Four questions for Christians

[Consilius]

You are preaching against "no salvation outside the church", which many Christians believe does not exist.
We all have our basic moral values, and the Eurocentric 16th century stereotype of "immoral savages" probably does not exist, and morality is not dependent on whether or not your particular tribe has been evangelized. There were law systems in ancient societies like Egypt and Mesopotamia, and people in general would have had an idea of what was right and what was wrong, based on, I admit, stuff that was evolutionarily beneficial. To attack a band of runaway slaves or to refuse them hospitality in the middle of the desert was something that you don't need Jesus to agree is wrong.
On what happened when they died, Jesus himself preached on the difference between getting it wrong when you knew it was wrong, and getting it wrong when you SHOULD have known it was wrong by your own rationality (Luke 12:47-48). I can't speak on their behalf, but some will say that the reasonably good ones went to heaven, while the truly bad ones went to hell. Catholics say that the good ones stayed in a state of limbo until Christ died, and that the good ones who had done some bad things suffered for a finite amount of time in Purgatory before going to heaven.

It's nice to think that if I were a well-behaved savage I would have made it to heaven. Unfortunately you are all over the map here, and while I appreciate the information, I was looking forward to seeing what you felt personally about what happened to those hundreds and hundreds of thousands of forced un-believers' souls, did they dry up like a raisin in the son? Is your god responsible for anything at all?

You would probably agree that morality originates from extra-religious sources, and religion simply identifies them and lays them out.
Therfore, these 'savages' would have had a perfect idea of what it meant to be moral, even if they had been atheist. Morals are not counter-evolutionary, so the unevangelized of even today know what it means to be good, and don't need people to tell them. Maybe…God set it up that way. Just a theory.
But say it was true. In that case, every person on Earth at the time of the Israelites would have had their own abstract Ten Commandments and a sense of justice. Therefore, when someone is being bad, they would not be able to blame their people any more than they would be allowed to blame God.
So bad Christians and bad 'savages' are the same. They both are denied God when they live sinful lives of unrepentance. They both go to Purgatory (I am a Catholic) if they didn't know what they were doing was wrong and strove to do good, which would be better than having done wrong while knowing it was wrong. And if they both follow their nearly identical moral codes to fullness, they both live for eternity with God.

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God does not make people do evil. The choice is ultimately ours. Anything less would justify "God made me do it." The only way God IS responsible for things would bring up the question of evil.

God chose to not give people the ability to follow the rules he designed. How can it be our fault that we can't adhere to rules designed to be impossible to follow? That's like saying it's my fault I can't walk to Pluto; what could I possibly do about it?

God is responsible when bad things happen to good people. These tragedies have the potential to inspire them, and their recovery from disasters also can inspire others when they are dealing with hard times. Tragedy brings people together, like the Israelite slavery or refugee families, and it can also tear them apart.

Since God can accomplish the same results without inflicting disaster and misery upon people, and he knows everything, how is this not proof that God is malicious?

God did not pull violence out of thin air. For around 80 years, without any provocation except fear, all Israelite babies were drowned. This was about more than saving the Israelites from slavery: this was about God performing his role as judge and punishing the Egyptians according to Egyptian law.

What does it say about a being's justice if he lowers himself to the level of mere humans?

The thing about free will is that we are all as capable of living perfect lives as we are of living terrible ones. But perfection is impossible to achieve, so sometimes we make mistakes, are punished, repent, and continue trying to do our best. These "mistakes" are still our fault; people are sorry right after they do bad things, but they don't exactly feel that way when they are doing them. We fall below God's standards willingly, all the time, under the same conditions of free choice as Adam in the Bible, so he is not the origin of the problem of evil. We all are, and contribute to a lot of it in our own little ways.

Faith in God gets stronger only in tragedy and confusion. I don't think anyone in the Bible was exempt from that. Miracles prove facts about God and who he is and what he does, but the part about loving God in religion comes from when we have nothing else to hope for. Was it malicious of God to allow the Israelite slavery to take place? Notice how the enslavement was carried out by other human beings. But there were people who were born into and died in this slavery. But, after pushing Israel to the limit, he intervened and saved them.

The human sense of justice is the same as God's. Isn't every person in a nation subject to a single constitution? Judges cannot make rulings or dish out punishments based off anyhting other than the constitution. If God judged us by his own unique standards, then it would be an unfair judgement, because not only would no one be aware of his specific law code, but it would be unfamiliar to the people and be seen as unfair. The Egyptians needed to know that they were being fairly judged for their offenses, so the judgement was carried out according to Egyptian law and the general sense of justice.