Response, continued (part 2 of 2, subtitle: Brevity is not my thing).
None of us is necessary. Our existence is a completely gratuitous gift from God to us. He has the right to remove that gift if we reject it.
Indubitably, at least in the sense that “we have no claim on God for our continued existence.” But just because we have no exterior claim on God does not mean that God does act according to Goodness (that is, act according God, or Himself). That is, though we have no claims on God, merely because God is God, there are some things that He does and does not do. God does not do evil, because to do evil would be to not be God, not because whatever victims may or may not exist have some right exterior to God that prevents God from doing anything in particular.
So in the sense that I can make no argument to God for my continued existence, absolutely true. Nevertheless, God loves us unconditionally, and acts accordingly - even when such acts are not what we want (because we’re stupid and confused).
Man is created in the image of God; this is what makes him a person. Our ability to reason is the “image” of God’s knowledge.
Is it our reason that is the image though? Would a sufficiently advanced computer be a person? A human born brain damaged who cannot reason?
You could say that computers will never get that advanced, and that may be true, but how do you tell if it has? What’s the cutoff?
And for the brain damaged human who is yet a person, the answer is that reason is built into humanity, but the brain damaged person is a person whose capacity for reason is broken, but it still a person.
It is not merely the ability to reason that makes us in the image of God. That’s part of it to be sure, but not to the extent that any entity that lacks the ability to reason is not a person. There must then be more to what it means to be a person so that the brain damaged becomes a person with a damaged faculty, rather than a former person (envision a chair with a broken leg - still a chair, but damaged and not fully a functional - versus what you get after burning a chair to ash - not a chair.).
God is not merely a reasoning machine, but also Goodness itself. It would follow that an image of God would also in some way incorporate this goodness, no? Though I am not sure if it follows from this alone (would have to spend more time), it seems likely that an image of God would at the least have to be good fundamentally, in order for it to be anywhere near an image of perfect Goodness itself.
Hell is not merely throwing out useless tools, that would be annihilation. Hell is the active, miraculous existence of the tools in a state of constant destruction.
Nope. Annihilation would be removing the tools from existence. In this analogy, which is not a good one for Hell, since we do not believe persons to be mere implements as you do, Hell would be not forcing the tool to come in and have dinner with you if it doesn’t want to. Letting it sit out in the dark all by itself if it won’t come in, but otherwise neither destroying it nor necessarily doing much else to it at all.
Of course I don’t know, but I doubt it. Endless torment is not the “best outcome” in any estimation!
But if they chose poorly, would you be able to stop loving them? I think the answer is generally no. Note that love does not preclude large amounts of anger and disappointment, but if a loved one fell so horribly, such strong reactions would in large part be due to the fact that we loved them, I think. Otherwise they’d just be names of people we knew were evil, like every other name of an evil person we knew. We might be angry at the murderer we do not know, but hardly in the same way we would be with a family member who committed murder.
God loves us unconditionally, but if we disobey him and hate him, he will let us die (or actually kill us, if you prefer). Spend some time with the Prophets in the Old Testament.
But did you not say that the annihilated were unloved and unlovable? If that is only by us now and not by God, then that is an imperfection in us which ought to be rectified, since we should strive to be like God. Since heaven tends to rectify such things as are not rectified when we get there, it follows that we both should and will love those who you say are to be annihilated simply because God does. Which brings back the question of the reaction to the annihilation of loved ones paralleling your question about the reaction to damnation.
I am not an Old Testament expert, but I am vaguely aware that
Sheol is a thing. Further, in regards the prophets, a) while annihilation would certainly be one form of victory of God over His enemies, it is not the only form and b) the temporal strength (which is generally what such prophecies concerned, as I - again, a non expert - recall) was destroyed absolutely.
It is my understanding (as far as that goes) that Judaism was primarily concerned with the current world - keeping the Chosen people together, and following God’s law now in order to bring about goodness etc now. From such a perspective, the absolute destruction of an evil kings earthly kingdom suffices to satisfy all of the “enemies will perish” language. And it does - all the power of evil is destroyed absolutely. But that does not mean that those who committed it were annihilated, otherwise why Sheol?
)
)
I often choose not to respond because I think it isn’t worthwhile. Can’t tell you how many posts I haven’t written! 
