Did Jesus HAVE to die?

OR could his mission here on Earth have ended differently?

Hello? Anyone there?

Parents are not continuously hiding from their children to test them, so why does God?

If the christian God is omnipresent ...

then how can there be a Hell? Especially if Hell is not a fiery place but instead means 'the absence of God'?

Are children gifts of God?

Do children just come into existence randomly/by chance when a sperm fecundates an egg or did God somehow make the two 'meet' at exactly that moment?

God's Love and the animals?

I'm watching an animal documentary again, and the beauty and ferocity of Nature are awesome as always. But I'm also asking myself how a supposedly perfect, loving God could have created situations where a lot of animals are senselessly suffering. Example: a baby seal loses sights of his parents, doesn't find back to them, gets rejected by the others and then slowly and painfully dies of thirst and hunger because it's not yet ready to survive alone. And that's just one example. Zillions more could be found.

Since such animals live and die far away from humans and since they haven't done anything 'wrong', why do they have to suffer? They're innocent in a sense, or is there an animal Original Sin as well? Why would God create this beings only so they could more or less rapidly die a painful death again?

Or are they just puppets/robots who can't really experience pain? Or does God use them to teach us a lesson?

How do Christians see this?

Just one Universe?

Assuming that God exists, that 'he' is omnipotent and that he has created this universe with all the necessary parameters for us to exist in the way we do, why couldn't he have created several more universes before or along ours? Although maybe with totally different parameters resulting in very different forms of intelligence?

Or couldn't he do that and our universe is the only viable one?

Necessity of a Creator?

Christians claim that an external creator has created the Universe because somebody had to create it. But God on the other hand didn't, according to them, need to be created. 'He' just was or came into existence on his own.

But if it's possible for a God to exist without a prior cause why would it be impossible for a universe to exist without cause? Why couldn't the Universe just have created itself (via the Big Bang for example)?

And why couldn't God be the Universe and vice-versa (pantheism)?