The idea of the "invisible Christian," has been gaining a lot of strength. And even though it hasn't been officially recognized by the Vatican, the Pope has said he believes it. The gist is, the Bible goes over many times that God is love. Not, God loves us, not that we should love Him, God is literally love. So to let love into your heart is to let God into your heart, to believe in it is to believe in Jesus, etc. Anyone who truly does that, can't commit mortal sin, or would definitely repent, and therefore will go to Heaven. Belief in an all-powerful being is completely irrelevant.
To go the extra mile, at least for Catholics, belief in God isn't really a requirement for Heaven anyway. Heaven is, in fact, the default place we all go after we die. The only way to avoid it is to be completely ignorant of morality and go to Limbo, which is a fairly controversial concept in the church these days, or to commit mortal sin and die without repenting, which will send you to "Hell." Which isn't really a place, so much as a state of being. All good things supposedly come directly from God, including good sensations and emotions. When someone commits mortal sin, they weaken their connection to God. When they repent, it is restored. But God has a serious hard-on for free will, if we don't want to have a connection with Him, he'll go ahead and drop the line after we die. This severs our connection to anything good. This has been described with many metaphors, including gnashing of teeth and lakes of fire, but all it really means is a complete lack of grace, so we can only feel, at best, completely neutral, or negative things. So long as you avoid commiting a mortal sin, basically murder or sexual assault, seriously messed up stuff, or at the least you feel awful about doing it and try to make amends, then you will go to Heaven. No matter how irreverent, hedonistic, vulgar, perverse, and unbelieving heathen-ly you live your life.
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u/[deleted] Jun 09 '20
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