Come on, why would he create such a world that has so many faults, like earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, poisonous creatures and plants? Why not create us with better immune systems to diseases which have wiped out whole civilizations in the past? Why did he create the whole predator-prey relationship in the first place? All creatures could've been created as vegetarians and kept that way with reduced mating cycles so there is enough vegetation for all.

Christians who respond by saying that suffering is God's punishment for our sins fail to understand that the so-called punishments do not fit the crimes. Even our own system of punishments is more humane in how we treat criminals.