The theological answer, as I learned it, is most clearly spelled out in James 2:14-26, often referenced through the phrase "faith without works is dead". The short version is: faith in Jesus will save you, not good deeds. However, if you have faith in Jesus, then that faith will manifest itself through good deeds. If someone proclaims their faith but doesn't act lovingly, then they don't actually have faith and won't be saved. So a Christian should be a good person not because being good will save them, but because being good is a result of genuine faith.

Seems to me this is a protestant thing, i grew up Catholic and repentance was a major part of it. You don't change and become a better person? Then no absolution for you.

IIRC the trick is to get your forgiveness after the last dick move, but before you die. If you mess up the timing, eternal damnation so it’s safer to be good.

Romans 6:1 "Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? Or don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?"

This is typically the best reasoning behind the idea of eternal forgiveness. You can rack up points on your sin bill. But it's contrary to the overall goal of someone who is following the teachings of Jesus and Paul.

I was raised in a very religious environment. And while it's taken me many years to rid myself of the scars that caused me emotionally. I still have answers from time to time. And if it helps someone be a better person, I'm happy to share what I know.

Questioning an aspect of a belief structure is important for personal growth. And I hope that some of the comments here help you get what you need.

TLDR: He doesn't forgive anyone who sins, he forgives those who repent. Repent not meaning "feeling sorry" as many seem to explain, but actually meaning "to turn away" which means changing fundamentally as a human being. From a bad person to a good person.

Someone who doesn't change and act good most of the time isn't repentant, so isn't forgiven. So basically, you prove it with your actions and how you live your life, not with just words only. By this measurement, Republican "Christians" aren't repentant and so aren't forgiven.

Not a Christian anymore, but I used to be for a very long time. Sidebar: "You will know a tree by it's fruit" AKA you'll know what kind of person someone is by what they do. Anyone who's even skimmed the bible (especially the new testament) would easily understand that most conservative "christians" aren't Christian at all, but rather like the Pharisees (phony religious types) that Jesus constantly argued with and condemned.

Other note: Sikhs actually live the way Christian claim to. I could easily make a "hard to swallow pill" meme which said: "Sikhs are better Christians than actual Christians are."

I come from a protestant tradition that says you can't ever be good enough to be saved. Jesus lived a perfect, sinless life and acted as a substitutionary sacrifice on our behalf to make us righteous before God. All the work of salvation is done through Christ. If salvation required anything other than faith to save ourselves (e.g. being good), then his death and resurrection would be meaningless. So once we are made righteous by God through faith, God begins the work of sanctification (being made holy and more Christlike). We don't believe this will fully happen in this life but is a process that we go through as we walk with God.

TLDR: It isn't about doing good things to be saved but rather we're saved and slowly begin to orient our lives around doing good things.

In Jesus's time, there were three different sects of Judaism.

One of them, the Sadducees, allegedly believed there was no life after death and that God didn't care at all about what people did or didn't do.

Their answer to your question of following the law is perhaps the most interesting.

They believed that what was put forth as laws were a gift to humanity and that following them inherently led to a better life in the here and now.

While I don't personally see all of the laws put forward as beneficial, there are certainly instances where that makes a lot of sense.

For example, look at the full version of one of the commandments:

Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.

• Exodus 20:12

Would following a commandment to take care of your parents in their old age ('honor' here comes from the word for burden) benefit you by setting an example such that when you are old that you too would be taken care of?

This was almost like social security in antiquity, much like the Sabbath was one of the first labor laws preventing working anyone more than 6 days in a row.

There's something called the overjustification effect, where when you introduce external reward systems for something intrinsically rewarding people over focus on the external and forget the internal benefits. I think a number of religions have serious issues with that.

There's even a certain irony in Job, named 'persecuted' in Hebrew because even though he lived a good life he experienced suffering which it explains by the intervention of Satan, today in the most common language among believers being the exact same word as "to do a task with the expectation of a reward."

Maybe we're too focused on the rewards.

