The second question being “Even if it were possible for the finite to offend the infinite, would the infinite punishment of a finite creature be just?” I will attempt to craft an analogy. You are in a park enjoying a picnic lunch when you glance down and notice an ant crawling across your sandwich. You are offended. How do you react? You have a number of options. You could ignore the ant. You could brush the ant away. You could move to a different location. You could kill the ant. You could kill the entire ant colony. You could capture the ant and confine it and proceed to torture it for several weeks until it finally dies. That last option is quite inadequate as a comparison to hell because hell is infinite in duration whereas the ant can only be tortured for a finite length of time.
This is very similar to the concerns a Jewish guy I knew some time back raised about the idea of hell. As a Jew he obviously had fairly strong views on the likes of Adolf Hitler, but his comment was that even when dealing with a tyrant like Hitler one has to ask when he has been adequately punished. If he were to suffer for 6 million years that would be one year per Jew his regime killed - is that enough? If not, what about 6 billion years, or 6 trillion years? If he suffered for one million years for every Jew he had killed, is that sufficient punishment? Where would the concept of justice say that punishment had been served?
To me the concept of hell flies in the face of any concept of a just and compassionate God. Hell would seem to be an entirely human invention based on a vindictive concept of retributory justice. Perhaps we have the wrong idea of hell. Perhaps we have the wrong idea of justice. Perhaps we have the wrong idea of God. I completely reject the concept of hell as it is traditionally understood in most Christian churches.
The notion of being burned alive while demons poke you with tridents is something that seems to fly in the face of the very concept of a loving God. Many people think of hell as a place of torture, when perhaps a better word to use would be torment. If people decide they want to spend eternity with God, they get their wish. If they decide to spend eternity without God, they get their wish. They may not like the place where God has completely withdrawn but they get their wish.
Adopting teachings along the lines of various forms of universalism provide some means to address the questions of the fate of those who die in infancy, those who die having never heard the Gospel and so on. Those who believe in everything being fully predestined ultimately have to end up with a form of universalism or a rewrite of Scripture (e.g. "for God so loved the few that he gave his only begotten Son so those predestined should not perish but have everlasting life"). Some might argue that what Paul wrote in 1Co 3 about Jesus being the cornerstone and us building on that foundation lays a - ahem - foundation for a theology of universalism, in that our works are tested and either result in us receiving a reward or escaping as if through fire.
What Jesus said about everlasting punishment (e.g. in the passage about "when you did it not unto the least of these") doesn't sit very well with the idea of everybody going to heaven but it does leave open a lot of possibilities as to just what this everlasting punishment might look like.
