Joe, my questions aren’t entirely rhetorical. Well, my first one was because I designed it as a “trap” to see if theists can see the inherent problem. Most can’t. To wit (in response to all of your responses):

1. A biography of Beethoven isn’t evidence that Beethoven existed. It’s the material that exists outside of the biography — the music scores, letters, diary entries by others, programs of concerts from his time — that serve as evidence for which the biographer has collected. What is the evidence outside of the Bible that a god created the universe? There isn’t any. Any version of “The Bible is true because the Bible says it’s true” amounts to nothing more than circular thinking, which is what you’ve done here.
2. “In the beginning…” is not evidence of the Big Bang. Humanity’s understanding of the Big Bang emerged in the 20th century (with the crucial help, by the way, of a certain Catholic priest who was also an astronomer; I’ll let you look this up). What you have here with this “In the beginning…” passage is a lovely piece of literature, of people putting down in words what they believe happened. Of course, other religions have their creation stories that conflict with the Bible, but that’s a detail worth exploring for another time.
3. “Science of the gaps” is a silly retort to the viable “god of the gaps” phrase. The latter phrase means “God did it” (as an “answer” to something humanity doesn’t know), whereas a scientist saying “I don’t know” is an admittance that knowledge isn’t available at the moment (but someday there might be). Over the centuries many ailments were mysteries to us. Eventually, we (scientists) figured out that certain ailments were caused by genes or germs or environmental causes. There is no “gap” in not understanding something while we wait for science to give us an answer (on this point, see my closing paragraph below, but don’t scroll down to it just yet). It’s more of a case that no religious belief or edict or principle has ever served as answer to any question humanity has ever had about the nature of the world and the universe.
4. You missed my point about Laniakea. Christians love to go on about how Jesus is our savior, that we can’t get to Heaven until we accept Jesus, blah, blah. I’m asking a commonsense question: If the Jesus story is so gosh-darn compelling and important, what relevance could it have for intelligent beings on a planet that Jesus never existed? That’s my question and I know the answer to it: The fictions that constitute the corpus of Christianity have no relevance for beings living elsewhere.
5. You contradicted yourself with your answer about morality. To mention God as a source of our morality is, in fact, to mention a supernatural source! I’m arguing that no religion, no prophet, and no message or directive from any religious seer has anything to do with why we are moral beings. Our moral impulses can be explained via evolution, and so any talk about what Jesus may have said is beside the main point: Nobody needs to embrace a god or Jesus or any other religious figure in order to be good. As for my comment that morality is an emergent property of evolution, you write “If this were true, then after 300,000 years of evolution, the whole world would be following the same universal standard of morality.” I’m assuming your “300,000 years” is a reference to how long Homo sapiens have existed. Fine. Good to now that you’re not a YEC! Whew. But your statement indicates that you don’t understand evolution. Why should a universal standard emerge? Yes, the impulse we call altruism can indeed be explained by evolution, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that every person on the planet will engage in altruistic behavior. By the way, you could be a victim of an amputation if, within the confines of a certain religion, you engage in theft. So you’re indirectly correct: Morality hasn’t reached a universal standard despite all the efforts from the many religions that exist.
6. You missed my point about miscarriages. I’ll restate it again with ideas that religious people often use. Life begins at the moment of conception and the soul enters at the moment of conception. Okay, so there we have it: Sperm meets egg and, voilà, you have an ensouled blastocyst. But wait! Weeks later the woman self-aborts, and sometimes this will happen without the woman even knowing she was pregnant. To revisit my original question: What’s in it for God to give a blastocyst a soul when the blastocyst or early-stage fetus later self-aborts? If God is the ultimate arbiter and source of what goes on in your body, once again: What’s in it for God to play this game of ensouling a blastocyst that God intends to kill (via miscarriage) later on? Yes, I can easily impugn God for miscarriages. An important reminder: I’m an atheist; I don’t believe in gods (plural to include all the god conceptions from other religions). So when I write “I can easily impugn God for miscarriages,” I’m only playing along with the God-belief narrative as a way to illustrate my point. Similarly, I could mention the motivations of a character from The Lord of the Rings without losing my mind by believing that this fictional character exists.
7. Many believers do believe in the Jonah story. If you take this story just as a story, fine. Hats off to your sanity with regard to this detail. I’m indirectly saying that there are many believers who believe this wacky story as a literal truth. What would you say to these people to talk them down from the tree? It’s your problem, not mine. That is, that many Christians do believe in the literal truth of the Jonah story is an issue for other Christians to wrestle with, that is, those other Christians who only take the Jonah episode as a story or a parable.
8. You: “Hell, on the other hand, according to the Book of Revelation, is opened up only on the Day of Judgement, on which Satan and his demons will be cast into the Lake of Burning Fire, and then all those people who refused God’s offer of mercy will be thrown.” That is utter fiction. But by the lights of many believers it’s not fiction. They see Hell as a real place of torture. That’s why so many believers on Twitter have told me over the years about my need to “repent” and to save myself from a fiery torment of eternal damnation. You write about “salvation.” Oh? Salvation, as in being saved? Saved from what exactly? Something that’s not Heaven? See? Your idea of Hell is indeed a fiery cauldron by way of your reference to a “Lake of Burning Fire.” In other words, Hell is a Bad Place. This is all good fun, by the way, deranged though these beliefs certainly are. There is no evidence for the existence of Heaven and Hell, but, boy, believers take these places seriously and usually literally! Funny stuff. And you dodged my point about God being a sociopath for even creating Hell.
9. “Satan, therefore, could not pretend to be God, because although he might strive to mimic God’s purity and righteousness, he could not fool those who truly know God and His righteousness.” Yep, there’s no question about it now: You most definitely have a talent for writing imaginative fiction.
10. The “god of atheism”? What “god”? I don’t believe in gods. I’m a godless secular humanist. Oh, I think I see what you’re doing. You wanted to write (or maybe almost wrote) “the religion of atheism.” That’s funny. To be an atheist is to be a person who does not believe in gods. How is not believing in something a religion? Do you believe in the existence of Nessie or Sasquatch? If you don’t, fine. But how are these two instances of not believing in the existence of Nessie or Sasquatch a religion for you? Same applies to those who don’t believe in gods.

In closing, there’s this assumption from many believers that atheists are people who are “searching” for answers. Keep in mind, as you wrote at the beginning of your response, that, yes, I was challenging Christianity. While Christianity was the focus of my essay, my broader questions could easily be directed toward Muslims or Hindus or whatever. So at the heart of things, I’m not just challenging Christianity, I’m challenging all religions. Muslims, for example, have their own take on Jahannam, which is the Islamic word for Hell. And so on. All religions are fabrications, and while they offer some primitive ideas about the nature of the world — yes, religions constitute a body of failed sciences — there is nothing that any religion has ever said that explains anything about anything. Or as Sam Harris once said, “I challenge you to think of a question upon which we had a scientific answer, however inadequate, but for which now the best answer is a religious one.” I’m still waiting for anyone to respond to Harris’s challenge. So is Harris.