I didn’t mean this literally, I just meant it as a hypothetical. If the answer is yes, it raises another question.
Say there was a non-Christian. They followed all Christian rules, (no murder, no theft, they loved, etc. Also, I know they couldn’t follow rules that say you have to accept Christ and things like that.) they live through their life doing everything like the most holy Christian possible. They just don’t believe in the Christian God.
Would Hitler confessing on his deathbed mean he had a better chance of getting to Heaven than a non-Christian who does good things?
Once again, the answer to this will depend on which denomination of Christianity you’re talking about, and even which Christian you are talking to. Many Christians believe that the only path to Heaven is through Jesus, because even a “very good person” will still sin.
The fact that any Christian would say Hitler has a better chance confuses me. Objectively, the non-Christian lived more like a holy Christian than Hitler did.
Also, please consider what others have already said about your Hitler question:
1: Cain’s wife presumably came from somewhere in the general vicinity of Eden. Even if you, for some odd reason, take the story of Genesis as literally true (which interpretation is only about 10% as old as Christianity, and an even smaller percentage of the time since Genesis was written), it just says that Adam and Eve were the first humans created. God could have created whole cities full of humans after then.
2: We don’t know. There are some schools of thought, in fact, that every human goes to Heaven. I don’t know about other sects, but this belief is entirely consistent with the Catholic Church’s teachings (the Church doesn’t actually teach universal salvation, but neither does it teach that universal salvation is wrong). There are some individuals whom the Church says are definitely, absolutely in Heaven (that’s what the Canon of Saints is, a list of those people known to be in Heaven), but there’s no human whom the Church says is definitely, absolutely in Hell.
3: OK, I’ve asked that, too. I dunno. But the truth, falsehood, sense, or nonsense of the Immaculate Conception has basically no impact on my life, so I pretty much just ignore it.
4: Christians believe that humans have free will. There’s no belief that it’s only us. The Bible explicitly allows for the possibility that animals have souls (and thus, presumably, free will to at least some degree), and certainly angels have souls.
5: God loves everyone, but humans don’t. Humans cause suffering and pain.
6: God wants us to choose to follow God. If we couldn’t choose otherwise, it wouldn’t be a choice at all.
Oh, yeah, that definitely happens. In some cases, it’s suspected that the “saint” never even existed, and was just a renaming of the old god or goddess (this might be the case for Brigid, for instance). And Mary certainly fills a lot of roles that were traditionally held by goddesses: Any time you hear “Our Lady of _____”, that’s Mary in one of those roles. It’s like in any other family: Mom ends up doing a lot of the work just because nobody else does.
Much appreciated.
Except that we all know that Hitler would never truly repent, so the hypothetical is similar to “If aliens really built the Pyramids…”.
Some denominations believe that those kinds of people go to their own idea of heaven.
The argument is that it is impossible to live a sinless life, and Jesus is the only being who can remove sin. And if you don’t get your sin removed, you can’t get into heaven.
Some will make allowances for someone who didn’t have a chance to accept him, saying that God gives them a chance in the afterlife. But rejecting Jesus is just seen as like rejecting life-saving medicine.
You can have a purgatory where that sin is removed over time, with the smaller sins taking lest time. You can give post-death time to accept the medicine. But just you can’t have sin in heaven.
Not my belief. But that’s the mythology.
And the Mormons even let you accept Jesus after you’ve died, when you come face to face with God. But… There’s a catch, you need to be baptized. Or have a live person get baptized for you. There are Mormons who get baptized over and over, to give everyone whose info they can find a chance to accept Jesus.
My best friend is an atheist agnostic, and in college in the early-mid 1990s in rural Texas it was hilarious when he’d get into discussions about religion, and he’d bring this very point up and watch them flounder.
His argument was basically that incompetent missionaries are damning people to Hell right and left because now they’d heard the Word of God and rejected it because the missionaries were the usual rural unenlightened dipshits like them, and had ineffectively preached to these people.
The God-botherers would usually flounder and get consternated. Every now and then one would say something that stank of predestination, like “if it was meant to be, God would have made them more competent” or something absurd like that, and he’d light them up on that too.
Even as a Christian, it was enjoyable to see him dismantle their stupid arguments. I’ve always been one who thinks that if you’re going to believe something, you need to understand it, not just parrot the party line.
Here’s another question I’ve pondered.
We’re told that God cast Adam and Eve out of Eden because they had sinned. Then, some time later, God sent/manifested as Jesus to offer the opportunity of redemption to people.
My question is why was there this interval? God’s omniscient and exists outside of time. So God must have known at the moment that he was punishing Adam and Eve that he was going to send/appear as Jesus. So why not do it right then? If God had given out that message of redemption right at the beginning, then there wouldn’t have been any issue of people not knowing about it.
That is not in the bible, nor is omnipotent.
It may not be based on scripture but I feel most Christians believe God is omniscient and omnipotent.