Your letter is moving into even more difficult questions, but I hope I can clarify at least some of them.
"If heaven is an exclusive establishment that only keeps a few thousand or a few million of the 'right thinking' people that every religion seems to have, why did God bother creating us - if he was only going to banish us all (the other billions of people who don't follow the major exclusive religions) to hell? Wouldn't that just emotionally kill God to see the vast overwhelming majority of his creation burn for eternity in hell? For that matter will he send any of us to hell if he loves us, why would he send anyone to hell? Is there a hell or did religion create that concept to modify behavior?"
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I think it was Martin Luther who said that God doesn't send anyone to hell; they choose to go there themselves. However, I do see your point generally, and there are a lot of answers on a lot of levels here.
It could be suggested as a starting point (and this may sound callous, but it will help to understand it) that God may be looking for a few gems amidst the refuse. Remember the illustration of the potter who makes one vessel to hold flowers and another to use as a bedpan (I'm sure I'm paraphrasing broadly). The point was that the clay couldn't complain about what the potter made--that was the potter's prerogative. Or let us imagine that we're all stones pulled out of a pond, and God is going to use some stones as tools to shape the others into beautiful decorations--by the time he's done, the decorations will be wondrous to behold, but the tools will be useless.
That still doesn't explain why He didn't do it in such a way that He could make beautiful decorations out of the tools, or why He needs to make bedpans from this clay. But I've got another level of thought on this.
Someone said of the non-Christian husband married to the Christian wife that he really does want to be Christian, he just doesn't want to be like anyone he knows who is Christian--namely his wife. That idea--that we who are Christians often get in the way of other people who evaluate the gospel based on what they see in us--is the best explanation I've ever heard for why some people are never saved.
Now it gets difficult. (Now? Now it gets difficult? It wasn't difficult already?) Most of us come to the point where we recognize that we can take no responsibility for our own salvation; for whatever set of reasons, when we chose to turn to Christ, no other choice seemed reasonable. Some of us were born to church families and spoon-fed the truth with our strained peaches; others reached the bottom of a deep and dark barrel, and saw only one light which might afford an escape for them. C. S. Lewis once described his own salvation thus: "I was dragged kicking and screaming into the kingdom of God, eyes darting left and right for some means of escape." The point is, those of us who have been saved were in some sense maneuvered into it by a God who knew exactly what it would take to save us. We're being pushed toward the less palatable points in Calvin's TULIP--if we have Irresistable Grace, don't we also need Limited Atonement to explain why not all are saved? More simply put, if it is the case that God knows exactly how to save any one of us, aren't we forced to conclude that those who are not saved were by default chosen to be lost? And does that not make God unfair?
One answer which must be given is that grace cannot be unfair by its nature. If the Carnegie Institute in New York chooses to give a million dollars to my friend David to help his ministry, and does not also give me a million dollars, there is nothing unfair in that. Neither he nor I can claim that we deserve a million dollars, nor that we've earned it, nor that it is our money. The money belongs to the Carnegie Institute until they choose to give it to someone else, and it's up to them to decide to whom to give it. Likewise, if you give a Christmas present to someone at work, your other coworkers might say, "Where's mine?", but you and they know it to be a joke. Gifts by their nature are things we do not deserve, which are conferred by the giver for reasons known to the giver.
Thus, if you begin with the assumption that God made something good which chose to destroy itself, it is thus logical that every human deserves to die. If He then chooses to reach down and save a few from that destruction, the ones not chosen have no grounds to file a complaint. Most people get what they deserve; those who say they only want what they deserve cannot claim to be disappointed when they do. Christians get better than they deserve, but no one can say that it's not fair when we do--especially if the offer is extended universally.
So how does God choose whom He will save? No one knows. He hasn't told us at this point. We do know that it isn't because we're better than anyone else. Some suppose that He has specific tasks to fill in heaven which we could not comprehend, but for which he has chosen and molded particular individuals. Some suggest that it has to do with some aspect of character which distinguishes those God can mold from those who will not be altered. I wonder sometimes whether He just worked out how to save the largest number of individuals (remember, some of us who are saved become stumbling blocks for some who never will be), and we are just fortunate enough to have landed in that number.
I feel that I've opened several cans of worms, and as Zymurgy's Law of Evolving Dynamic Systems states, If you open a can of worms, the only way to re-can it is to use a bigger can. But I think I can touch on two open issues here before I move on to the next problem. First, if God made something good, why did it destroy itself? Second, is the offer truly open to everyone?
On the second point, C. S. Lewis made a brilliant observation. The material in the Bible is intended to provide information needed by those who have the opportunity to read it or hear it read. Thus it does not at any point tell us what God will do with those who never hear the gospel or know of the Bible. Anyone who reads the Bible is automatically out of that category, and does not need that information. Concerning those who hear the gospel and fail to heed it, who read the Bible but reject the truth, they may argue a night and a day that God did not push them to salvation in the same way as He may have pushed others, but in the final analysis, they chose what they chose.
The first point is much darker. How could God's good creation be spoiled by itself? Saying that mankind was tempted by the fallen Lucifer only pushes the problem back a level--how could Lucifer fall?
Volumes have been written on this. One of the earliest suggestions involved the idea that there could not be anything as perfect as God, so His creation had to be flawed. The best book I ever read on the matter was John Wenham's "The Goodness of God". He pointed out that the facts that we are able to choose our own actions, and that we are able to affect each other, and that our actions have consequences, are all good things, but that nearly all that is evil about the world is possible because of those good things. We could wonder for how long the garden of Eden was unspoiled; perhaps it was a week, or perhaps it was an eon. All we know is that man was able to choose to do that which would destroy him, and was told the consequences, but eventually chose it. His ability to choose that was a necessary possibility for the world to be truly good.
Is there a hell? Is there an eternal punishment? There is a debate in theological circles as to whether eternal punishment is "eternal in its duration" or merely "eternal in its consequences". There is some evidence that the consequence of eternal separation from God must be the ultimate dissolution of the individual self--that is, cast into loneliness, one would eventually cease to exist. But it's generally agreed that the survival of the spirit beyond death is intrinsic to the Christian message, and that no one will be forced to spend eternity with God, nor permitted to spoil heaven. Thus, there must be some realm where these may exist, at least for some time. If it is a place cut off from God, where the only people are those who put themselves first and who are slowly getting worse rather than better, that in itself would be sufficient to make it hell. As to the images included in the New Testament--the outer darkness, the lake of fire, the garbage dump where the worm never dies--these are clearly images, attempts to convey a concept of the inconceivable, to illustrate the afterlife in a way which describes its nature rather than its appearance.
Suffice it that at the end of all things, those who are saved will be kept in a wonderful place where they will be together with the God whom they have learned to love and trust in life; and those who have never learned to love or trust God will be tossed out as useless objects, failed attempts to make people. I would like to imagine that in the end all would be saved; but I know that there are many who would refuse to be saved, even if at the end they could clearly see the alternatives and make a choice then. If you read C. S. Lewis' The Great Divorce, he illustrates this rather well, with a collection of characters given the opportunity to leave hell and go to heaven, but who because of the people they have become choose to return to hell, where they are more comfortable.
Well, I'm being asked to make time for some other projects, so I'd better cut it off here. Again, I hope these answers are helping. I'll probably continue tomorrow.
--Mark
To Mark J. Young's Bible Study Materials
Read about the Multiverser role playing game--accused by some critics of being "too Christian"
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