That is because you dismiss the evidence .. and then call it a "claim".
A person who accepts the evidence does not dismiss it.
One doesn't dismiss evidence. He evaluates it. If he is a critical thinker, he does so using well-established rules of inference that connects evidence to the sound conclusions derived from it. If he is not skilled in critical analysis, he used his own custom rules, which he will say justify his conclusions drawn using them, but not in the academic community, which rejects his claim that his evidence supports his conclusion. It really doesn't matter to a critical thinker what a person concludes if he is not using fallacy-free reasoning, just as a skilled mathematician doesn't care what a person who doesn't know the rules of inference for addition suggests the sum is. If 2+2 doesn't equal four every time in a custom, private system for adding, it's output is useless.
Also, nobody is calling evidence a claim. A claim is a statement offered as fact. It might be bare - no supporting argument - or it may be preceded by an argument, which might be sound or unsound. These are all claims, whether unsupported, insufficiently supported, or sound, and none is the same as any evidence offered as sufficient support to justify that claim.
my sister says, "God is so good. He cares and loves us so much"... when something good happens. Or "Oh well God knows best. It was his will"... when something bad happens.
A great illustration of the confirmation bias that follows the faith-based assumption that God is good.
the Baha'is carefully avoid the issue of animal suffering. God is good no matter what.
And another. Yet they accept this god anyway. Why? They're free to assign any qualities to the god they choose to believe in, so why choose that one? If I were a theist, my god would simply be unaware of that suffering or unable to intervene, meaning that he would be like me, who only "tolerates" the animal cruelty that he is powerless to prevent.
I don't think God ever makes mistakes. Rather, I think that what we humans 'perceive' as mistakes are not really mistakes.
And more confirmation bias, which causes misperceiving mistakes as not being mistakes. What a terrible way to decide what is good and what is proper behavior. The decisions are all pre-made. It's all good and none is a mistake. A faith-based confirmation bias like that deforms both cognitive and affective ability, that is, the ability to make proper judgments about what is true and what is moral.
I fully agree, especially since suffering has nearly destroyed my life, but the other Baha'is will say "that's great, look how much you are growing spiritually!"
How does that make you feel when they not only marginalize your suffering, they also imply that you should be glad for it and are being impious not being grateful for it?
I used to blame God for my suffering so I hated God, but not anymore, since I consider it to be completely illogical to blame God.
I also consider it illogical to blame gods for nature's ways. But I've gone a bit further with it than you. This is an excerpt from I list I compiled of the benefits of atheism:
"[4]
When a cute little doe-eyed girl dies of leukemia sometime later today (and one will somewhere), you'll have the comfort of knowing that it was just rotten luck, and not something caused by or allowed to happen by any ghost."
But you don't get that comfort, do you? The god others believe in is good. The one I believe in doesn't exist. Neither of us is tormented thinking he lives in a world run by a cruel or indifferent god. Yet you retain that version of a god.
It seems to me that God does not care about 'some animals' that suffer in the wild, if God was the one who was in charge of the process of evolution.
That is the only logical conclusion I can think of.
There's another logical possibility, and a more wholesome one.
Why are you defining 'good' as the will of God
Don't most Abrahamic theists do that? Their Bibles and clergy tell them that God is good, and they start with that faith-based premise and make moral judgments with that as a given.
It is morally right to punish people that mistreat animals because they are doing something wrong.
Agreed, but you seem to give gods a pass there, or do you consider a god that sits idly by watching gratuitous suffering immoral as you would a person actively inflicting that suffering?