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pale: But would God want to...would it be in fact, unnecessary? What would be gained from insuring that all sensations experienced by the human body were pleasant ones, that no suffering was ever experienced, that we existed in a blissful tapioca of fulfillment, happiness and warmth.

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I can see the usefulness in creating some suffering. My point is that at some point the amount of suffering becomes superfluous to creating a world with all the positive counterparts of suffering. It's like this: if I get cancer, I can see how the suffering of the cancer might allow me to realize the pettiness of getting upset over little things and better appreciate the important things in life like family, friends and simple pleasures. But in addition to the cancer, did I need my dog to get hit by a car, too?

It seems to me that the amount of suffering in the world is utterly incommensurate with the idea of suffering being a tool of an all-caring and omnipotent God.

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pale:
Again, most concepts of God are accompanied by some belief in an eternal afterlife. Assuming this as part of our concepts of God (which would be reasonable, considering this along with sacrifice and laws are also near universal components of God across cultures), what would the context of such suffering be? A few years in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion?

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That's assuming, of course, that there's no suffering in the afterlife. But then, as you say, if suffering is a necessary component to free will, then doesn't that mean that we'll be sentenced to spending eternity without any free will? If it's more important to have free will rather than freedom from suffering, then doesn't that mean that the afterlife would then be worse than life on Earth?

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pale: Many sects would argue that life is inherently suffering. That the purpose of that suffering would be to motivate one to learn and grow to escape the cycle of death and rebirth. Thus, a child being eaten by worms is being taught a lesson....that life is painful.

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I don't know. Creating life to be painful in order to teach people that life is painful seems like logic oddly akin to hitting someone in the head with a hammer in order to teach them that it hurts to be hit in the head with a hammer. It's a lesson that reflects reality only because you've made it reality.

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pale:
The point I'm trying to make is.....assuming an eternal context, we're looking at this nearly blind. As if we were opening a book to a random page, reading 3 to 4 words, and assuming that we know enough of the characters, story, style, language, and symbolism to critique the novel as literature.

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That may very well be the case, but if these three or four words are all we can see, then unfortunately, that's what we have to build our judgments on. Likewise, if I don't have any evidence or reason to believe that there's something greater going on than what appears to me to be an absurdity, then I think I can be forgiven for concluding that it is an absurdity.

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efronious: As tragic as the picture of the dying child is, in no way does it 'negate' the existence of God. In the first place, the ultimate workings of 'God' are, by definition, beyond human comprehension. Whether the sufferings of this child and all the other people who suffer serve some purpose beyond our ability to understand is simply unknown to us.

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That's just an appeal to the unknown. One could just as easily say that the workings of exorcisms and divining rods are beyond human comprehension. In fact, this rhetorical excuse can be used to justify just about any absurdity you can imagine as being "beyond human comprehension." Unfortunately, being a human being, human comprehension is exactly what I have to work with. It may be that there is some supernatural creature out there doing things that seem daft or unnecessary or wholly irrational to us but which are actually being done for good reasons. But unless those good reasons can be demonstrated to me, I can't be expected to believe that this is the case.