After thinking it over I’m going back to Calvinism. I hold that hell is eternal but not everyone recieves the same intensity of punishment. The problem is that people think God owes sinners grace. But He dosn’t. This goes against the very meaning of grace. If He chooses to actively save some and pass over the rest by giving them over to their own sinful hearts, then He does nothing wrong. One group gets justice, the other group gets grace. No one gets injustice. In the end God is glorified by both justice and grace. Neither does this make God egotistical. Pride is loving and thinking of yourself more highly than you ought to. God doesn’t do this. His loving and thinking of Himself is direct proportion to who He is - the most glorious of all beings. He glorifies Himself for the joy of His people. As Jonathan Edwards puts it:
It is a proper and excellent thing for infinite glory to shine forth; and for the same reason, it is proper that the shining forth of God’s glory should be complete; that is, all the parts of His glory should shine forth, that every beauty should be proportionably effulgent, that the beholder may have a proper notion of God. It is not proper that one glory should be exceedingly manifested, and another not at all…Thus it is necessary, that God’s aweful majesty, His authority and dreadful greatness, justice, and holiness, should be manifested. But this could not be, unless sin and punishment had been decreed; so that the shining forth of God’s glory would be very imperfect, both because these parts of divine glory would not shine forth as the others do, and also the glory of His goodness, love, and holiness would be faint without them; nay, they could scarcely shine forth at all. If it were not right that God should permit and punish sin, there could be no manifestation of God’s holiness in hatred of sin, or in showing any preference, in His providence, of godliness before it. There would be no manifestation of God’s grace or true goodness, if there was no sin to be pardoned, no misery to be saved from. How much happiness soever He bestowed, His goodness would not be so much prized and admired…So evil is necessary, in order to the highest happiness of the creature, and the completeness of that communication of God, for which He made the world; because the creature’s happiness consists in the knowledge of God, and the sense of His love. And if the knowledge of Him be imperfect, the happiness of the creature must be proportionably imperfect.
God permits evil and suffering. He’s not the direct cause of it. Moreover, hell is not torture but justice. Everyone recieves a different degree of punishment. People in heaven don’t rejoice at seeing the suffering of people in hell but in seeing God’s perfect justice. In one sense it doesn’t please God that the wicked perish. But in another sense it does please Him that justice is executed.
And if we were able to help even a little with that, then I’m glad we were able to do so.
But what I would say might perhaps be better brought out in posts on the relevant topics. (Or you’ve already read plenty of places where I’ve already talked about those topics, such as the nature of God’s justice in relation to the Trinity, and you think my reasoning is invalid and/or based on faulty data.)