The survivors have all been chosen as the last people on earth. The island (or a few selected islands) is shielded from some global disaster (fate)...it's an experiment..and the higher power conducting it has been trying to make it work but the experiment keeps failing (the French message) because the survivors are unable to cope with their fate.
This would explain the racial diversity..black, white, Arab, Korean, etc.. because you would want a good sample of the human tribes for such an experiment. The higher power involved here may not be represented as obviously alien but in a more angelic/gaurdian-like form..most likely in our own image.
Jack may be the gay representative of humanity (he's not taking Kate’s ques at all and she aint chopped liver)
A force field might also explain the weird weather and the fact that time seems frozen on the island.
The significance of the black and white stones and the backgammon pieces represents the split between the hunker downer camp and the stay on the beach camp..it's a choice.. a reoccurring pattern in past attempts at the experiment...the beachers will die or kill each other. The hunker down camp all made the choice to get on the plane very deliberately while the beach people were on the plane reluctantly or by force. The stay on the beach camp cannot accept the fate that they are stranded and thusly would not accept the fate of being the last people on earth.
When Jack found the remains of the previous hunker down camp he hid the stones he found..so he is aware of all this symblism on some level. An interesting thing I noticed is that the people that couldn’t let go/remained on the beach are all the criminal types of the survivors: Kate, Sawyer (who knows Kate from before the wreck & may be an accomplice in her crimes), Sayid (the Iraq republican guardsman), Walt (probably been in prison and never got to know his own son), etc..
Hurley (who always seems to have batteries for his walkman) is an alien observer monitoring the experiment..we never saw him on the plane..he's non-threatening..and was clearly observing everyone all through the last show.
This is a very fruitful hypothesis..it's giving me a lot of ideas. Here is another - The dolls in the spring belonged to the children of "adam & eve". Where are the children now? They've been on the island a while...likely without other human contact and have probably become proficient at tapping into the power of the island (which may be a technology that amplifies the power of the human mind). Perhaps the children created the "monster" or robot thing to keep them company.
Time will tell if I'm on the mark or not.
