For those asking why there hasn't been a group of people who see the OT God as evil, there already is/was.  a group that originally was around before Christianity called the Gnostics had this view.  There are Many many subsets of this group, as it is more of a philosophy than a religion in many cases.  They believed that the OT God was an imperfect creator and the real god was infinitely perfect, and never really spoke to anyone or actually had anything to do with humans.  Some modern Gnostic thinkers relate this god to the universe or a mental construct of what it means to be good etc... The Orthodox (Catholic) heresey hunters of the early Christian faith persecuted the Gnostics and tried to stamp them out completely, but some of their teachings persist.

The early Christian church, if you speak second century onward, wasn't even large enough to do any sort of large scale persecution of gnostics.  If anything, it was a sparring of words and writings.  What you do find, in the Catholic church, is they have the tendency to document everything, and store it.  They don't stamp out considered heretical teaching, but label it and treat it as a disease, and then come up with lines of arguments against it.  In short, it has a name and a description of why it is error.  And this is used to build a theological system.

In regards to gnostic teaching, there are issues with a number of it.  Part of it is that gnostics have an alergy to matter, and think matter is evil.  Christ being God incarnate seems to be offensive, because the material world doesn't matter at least, if not evil.  This is an assault on the incarnation (denial of Christ as God incarnate, and also denying Christ came in the flesh).  They also have a general rule of believing salvation comes through right knowledge.  If I was going to critique evangelical theology, it is their tendency to put belief, not as trusting in God/Christ, but believe certain things true, that ends up being like gnosticism.   The denial of the flesh and the material world, is a dangerous thing on a lot of levels.  It leads to people not doing good deeds, and not manifesting love in any form.  It also has people not take ownership over their own body and their own lives, because they don't believe it matters.  You see the letters of John write on this, about how denial of Christ coming in the flesh, is of the spirit of the Anti-Christ.  Paul writes a lot of about love in the letters also.

Another aspect of gnosticism, particularly the teaching on how the Old Testament God was not the real God, is that a leading person preaching that, decided to come up with what was considered "True" scripture, and selectively took some of Paul's writings, and some of the gospel accounts.  They also threw out the Old Testament.  This drove the conventional Christians to counter, and led to the eventual formation of a New Testament canon in response.

I think we may be nearing the end here.  Carry on.  I have other things I need to get to now.

Haha "seems reasonable" is better than nothing, I'll take it!

Most founders of religions seem to gain great personal benefit, usually in the form of wealth and power.  It goes without saying that this was probably their main motivation for making up the religion in the first place, and perhaps they even felt justified because they believed that the religion they'd made up was good for society.  The Biblical prophets didn't have as easy of a ride.  As I noted earlier, God killed moses and gave most of the rest of the old testament prophets over to a miserable existence on this earth.  People might note king david as an exception to this, but david wasn't exactly a prophet (though his psalms are considered to be inspired by God.)  He was weak both physically and morally yet God turned him into something wonderful in order to prove His glory.  And even david didn't make it through life without having to suffer some very harsh punishments.

Some cult leaders are truly puzzling cases, though I haven't looked into them very much I admit.  It does seem though, that some of them did seem to actually believe in whatever it was they were brainwashing their followers with and then they all ended up killing themselves or whatever.  Needless to say, these cults never found widespread success (thank God.)

The unique thing about the apostles is that there were 11 of them that would have had to have either been all in on the same lie that Jesus had risen from the dead and spoken to them.  They would have also had to have lived and died (besides john) according to this lie.  And if it were a delusion, then all 11 would have had to have had the exact same delusion.  And then the cherry on top is that their story of Jesus' resurrection has now been spread over almost the entire earth.  Furthermore, the old testament stated that the whole world would come to faith in the jewish God because of the messiah! And it happened!  This would have to be one mighty coincidence.  It is these facts and other facts, which work in combination with my own experiences and perceptions, that easily gives me more than adequate reason to believe.

If you believe in Christianity then you believe in incest.  Adam and Eve had two sons Cain and Able.  Cain killed Able then was banished.  Then they had the 3rd son Seth (they had more kids but Seth is last mentioned I believe by name).  Seth (and his siblings) would either have to have sex with his mother or sisters to spawn the human race.  So how did these humans reproduce without incest according to Christianity??

I'm not sure how to address the rest of your post, but this is not really a tough question to consider. In the beginning of creation, everything God made was good. There was no death, no disease, no mutations of any kind. The human genome was completely clean. When mankind decided to sin, that sin brought all those things into the world (death, disease, etc.). The human genome was then prone to corruption. It wasn't bad at first, which is why God allowed incest to increase the population. But many generations later, God saw that it kept getting worse, so in Moses' time He finally commanded that incest should stop. Not only was it dangerous, but it wasn't necessary anymore.