I'm atheist, but I've been interested in religion in general for quite some time.

From what I know, it's that you have to genuinely have remorse for the bad things you've done and then Jesus will forgive you. It your remorse is fake, Jesus won't forgive.

Catholic here. Despite God's forgiveness, Jesus never said salvation is guaranteed. As he said, "it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven". And that's just for the rich. There are other passages that emphasize the difficulty of gaining eternal life in Heaven, " the way is narrow", "you must take up your cross", and so on. Christ's death and resurrection made salvation possible in the first place. We couldn't even have a hope of it without His help. He also gave us the way that we must follow to gain salvation now that it's possible: belief in God and Christ, and following His commandments, given through the Church.

To put it in another way, we all have a relationship with God. That relationship was damaged through original sin in a way we could not repair on our own. God still has always loved us, but without Christ's sacrifice, He could not forgive our betrayal through sin and therefore we remained separated from Him. Once Christ bore the burden of our sin and overcame it, that repaired humanity's relationship with God overall and God is willing to forgive any sin, past or present, that we commit against Him. As long as we do not commit a serious sin, that relationship will stay intact. Two people in a relationship may do little things that annoy or lightly anger the other person, but we've all got stuff that aren't "deal-breakers" with each other. But a serious sin done with full knowledge and of one's own free will, which in the Catholic Church we call a mortal sin, is a "deal-breaker" that once again severs our own personal relationship with God and threatens our salvation. It's basically a betrayal of God's love. God has these rules and morality and such because He loves us so much He wants the absolute best for humanity and the world. Sin does damage to that, and mortal sin does damage to that in a big way. God is always willing to forgive, but in order for that to happen we have to show that we are sorry for breaking that relationship and promise/resolve that we will do our best to try not to do it again. We have to reconcile with God just as two people in a strained or broken relationship have to reconcile with each other. In the Catholic Church, we believe that reconciliation happens in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, where we confess what we did to a priest, who is in the person of Jesus at that time, and make that resolution to not sin again. The priest then offers a penance as a way to basically "make it up" to God, or as a theologian I heard once say, "clean up the glass and repair the window we broke", and the good relationship with God is restored. Basically, yeah, God is always willing to forgive if we ask for it... But that doesn't mean we still can't break that relationship. I'd always be willing to forgive a best friend if they were to betray me, but if they actually did that, I'd still be mad, and if they don't respond to my calls offering that forgiveness, well, there's not much more I can do to fix the relationship with my friend at that point if they don't want to be forgiven.

It varies significantly between denominations, I know that much. Guaranteed salvation is protestant-specific, at the very least, and isn't even held by all denominations within.

Raised Catholic. Don't believe in hell. Lost my mom recently so i hope there's a heaven. If there is i assume it would be accepting of all. I try not to do things that hurt people because i don't like to see people hurt.

Imagine Jesus as a director of a company that accepts all sincere applicants. The director assumes responsibility for all the mistakes his employees make, but he doesn't assume responsibility for people who only claim to be employees. People who purposely commit crimes get fired and applications by people who apply with the purpose of commiting crimes get rejected for not being sincere. (That's not to say someone who once was fired can't reapply if they're actually sincere about it, but since God sees into people's hearts and minds, you can't trick him.)

You have to be truly sorry for your sins and make an honest attempt at not doing them again. That being said if you sneak in a really sincere confession right before death, then by the book, you should go to heaven. This is a loooot like Christians last rights, the sacraments they use on the dying.

Fun fact anyone can preform last rights for a Christian should they request it. Reason being that people don't always get to choose when they need their last rights so holy men may or may not be around.

Christians aren't a monolith. There isn't a single right answer here. Everyone practices religion in their own way. You'd have to ask this to Christians on a personal level.

I am no longer a Christian, I came from a super fundamentalist bent of Christianity. The idea of choosing to not sin even if you know your sins are forgiven has to do with love.

