Ok, that is a lot of difficult stuff. And some of the answers are personal belief, not canon, even if i am catholic.
In Catholicism (the religion I was raised in,) God is bestowed three primary properties: omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence; knows everything, is everywhere and is infinitely capable. Then we’re sold “free will,” the assumption that we choose to do right or wrong and suffer or gain in the eternal sense for those choices. But if God knows everything, he knew the choices we would make eons before we ever make them in the grander scheme of “God’s plan.” And none of us asked to be here, “gifted” this life of servitude towards a silent, invisible father who holds our very eternal fates in his hand. Either free will is an illusion or God is fallible.
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One could say that free will is indeed an illusions. But not because god knows all of our decisions beforehand. Ask yourself, if some timetraveller came and knew about the decisions you will do tomorrow and all their consequences, would those decisions stop being yours ? No, they wouldn't. Just because the future is fixed and someone knows it, that doesn't stop free will as long as that knowledge is not known to you.
The reason why one could say there is no free will, is because god not just knows all our decisions, but could have made us different if he wanted to make us make different decisions.
Catholics believe the Pope, the head of the Catholic church, to be an infallible human, but no one wants to suggest that God effectively has to be fallible in order for our choices to have any weight; he can’t know what we’re going to do if our “choices” determine our fate
Now back to canon. Catholics don't actually believe the pope is infallible, only that he is infallable when speaking ex cathedra. Which he basically never does. It is very much part of catholic doctrine that nearly everything the pope says might be wrong or misguided and that the pope is just a human like all the other priests. Infallability is a power the first Vaticanum bestowed to the pope to have a final say for the doctrine so that he can overrule all other bishops. But because of how binding it is for future popes and theologians and because you need a concil to revert such a decision, popes don't use it. There are also branches of Catholicism that don't accept this pope power even if never used, most famously the Old Catholics.
Hence I fell into agnosticism. I do believe in a God, but I believe him to be beyond our understanding and thusly, knowing his will and intention (if any) is beyond our capabilities. Do I believe the words of the Bible? Not really. Stories from a people two thousand years less learned than ourselves and more susceptible to seeing an exceptional act of nature as a miraculous act of God and write stories about them, i.e.: Hurricane Katrina could easily have been “God’s smiting of a city that prides itself on debauchery and hedonism.” But to think our perfect existence (“perfect” as in the sequence of cosmic coincidences necessary for us to exist are incalculably minute) were initiated by happenstance, I find equally unlikely. I’m also open to the idea that yes, they could have been purely coincidental and we’re an accidental result.
Bilbical literacy is something for protestants. Catholics have a really long tradition of interpreting the bible allegorcal and considering the circumstances it was written it.
It is less a book of "These things really happened" and more a book of "Educational stories and guidelines". Considering that a lot of Jesus' teachings are clear and blatant allegories, it is not farfetched to interpret the other bible stories with a similar mindset.
And yes, an allknowing god can't really be surprised, and won't be irritatedly dealing out punishment stors for cities. In fact, a lot of Jesus teachings are about how the poor, miserable people having various problems are certainly not punished by god and how being rich and successful is not a sign of gods favor and more a sign that you did not do enough to help others.
That is also why i consider the Prosperity gospel as one of the worst heresies in existance.
Any God I believe in doesn't permit the existence of a Hell.
I don't actually believe in hell. In Catholicism every human is a sinner and every sin can be forgiven. There is not really much difference between one human and another and making some arbitrary threshhold about how much sin is acceptable would be pretty unfair. I also do believe that people can still ask forgiveness after they died and are in the presence of god and every sin they want to be forgiven, will be forgiven which allows everyone to avoid hell.
But i also do believe that people can chose not to reconcile with god after death which would technically damn them. How various kinds of afterlives actually work, i am not really sure. Bible descriptions here are clearly metaphors about pleasant and less pleasant things. But as afterlifes clearly can't follow the same natural laws as our phisical world, it is probably very strange.
Modern Catholicism itself is also pretty vague on the idea of hell. There is the sentiment that the punishment for unforgiven sins is distance to god and not getting to bask in his glory. But what that means practically is everyones guess.
