"And if the former explanation is true, why is he so goddamned tetchy? We have Christians who are supposed to be longsuffering, patient and kind, serving a God who is second to none in his sociopathic perfectionism"

"The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance." - 2 Peter 3:9

"I was attempting to understand how someone can thank God for salvation in the face of the knowledge of the fate of their loved ones."

I can understand that viewpoint, but I personally found too many things I didn't fully understand.

According to the Bible God is patient not wanting anyone to perish

That passage only really makes sense if you read it assuming that Peter (and incidentally, Paul, see 1 Thess) both thought that Jesus was coming back within the lifetimes of their readers (Paul's "we who are still alive" in 1 Thess 4:15 is particularly revealing, I think). That's not usually a way evangelicals are happy reading the text as it contradicts their extra-Biblical assumption of inerrancy.

Peter's answering the implied question of why Jesus has not come back yet by saying God's patient. He doesn't address the possibility that all of his original readers will die before Jesus returns. Assuming people are being born and dying all the time and there are still some Christians around on earth, God can always add to the number of people who will be saved by not coming back just yet, but then logically he never returns at all. What Peter seems to think is that he will see the Lord come again in his gen-er-ation, but maybe towards the upper end of it so more of that generation can be saved.

In any case, the point remains that sending people to hell for rather piddling things is tetchy and nasty, whether it's done after some patient delay in the first century AD or whenever judgement happens.

Of course this rests on the idea that the fair penalty for our sins (to whatever finite degree) is an infinite punishment. *If* this is true then it would only make God just, and the fact that he gives us a possibilty of repenting and letting Jesus take the punishment for us can only be looked upon as a fantastic thing.

As the article from Wednesday points out (the thread from which it comes is interesting too) that's a meaning of "justice" which is at odds with how most people see justice. We recognise that sentences should be proportionate to the crime. Of course, you could argue that when God uses a word it means just what he chooses it to mean, neither more nor less. But that seems to mean we should be ready to worship an omnipotent fiend.

We set an oilrig on fire on purpose

But we didn't. Most people have not done anything which means they deserve to burn. And again, the fire is from God, not just a consequence of refusing to be rescued.

My conclusion is two things I suppose - I believe it to be true but it doesnt impinge on me or my life all that much. The secondary conclusion leads on from the first, I'm rather a selfish person - ultimately I care about other people very little unless I'm directly presented with them or their suffering.

I think this is what quite a lot of evangelical Christians are like about hell (it's certainly my recollection of how I felt about it).

The point he seems (to me) to be making here is that God's concept of time is different from ours, and that a thousand year 'delay' before he comes back seems only as long as a single days delay to us. The use of a 'thousand years' seems to imply to me that he had in mind a significantly longer period than the lifetime of those who were alive at the time (although this is not conclusive as I don't believe this passage directly addresses this issue).

He's quoting Ps 90:4, which I'll grant does seem to allow for a large period of time. However, as Norman Cohn writes in Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come:

Nor was [judgement] imagined as lying in some remote, unpredictable future - the early Christians were certain that Jesus would return very soon indeed: "The time we live in will not last long. " - "It is far on in the night; day is near." - "The end of all things is upon us."

I don't see how Paul saying "we who are still alive" cannot linguistically be taken to refer to "those Christians who are still alive" in the same way that I might say "we will win the war on terror" to a group of my friends.

I don't think that's how this inerrancy game is played. As far as I remember, the rules are that you can and should draw conclusions from particular choices of words (at least, I remember sermons at StAG which did similar sorts of things). Paul could have said "those who are left alive" (after all, he already knows who to say "those who have fallen asleep" in the very same sentence), but he says "we".

I'm also not sure if the Greek of the time allows the sort of idiomatic use of "we" which you refer to, although I don't know how to find out (I suppose could go through every use of the word in the NT and see whether any of them work like that, but I can't really be bothered :-).

In any case, the evangelical special pleading about the passages in the letters of Peter and Paul which show that they thought the return of Jesus was imminent is at odds with the stated position of some evangelicals (see under "Subversive Hermeneutics") that a general principle shouldn't override specific Bible verses. The general principle in question here is that Peter and Paul were never wrong in what they wrote.

It seems unlikely to me that Paul could have meant 'we' in the direct sense of himself and those he was addressing, as in verses 13 and 14 he is assuring them that those who have died will rise again with Christ. He is writing to assure them that if they die they will not be lost or forgotten, but rather will rise with Christ when he comes back.

I think he does right to reassure, but rather, he writes to people who think that the Second Coming is imminent but are worried that people who have already died in the intervening time will be forgotten. At 50 AD, 1 Thess predates the gospels and provides very strong evidence that this was the expectation of the early Christians.

Evil people like Hilter and Stalin consider themselves moral.
I consider myself moral.
Therefore I deserve the same punishment as Hilter and Stalin.

What's wrong with this picture?

If they didn't have moral standards to lend some consistency and predictability to their behavior, they would never have been able to attract followers and create a political power base.

This confuses order/chaos with good/evil. As anyone who's played AD&D knows, they're not necessarily linked. Hitler was lawful evil.

The exact amount to which we are sinners, and the appropriate level of punishment appears to be beyond our personal determination. What is certain though is that we are sinners and that God has provided an escape route from the punishment we deserve because he loves us so much.

Hmmm. You (or Gospelcom) say that some people will be punished more severely than others. If the punishment lasts for ever, though, it seems to me that this removes such inequalities. An eternity of anything bad is pretty bad (I'm reminded of the bits in one of Terry Pratchett's books about how Hell is being trapped for eternity in a hotel in Wales). If the punishment does not last forever, what happens to people who've served their time? Are they destroyed, even though they've served their punishment? Are they admitted to heaven (in which case you seem to be advocating something like purgatory)?

Going back to the article from Wednesday (the person, not the day), I'm also not sure how the requirements of justice are satisfied by blaming and executing the wrong person. Like the infinite punishment for a finite crime, that's a lot way from what I'd think of as justice. One can make analogies about how people volunteered to die for others in concentration camps and the like, but the problem here is that in Christian theology, God is both Maximilian Koble and the Nazis, and it's all just a very odd show put on for our benefit.