Genesis

so we discussed genesis today in class and there were a lot of interesting points raised. its hard for me having very little education in the bible or religious studies to understand others that have had a "religious" upbringing. there are so many beliefs that i have a hard time comprehending. i guess the biggest one would be faith in god. what is faith? the belief that as long as you obey and trust god, you will be safe and blessed? i mean thats basically what i took faith to be from reading the first part of genesis. for example, abram had faith in god and god commanded him to take his son and kill him as a sacrifice to god. abram did as he was told and right before he cut his sons throat, the messenger of god told abram to stop and that he had proven his devotion to god. so now abram and his son are blessed. god is awesome, he is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. so god knows abram and he knows what he is going to do. so he knows that abram is dedicated to him. what is the point of making him go through the pain of almost killing his son and making the son go through such an ordeal. to me that is just like burning an ant with a magnifying glass. if life is so precious why torture those living it with ridiculous tests. the garden of eden is another one of these tests. god knows by putting the forbidden tree in the garden that eventually adam and eve will eat from it. so he is basically letting them live in paradise to get a taste of it and then snatches it away when they fail to remain "true" to god. if he wanted them to stay innocent he could have removed the snake, the tree, or stop them before eating the fruit. god also makes mistakes. when in a brilliant move he decides to cleanse the world with a flood, he wipes out all of the "evil" people. afterwards, he tells noah that he made a mistake and he would never flood the earth again. (also there have been a few floods since then which have plenty of people regardless of their moral standing) so far in genesis, the god depicted is not a god that i would be able to believe in or have faith in that god.