I had a much bigger response written but my computer ate it, so I'll just over the basics.
In all the examples Bakker gives us where people are damned, it is because they have transgressed in a manner where they have done things that they themselves believe are wrong. Inrau believes he should be damned as soon as he uses sorcery. People in Earwa are convinced women are worth less spiritually than men. In this, I believe Bakker explores intentionality and the importance of an individual code of ethics that informs 'right action' of self actualizing people. Your position seems to be that these things are self-evidently not good, but that entirely depends on your subjective frame.
I'm not sure I totally get what you're saying here. I realize the concept of subjectivity as it comes to morals (for example, women being inferior to men). The point I was trying to make rests solely on the "objective morals" thing. Maybe I'm just getting caught up with the terminology, but when Bakker says that the idea of women being inferior to men is a "fact" of that world (the Bakkerverse), like atomic weight...it just doesn't make sense to me. The very concept of "objective morality" doesn't make sense to me. All it is is a punishment and reward system, applied by powerful beings unto lesser ones, based on arbitrary rules. What makes these imposed morals objective? Where does that come from?
Is it really that impossible to imagine that Ciphrang might simply be a metaphysical version of sharks? Choose to swim in their lake and you get chomped. Why should snakes not be possessed of some simple purity?
Not impossible, in fact I agree with you. But my point about the snakes is that their "purity" is nothing. It's bullshit. The gods decided they're holy, so they are. That's it. Maybe there's some metaphysical stuff associated with that holiness, but it makes no difference. It's all arbitrary.
I don't think the hundred have any say in what is moral. Neither is there any indication that the hundred are responsible for damnation. Rather they can intercede and derive some kind of power from souls that dedicate themselves to them (at least in the case of the compensatory gods).
Definitely gotta disagree with you here. I think the Hundred are absolutely enforcing their made up morality, and that somehow souls are a source of power for them. I also 100% believe that they are the ones causing damnation. There's a Bakker quote in the 'Sayings of Cujar Cinmoi" where he explains that the default state of a soul after death is oblivion. Damnation (or otherwise redemption) only comes about from agencies in the Outside interfering. So it follows, I think, that the Hundred are intentionally damning souls.
I highly doubt that the Inchies are the secret 'good' guys.
I was hesitant to use a phrase like "good guys" because it's not really what I mean. What I'm trying to say is that the Consult's goal of ending damnation IS a good thing, in particular if it involves saving the universe's souls from interference by the Hundred. Of course, the Consult's methods of going about it are very evil, and they likely could care less about any one else as long as their own souls are saved. So I don't think they're actually going to be "the good guys" in the end, but I definitely think they're supposed to be yet another subversion of the reader's expectations: they're painted as being the most evil, horrible thing possible, almost comically so, only to be trumped by something much worse, which they themselves happen to be fighting against. It fits pretty damn well into the style of genre subversion that Bakker's going for. The almost comically evil bad guys are in fact fighting against the gods themselves, who are in turn inverted from being figures of ultimate morality into giant cosmic torturers, who damn almost an entire universe of beings solely for their own benefit. Again, this also fits with the idea that Bakker is playing with Judeo-Christian myth, and showing how a god like the one in the Old Testament is not particularly righteous. He asks extreme sacrifices of people just to make them prove how superior he is. He makes completely absurd and arbitrary rules that, if broken, leads to someone being damned for all eternity. He's petty and jealous and angry, and yet he's supposed to be the epitome of goodness. The Hundred are exactly the same.