[Matt R.]

Good point. The best answer I can give to that is that (from my perspective) the world would be incredibly dull if God took away some or all of those things. First of all, there could definitely not be free will -- no one would be capable of murdering, stealing, etc. and they would be *forced* to simply be good. If we were to live forever and never get injured, we would not cherish our good health and our life here on earth as much (i.e. without the bad, we would have no perspective to appreciate the good). Also, to prevent things like tidal waves or accidents occuring, the "programmer" would have to constantly intervene to modify the random occurances in his program. He could never just let things happen as they were meant to happen, based on the laws of the program/universe.

But, it's definitely an interesting question. However, I see the world as we have it now as the "best possible" unless God were to constantly intervene every time something bad happened, while still keeping the variety that we observe in our world to keep it interesting. AND, if there is an infinite afterlife, even if we were to somehow undergo constant suffering for 100+ years on this earth, it would be infinitely small relative to whatever we experience after death (in other words, anything bad that we could possibly experience in this life is completely irrelevant if you compare it to infinity).