I am a person who thinks that Christians should be as vehement, as 'down-and-dirty' as unrelenting about the Problem of Evil as the most intelligent and thoughtful of atheists. The Problem of Evil is the one really good objection to entry into the religious life, IMHO, and it is an intellectual problem that needs to be wrestled with in it's strongest form, and out in the open. The Bible devotes entire books to this very problem, and we do ourselves no favors by refusing to face it head-on. It can only lead to personal growth and advancement towards The Truth.
Sometimes when I lay the problem of evil out in the starkest terms I know, then I get this response: "well, God is a mystery, and we can never really understand Him." This really, really bothers me. Yes, God is a mystery, God is in some sense infinite and so beyond our ability to understand in all ways. But to say God is infinite is not to say that God is in all ways infinite. And for Christians, it is not really an option to say this. Why? Because Christians say, and say often, that God is Love. When you say God is love, you have intellectually restricted what you can say about God in other ways, and you cannot retreat to God's mystery as a way out. You have in that moment defined some aspect of God, and by defining God, you have limited not what God is, but what can be meaningfully spoken about Him.
If you say God is love, then the problem of evil IS a problem. Retreating into the mystery of God is a way to avoid the problem. If God is in all ways mysterious, then the problem of evil doesn't even exist, because we really don't know anything about Him/Her/It/Whatever. But if God is love, then the problem of evil stares you in the face, and you owe some account. You can say you don't understand the evil and the suffering, given that God IS Love, but you can't say that the evil and suffering isn't a problem because "God is a mystery".
Some people have told me that God is love, but His love is really nothing like our love. Well this is just the dirtiest way of dealing with people. It is nothing more than a bait-and-switch. You talk of love, but the word as you use it has only the vaguest connection to the way everyone else is using it. This threatens not only our ability to talk about God, but our ability to talk about love. God is love, but His actions don't have to look anything like love for us to say it. At this moment, you are just talking out of both sides of your mouth, and you are nothing but a lying salesman. Be honest, and stop talking about God being love, or stop talking about love altogether. But don't say one thing and mean another.
Yes, God is mystery. This means that we can't explain a lot of things about God, because we don't have access to the truth about them. The Trinity is a mystery, no explanation is all-encompassing and satisfying. The Incarnation is a mystery. For me (this is a bit of an idiosyncratic concern), it is a mystery how God can be suffering, self-emptying love, but that this love is also the greatest power in the universe. God's power is paradoxical. His ability to love each person as the only person, and yet to love all people, is a mystery. God's selfhood and our sharing in it is a mystery. God is mysterious in oh so many ways. But to say that there are mysteries about God is a far cry from talking about God in a specific way, and then retreating from the very language you just used. God's love is infinitely greater than ours. But if it is nothing like ours, if we cannot say anything concrete about it at all, then we not only threaten our ability to talk about God, but our ability to talk about love.
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