Probably the only correct answer in the context of the OP.
Like Reeder says.
When I was in college we had quite a few travelling preachers come through and evangelize on the quad. From the way they told it, they were horrible wife-beating drug addicts that went to jail.
Then they found Jesus and are now better than all of us heathens.
But the one dude, he did get into a fist fight with a heckler, so even if his soul is clean his fists weren’t.
Depends on the Catholic. 
I don’t think I have the time for an “Ask the Graduate of Catholic Theology” thread. It’ll mostly be a lot of linking to the Catechism of the Catholic Church anyway (and a few inside views of current RCC politics).
WRT to Protestant theology: Remember, Protestantism is a loose designation of a family of Christian denominations more noted for being non-Catholic than for being alike. The theologies of various Protestant denominations can vary greatly from being nearly identical to RC theology to being very different.
Peace.
If Adolf Hitler had not killed himself, but been captured, and before being put to death (which I expect would 've been about as open-and-shut case as we’ve ever seen) he did whatever neccesary in your religion to achieve the state neccesary to enter heaven or equivalent, could he?
Yes.
What would he have to do?
Accept Jesus as his savior.
Sounds pretty freakin unfair, doesn’t it? The SOB kills 6 million people, repents at the last minute and gets to go to heaven? What kind of screwed up system is that?
Basically, according to Jesus Himself, grace is God’s gift to give, not ours, and He can save whoever He wants at any time during that person’s life. In short, if Hitler did repent at the end and ended up in heaven, it’s really none of our business because Hitler’s salvation would have been between him and God, and nobody else. It’s not about us. The Bible also says that God’s arm is not short that someone who has fallen can’t be reached by Him, and it also says that God will accept whoever comes to Him through his son. Even rotten evil monsters who commit genocide.
That said, I seriously doubt Adolf is chillin’ with Saint Paul, but then Paul committed genocide too for a while there so I spose we’ll find out when we get there.
I happen to find 1st Corinthians 3:11-15 useful:
Now I might have taken this all out of context (so sue me), but this sort of makes sense to me; whatever is precious and good of a person, survives the furnace and is purified; whatever is perishable and corrupt is burned away and utterly destroyed; so, someone like, say Mother Theresa would come through the process relatively intact, whereas someone like, say Hitler would suffer great loss (not just to things that he has but to what he is - the person himself) - I suppose in some cases, this would result in something like a newborn baby, with nearly all of the personality traits burned away. I suppose that for a person who was truly evil to the core (but I’m not sure if that is possible), there would be nothing left but ashes.
I don’t know what happened here, but the verses you’re quoting are 12:31-32, not 3:22-30.
Also, let’s not forget the corresponding passages in Mark and Luke:
Lk 12:10:
Mk 3:29:
Notice: now it’s only “danger of eternal damnation” – not exactly unpardonable.
Darn contradictions.
Lets not forget the** Son of Sam** himself whose conversion and repentance has convinced some evangelical groups that he has actually repented.
For that matter Matthew and Saul might count as repenters, but I was thinking of someone more recent. Thanks to everyone for examples.
I think Ted Bundy did too…
This isn’t an attempt to answer your question, but rather a cynical view of mine that I feel needs to be introduced into this discussion. Although I can’t speak for other religions, I always find it something of a sick joke when Christians condemn Hitler as the pure embodiment of evil. Why? Because their god would condemn to hell many of the same people that Hitler had put to death in the extermination camps. To illustrate my point, here is a sample of victims of the Nazis who are also going to end up in hell, according to many Christians:
Jews - anti-Semitism has, of course, been a fine Christian tradition, practiced by such upstanding souls as Martin Luther and many Catholic saints (I believe St Augustine made anti-Semitic utterances, just to give one example). One of the main reasons Jews are condemned, of course, is for “killing Christ”. Of course, the inconvenient fact that, according to Christianity’s ridiculous theology, Christ had to die (and that, therefore, those who brought about his death were only doing God’s will) is overlooked.
Jehovah’s Witnesses - for being heretics.
Homosexuals - for being “abominations in the eyes of God” or somesuch bullshit.
Communists - for being “godless”.
Criminals - self-explanatory.
And don’t give me that rubbish about how God doesn’t send these people to hell; they send themselves there. He chose, through his own omnipotent will, to create the place, after all; no-one else forced him to! Saying that the damned send themselves to hell is nothing more than engaging in a theological version of blaming the victim; you may as well say that the victims of the Holocaust bought their own train tickets to the death camps! So, getting back to my original point: obviously, if you subject the above types of people to highly unpleasant yet finite suffering, you’re evil incarnate; if you subject them to even more unpleasant suffering that is also eternal in duration, you represent the supreme embodiment of goodness!
While I’m on my little soapbox, the above criticism could also be applied to using Stalin as your example of the devil in human form (given how similar the paranoid mentality of a Stalinist police state seems to be to the mindset likely to be possessed by any religious person who believes that their god can see their every action and discern their every thought (I bet Stalin wished he had that power!)), or any other tyrant for that matter. After all, tyrants also seem to be in the habit of demanding “love” from their subjects and inflicting terrible punishments if that love is not forthcoming. Indeed, I often think that the only reason God seems to have achieved the seemingly impossible feat of being both feared and loved is that he’s succeeded so well with the fear part that few would dare admit, even to themselves, that they do not love him.
Perhaps relevant here is Matthew 20:1-16, the story of the workers hired at various times of day. Both those hired at sunrise and those hired an hour before sunset are payed the same amount, a full day’s wages. When those hired early complain, the boss says that it’s perfectly fair, since they got the wages they agreed to, and if he wants to pay the same wages for less work, that’s his own business. Likewise, a person who comes to God at the eleventh hour still receives the same reward as one who has “worked all day”, that is, who came to God early in life.
And I was going to chime in with the Catholic viewpoint, but moriah has beat me to it, and she’s obviously more qualified. There are people whom we are certain are in Heaven (the canonized saints), and many others who are considered likely to be in Heaven, and whom we hope are in Heaven. There is no human (not even Hitler or Judas Iscariot) who is certain to be in Hell, and we are not even certain that any human at all is in Hell, nor should we hope that any person is in Hell.
When I was in the ninth grade, it was this very idea that made me instantly give up on Christianity. My atheism didn’t happen until college.
Anyone know if there are restrictions on facial hair in heaven?
**Perhaps relevant here is Matthew 20:1-16, the story of the workers hired at various times of day. Both those hired at sunrise and those hired an hour before sunset are payed the same amount, a full day’s wages. **
That’s kinda what I said in the following paragraph …
Strange, that’s one bit I don’t necessarily have a problem with. Oh well, any more detailed discussion would have to go to GD.