On Choosing Belief -- A Scenario

Here's a scenario:

You work at Company X. You've been there for three years, and you've always gotten along well with your coworkers. You work with a man, Abraham, who every month runs out of money. Every month Abe asks to borrow $20 from you until payday. You've always lent Abe the money and he's always paid you back. Sometimes before payday.

But at any time you could decide to not lend Abe the money. It likely wouldn't have anything to do with whether you thought he'd pay you back. Maybe some month you didn't have enough to lend. Anyway, you don't lend him the money. That doesn't mean you didn't have faith that he'd pay you back if you had lent him the money.

This is part one.

On Choosing Belief

Here is a subject I'd like to discuss, but first I'll invite some ideas so I can better frame the discussion.

1. Christians often tell me that I can choose to believe in God and/or Jesus, as though this choice is as simple as guessing which checkout line will get me out of the grocery store more quickly. I'm still mystified, though, as to how a belief can be chosen. Can someone explain this process to me?
2. To arrive at a belief that God exists (in the way(s) in which He is understood to exist by at least a majority of Christians, if such a thing is possible), it seems to me one must have faith in a number of things that are not God: faith that the stories of the New Testament aren't fictions, that they were preserved in accurate form in the decades between the events and their recordings, that the Council of Nicea and the Council of Trent (as well as the earlier Church Fathers such as Irenaeus) accepted the true versions and rejected the false ones, that the various schisms through the Church's history were survived by the correct side, that the texts are translated in the proper contexts and that they are understood as intended. These things are not divine--how does one justify faith in all of these things just to get to the possibility of God?
3. Why is God's ego so fragile He needs my approval, and why would He create so many souls out of nothing just so He could eternally torment some of them based on this qualification? (I realize this one involves specific beliefs about more than just God, but I thought I'd toss it out there).
4. Anything you'd like to add to the pile?

I don't mean to pick on Christians, but they are the ones who insist most often that I need to believe a certain way.