I'm glad you brought up free will. Question: If God created me in his image, he gave me reasoning skills, questioning, and free will. If I use these skills and my free will to not believe, not follow the church, and live my life in a moral fashion outside the confines of religion, why would he punish me for that, he made me this way?
That brings up another subject, that's been addressed elsewhere: "Moral" according to WHOSE standards? Who's making the rules, here?
If you choose not to believe or follow His instructions, He has no reason to reward you (or at least, spare you of the consequences of your actions).
You don't have to obey your boss at work, either. Then again, your boss doesn't have to reward your disobedience with a paycheck.
Because it's not free will, but an ultimatum. Free will is when you have an unconstrained condition to make a decision. In god's case, if you "decide" not to follow, you burn in hell for eternity. This means that there is a strained condition to the decision.
Not quite!! Free will means you get to make the decision and endure whatever consequences are associated with such a decision, one way or the other. Were God to leave mankind to his own devices, he would simply do what he does now and what he did long ago: Destroy himself.
Then come the complaints of why God doesn't do something about this, that, or the other.