Let's start with a story first. There was once a man, a farmer to be more specific, who had a young puppy. He trained it just as he had his other dogs, but for some reason it liked to chase his chickens. The farmer of course didn't like this, as the loss of chickens and eggs cost him money, but no matter what he did to break the dog of this habit, a day or two later it was back at it.
The farmer had two obvious choices, destroying it, or giving the dog to some other person that didn't have chickens. But instead he chose to keep the dog, locking it in a small cage and barely feeding it. For many years, every morning he'd yell at the dog, kick it, and thoroughly abuse it, all as punishment for failing to obey him. This man was clearly a sadistic psychopath (many people would use much stronger language to describe him).
The Roman mother church and its Protestant daughter churches
(as well as Islam and other religions with the Hell
doctrine)
worship a God with a personality very much like that farmer's,
a god that for all eternity tortures those that refuse to obey him,
and for no apparent purpose other than sadistic vengeance.
That god though is not the God of the Bible, the loving God that created the heavens and the earth, but he is a god mentioned in the Bible and known as Satan or Lucifer. The Bible says that Satan is the god of this world, and says that, except for God's church, which would be a small flock, he has deceived everyone on Earth.
The Bible prophesied that there would be false apostles,
preaching a false gospel in the name of Christ,
that Satan's ministers would appear as ministers of righteousness,
fooling the whole world,
and that even those that sincerely worship God and Jesus
would be rejected because they were following false doctrines
and man-made traditions rather than God's laws,
having been deceived by the
greatest conspiracy (§Examples — Antisemitism)
this world has ever seen.
I never knew you; depart from me, you who practice lawlessness!
So yes, the god of this world really is cruel, although the Hell (and Heaven) that he preaches exist only in his sick imagination; such doctrines can be found nowhere in the Bible. Those few that haven't allowed themselves to be deceived by him know the truth and know that the real God is anything but cruel.