This is the mistake atheists make all the time when arguing that God doesn't exist. Who says God must meet our expectations of what is right and fair?
The main argument against the existence of God is simply that it can't be proved.
Even if we accept that a god does exist, whether that god meets our expectations of what is right and fair is another issue. If we accept the existence of God AND the fact that his version of right and fair is not always what we expect, why should we believe in something whose version of right and fair we are not necessarily able to predict, understand or accept?
I don't really expect an answer to that last question, because religion and its adherents discourage questions and dislike answers that make sense. When someone dies at an early age or from an illness with a greal deal of suffering, or a tragic event, you're not supposed to ask why God would take them away, because God supposedly doesn't deal in explanations and, as I once heard a priest say at a funeral mass, 'Even if He did explain it, we probably wouldn't have the capacity to understand'.
This is essentially encouraging people to give up, stop questioning, stop thinking and accept that something/someone should have control over them without ever being accountable or explicable. This is infantilizing, cruel and a farcical insult to the human capacity for reason and intelligence, and it enrages me. It is why I cannot accept that kind of belief in my life and I cannot respect it as a basis for the action or inaction of another human being.
Suffering is a byproduct of a sinful world, and unfortunately innocent people can be affected;
You posit that a 'sinful' world exists in the first place, which is not proven, and the rest of the argument from there on makes no sense. How can a God be so all-powerful yet not omnipotent enough to prevent suffering among the innocent? Do 'sinful' people, even monumentally evil ones, not sometimes escape suffering to some degree? How is that possible? How is it fair?
for what reason, none of us know.
More giving up instead of seeking explanations that make sense. Bad things happen, good things happen - none of it can be shown to controlled by anything. 'Everything happens for a reason', as some people, spiritual and otherwise, are fond of saying, is a delusional notion. I'll take 'everything happens because it happens' over that, because trying to accept that good and bad things happen because each individual thing that happens is
supposed to happen, no matter how arbitrary it is, is a recipe for making yourself crazy.
Your claim that God can't exist because good people suffer, is a weak argument; that is such a black and white conclusion.
If he does exist and allows as many 'good' people to suffer as actually do suffer, he has a lot of explaining to do about how unjust it is. Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot - he doesn't do explanations. How convenient.
And no, I am not prepared to accept random, unaccountable suffering that
passeth understanding in this life just to get to another supposed existence (again, not proven!) in which such suffering either becomes understandable or no longer exists.
What I find interesting are people that expect God to help them when they ask Him for something, yet they ignore Him when things are going well in their lives. Why should God answer to those that only seek Him when they want something that will benefit their lives?
That's an issue regarding people who consider themselves believers, not for atheists or agnostics or people who just aren't religious. Someone who doesn't believe in God but expects help from God in bad times is obviously illogical at best, hypocritical or not actually a non-believer at worst.
To bring the discussion back to Ford, if he has in fact found religion, I don't think it'll help him much beyond his existing group of supporters, and I don't think it'll change him politically. He'll have the same unethical, hypocritical and intellectually dishonest nature as before, just couched in sanctimony and moralizing, when it suits him.