"For God so loved the world he gave his only son for our sins" etc

So the pastor tells us that we know we are a real Christian who is really saved by our "good fruits", that is, the good things we choose to do and the bad things we choose not to do. So by choosing not to sin, you're proving to yourself that God is real and that God really saved you, because, as everyone knows, it's impossible to be for even a moment anything but absolutely selfish without God's help.

Most Christians aren't that Calvinist though. That was the church I grew up in.

I'm catholic, and to me it's because behaving in a good way will simply make you live better;
the idea is that sin is something that turns you away from God, but being close to God is what makes you truly happy

So even in this life, behaving in a good way would make you live better and happier

The “be a good person” and “you’ll be forgiven” are two separate ideas. Digging into it requires digging into a lot of different religions and their beliefs. Churches and people disagree on how those go together.

I don’t feel your request of “understanding the reasoning that Christians use” relates well to the question in your title. Much of religion now is repeating dogma rather than spiritual awareness and bettering yourself.

That's the fun part! It depends on which branch of Christianity you believe in. Some think it's only faith, some the baptism/saved, and some good works.

How odd, that one should be good not for the sake of goodness, but out of fear of damnation.

Jesus is an example of an ideal person. Being literally divine Jesus is capable of setting a perfect example of love, forgiveness, and compassion. We humans are not. We have flaws, but should still strive to be good people, just as Jesus was a good human.

If you are "being good" or "not being bad" for selfish reasons, you aren't acting out of love or goodness. Heaven, hell, reward, punishment, these shouldn't matter when it comes to virtue or vice.

For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries - Hebrews 10:26-27

we dont. thats the point. because we just have no chance of reaching some level that god can accept on our own. Everyon can be rescued, no matter what they did, because nothing is worse than beeing distant from god. However i do think that people that commit horrible crimes generally dont give a fuck about some god forgiving their sins. it just excludes one another. yet this door stays open just in case this changes. ..until death or rapture

My general understanding is that you're forgiven if you choose to accept Jesus. (Note that I am not christian, but was raised as such.) You are not required to accept salvation. Actions, by themselves, mean nothing; you can be a fantastic, moral person, and work all of your life to help other people, and without accepting Jesus you're still damned. OTOH, if you have truly accepted Jesus, then ipso facto you're going to work tirelessly to help people; actions are a natural consequence of the belief. Therefore, someone that acts contrary to the teaching of Jesus is not saved, because they do not have true belief.

For a real world example, Jimmy Carter would be a person that you could say would be saved (...if any of this was real); his effort demonstrates the faith he claims. OTOH, looking at all of the televangelists, you could quite reasonably say that their daily lives contradict the teachings of Jesus, and therefore no professed belief can ever result in their salvation.

It's all about how you arrive at the pearly gates. You could live a sinful life of you truly redeem yourself on your dying bed; accept Jesus and free yourself of your sinful ways.

The strategy of living sinfully with last minute redemption comes with two big drawbacks. First, death could come for you at any moment - you won't necessarily have time to prepare. Second, your conviction in time of dying needs to be sincere. It would be hard to fake, and most sinners probably wouldn't even know where to start. That's why it's all but impossible for rich people to get to heaven - their minds are twisted towards justification of their inaction, and their chance of redemption is close to zero.

That's my understanding anyway, I'm an atheist from a Protestant country living in a Catholic one.

The simple answer is that the "you have to be good" Christians are not the same people as the "Jesus forgives no matter what" Christians. Beliefs and doctrines vary wildly throughout Christianity, and different Christians often believe contradictory things. This isn't helped by the fact that the Bible itself, being a collection of many books by many authors, contains contradictory viewpoints. This allows believers to focus on the elements they like and ignore the ones they don't.

What's so disheartening is that a lot of fundie Christians actually use this logic to get away with twisted stuff like SH, SA, or CSA.

(And then the next day they collectively blame drag queens for allegedly doing the exact same thing to CYA, but that's another story.)

Basically just the bible says you are supposed to be good, and Jesus says you are supposed to be good. It is kind of a big loophole though, if you really aren't interested in being good.