Just to play advocatus dei for a moment, most of the above makes a lot more sense to me in the context of a God trying to reconcile his perspective with that of a set of mortals with whom he shares a preexisting special relationship and set of behavioral rules but whose psychology he doesn't fully understand. Seen in this light, the whole New Testament story starts to look like self-modification on God's part in service to a package of, essentially, legal reforms designed to relax the fairly brutal and self-limiting Old Testament rules. I'm not a theist, though, and from a Christian perspective a lot of this is rank heresy: it's compatible with functional omnipotence but requires only limited omniscience, for example, and it's flatly inconsistent with a lot of trinitarian perspectives. Still, that's about as best I can make sense of the mythology without falling back on "mysterious ways".
Similarly, a theistic friend of mine likes to describe God in terms of a frustrated roleplaying GM who's fed up with trying to keep his players from going off the rails; Jesus in this metaphor could be thought of as a GM-run character joining the campaign for a session or two in order to capture the experience from a player perspective and maybe point the story in a less disastrous direction. Not necessarily a great idea, but it beats "rocks fall, everybody dies".
It's more of a Jewish thing, but I find apologetics becomes a lot easier when I recall that God has a (trollish) sense of humor. Imagine Christians taking Christianity super seriously, and atheists getting all sneering and masturbatory about how the plot seems to be totally incoherent, and everything gets all heated, and in the background God's just going "trolololololol". By hypothesis He trolls you because He loves you—recall that Socrates and the Buddha also tended towards trollishness, mostly as a didactic method. Also relevant is that saints...
A friend recently asked how strongly I believe that my deconversion from Christianity was not a mistake. Here's my response, and for those of you who are not Christians, I'm just wondering what numbers you would give:
"There is a part of me that wants to say the chance is far less than 1 percent. But when I consider what 1% must mean about my ability to follow complex arguments and base my judgement on the right premises, it seems absurd to say that.
Trying to honestly estimate the chance that I'm wrong about the Bible being generally reliable is a fascinating exercise... I know the number is low, but I'm not sure how low.
Today I would give myself a 1 in 20 chance of being wrong. If I were to consider the arguments of 20 other groups similar to Christian theologians, I would probably misunderstand them at least 1 time in 20. After talking with 20 groups that have a very different worldview, I might think they are all are mistaken, but once in a while, maybe 5% of the time, it would actually be me.
Wow, 5%!?! If I convert that into "There is a 5% probability that the God of the Bible exists and will send me to hell", I feel scared. But I know how to cheer myself up: I just say, "No way, the chance I'll end up in hell MUST be less than 5%. After all, the God of the Bible is CLEARLY just a big, mean alpha-monkey and... [rehearse all the atheistic arguments here]".
This back-and-forth from certainty to uncertainty makes me feel like I'm doing something seriously wrong.
So what about you? What chance do you place on some variant of Christianity turning up to be true, and what chance do you think a god of some sort exists?"
Numbers please.