Attempts to frame God as evil and cruel never run out in the atheistic world. One such attempt involves questioning the existence of free will. Free will, of course, is the most common element in defences against the problem of evil. As humans, we are free to choose good or evil, and so sceptics argue that God was either evil or thoughtless to allow free will.
Consider an automatic door, much like the ones you will find at any supermarket. An automatic door has no free will. It does not open to allow passage out of the kindness of its heart, it opens because it was designed to do so. By contrast, a non-automatic door must be opened manually, and a common "good deed for the day" is to do so for anyone seeking to go through it. Thanking an automatic door for doing what it was designed to do, without choice, is strange. Thanking a person for opening and holding a door for you, by contrast, makes perfect sense.
Here we see the obvious distinction between a free willed being and an automaton. Free will is what gives a deed its moral implications, and, by extension, what makes a relationship real. If humanity did not have free will, sure, we would never have sinned. But neither would we ever have done good. Not truly, anyway. Neither would we have a true relationship with God. It would no longer be love responding to love, but the divine equivalent of a sad relationship between a man and his robot. Therefore, we see that free will, far from being God demonstrating cruelty or madness, is actually essential to the completion of the human purpose. We weren't supposed to be robots. We were designed to have a real relationship with God. If that means some people reject that purpose, that is quite literally 100% their fault, as indeed it was designed to be. You sin by choice, you refuse to repent by choice, you perish by choice, and that is not the choice God chose for you. God did far more than He should have ever needed to in order to redeem you.
So the question is, will you accept God's choice for you? Will you remain in sin, or will you put your faith in the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ? It is your choice, and arguing that it was wrong for God to give you that choice does not excuse making the wrong one. So why not make the right one? Repent and be saved.