(November 17, 2017 at 12:34 pm)Catholic_Lady Wrote: In Catholicism we don't have anything about a loyalty/reward scheme.
With that being said, some protestant denominations believe that all you need to do to "go to Heaven" is to believe in Jesus as your Lord and Savior, and if you are not a Christian you go to Hell. They believe faith alone will get them to Heaven.
We believe it is much more involved/less simplistic than that, and we do acknowledge that a person who is Christian *may* go to Hell, and one who isn't *may not*.
Basically, it depends entirely on the state of your soul. If you are in a state of mortal sin, you go to Hell. That sounds simple enough, but the tricky part is that we have no way of knowing whether or not a person's soul is in a state of mortal sin. We can't even officially say that about Hitler, Stallin, or Mao, for example. Because in determining the state of someone's soul, every single thing about that person is taken into account. And since we can't read minds and see a person's entire life experiences, we can't make any judgements on their soul.
Then what was the purpose of Jesus, His life, His death and His resurrection. What you just described is Judaism. Something that Christ came to put away because it didn't work, Judaism was set up to show we needed a savior and not ourselves. I'm not trying to bring some kind of argument, I'm curious.
GC
God loves those who believe and those who do not and the same goes for me, you have no choice in this matter. That puts the matter of total free will to rest.
