I don't understand how people can claim a loving "father-figure" god would create Hell.

Epicurius said something about the contradiction of god's existence.

I just want to know what kind of god would create something, give it free will, and then punish it when it uses that free will. Sounds illogical and perverse to me.

Insane cannibalistic and specious

As Matt Dillahunty has said, God had to sacrifice himself to make a loophole for a rule that he created.

My theory is that there was a preacher named Jesus back then and he said a lot of intelligent sounding statements and gathered a group of followers. These followers speculated that Jesus was the Messiah promised in the Hebrew Scriptures. But then unexpectedly Jesus was arrested, crucified, and of course he couldn't be the Messiah. But his clever followers made up the story that he had been resurrected and was now in Heaven and that the reason he died was to atone for the sins of mankind. With this big lie in place the followers could then continue preaching, PASSING AROUND THE DONATION BASKETS, and gathering more stupid followers. And the sucessors of these charlatons have been doing this for almost 2000 years.

The flood, the plagues, and all the genocide weren't any better ideas, either.