I highly doubt this will do anything to change your opinion, but I figured it should be addressed anyway.

Just a quick note, many of the early Church fathers who lived in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd century (before the Bible was compiled,) quoted the new testament books frequently.  These quotes all line up with the text of the books as they are today.  If anyone is interested, here is a site that quickly explains a lot of this and cites some of the source material (Church fathers' letters) which is also easily accessible on the internet: http://www.datingthenewtestament.com/Fathers.htm

 Also, new testament manuscripts have been found (and continue to be found) that date back as early as the 2nd century and which line up 99% with today's versions.  Most of the discrepancies are grammatical errors.  Here's a site that gives some information on this if anyone cares to check: http://biblefacts.org/history/oldtext.html

As for the gnostic gospels, the gospel of thomas, judas and other texts, we also find writings from the early Church fathers from the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th centuries which state reasons which, if true, give us good reason to believe that they were in fact invalid.  Most of the unincluded gospels were indisputably written too late to have been authentic.  In the case of the gospel of thomas, there are some people who apparently believe that it was written around the same time as the canonical Gospels.  The church fathers, however, state that it was not written by thomas and that it was written after thomas had died.  Having read the gospel of thomas, I see no motive as to why the church fathers would lie about this text.  For the most part, it contains rephrasing of some of Jesus's quotes mixed with some new quotes that are based off of the same principals contained in the other Gospels.  It does have a small bit of very strange material in it, but nothing mind-blowing that people would want to cover up.

Your illustration seems to imply that the Gospel of john was originally based on the gospel of thomas.  The only evidence for this is that there are some similarities in the text, and such evidence could imply the opposite as well (that thomas was based on john.)  We, on the other hand, have much more evidence from the testimony of Church fathers that the Gospel of john was either written by john himself or dictated to his brother and/or disciples and written by them.  The church fathers also testify that the gospel of thomas is a forgery and, again, I see no motivation for them to lie about this judging from the contents of the gospel of thomas itself.

You seem to have a christian view rather than a historical view on Gnostics....

Most Christian Gnostics (the ones directly at odds with the Orthodox church of the time) did not believe in what you speak, in fact gnosticism was a large movement of many unrelated groups.  Some were more philosophers, as Plato's teachings were found in the Nag Hamandi texts, Some Worshipped John the Baptist, others worshipped Seth from the bible, some saw the creator God as pure evil and worshipped anything that stood against him such as Cain.  Most Gnostics actually believed that Christ was still the son of God, but not the son of the Demiurge (their name for the creator God), and others believe that Christ and Jesus were two seperate entities merged only temporarily.  The Gospel of Judas, a recently discovered Gnostic text, lays out exactly how Jesus plays into the Sethian  grand scheme of things, and it is not the "we hate Christ" mentality you are speaking of.   

Of course some of the apostles hated the Gnostics, they had a book of Mary Magdalene that basically said "men and women are equal" as well as a book that showed Jesus not to be completely free of flaws.  They also did this with the Apocryphal texts by making Simon Magus look like a crazed madman even though what happens in the text is obviously false. 

On Heresy hunters: actually Christian persecution of Gnostics by heresy hunters is fairly well documented by scholars.  Someone had to have made many of them dissapear from history didn't they?  By the fourth century Christianity was the ONLY religion allowed in the Roman Empire, so a mass wave of "false doctrine" burnings, temple burnings, and a "witch hunt" for heretics began.  This can be seen the most eloquently by The utter destruction of a few Gnostic sects  caused by one of the movers and shakers of the old Orthodox church, Iraneus.  Iraneus did not hold a sword by himself, as I can recall, but his writings incited mobs of "heresy hunters" much in the same way that Eupopean witch hunts began after writings were published.  This is ironic, as Iraneus was one of the folks that had to flee Rome when Christian persecution was going on. 

Iraneus's book "against heresies" http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103.htm

The first recirded man killed by heresy hunters was Pricillian, who was thought to be a magician, this continued well into the 1800's

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priscillian

I'm not sure how you can claim that there was no persecution as many of these groups went as far as to hide in mountains, bury their holy books etc..  Obviously something went down... 

Also the same thing about "not loving" and "hating the material word" can be pretty well observed by many Christians - Monks for instance don't want any sort of pleasure in their lives, some monks even mutilate themselves to repent for their sins.  how is that mentality any better?