>Every biblical reference that I can find on the >subject indicates that children who die before t>hey attain any sort of moral understanding go to >heaven.

Can you give me any specific verses to read? I know you and I have discussed this before, but I don't recall ever reading anything specific.

I know Catholics have a neat way around this. They have something like an age of accountability (I think it's like 7 years old or something) before which you basically aren't held accountable for anything you do. After that, you have to accept Christ (and do all those other things you have to do as a Catholic) to be saved. I'm sure the "real" system is much more fluid than this is, though.

>God judges according to our capacity and >opportunity to understand, as far as I can tell.
But you just said He judges according to his own perfect standards. How can we possibly understand His perfect standards?

>
>> All that free will and there is only ever one >>thing worth exercising it for?
>
> I never said that, nor did I mean it. Accepting >Jesus Christ is hardly the end of human >responsibility. You don't believe that, nor >should you, and I know you don't believe I >believe that.

Right, I don't believe that. But what I'm getting at is this: You accept Christ and accept his sacrifice. That's it, you're saved, right? It doesn't matter *one bit* what you do after or before that point, you're in the club. You can be a murdering, lieing, thieving sack of scum before and after that one decision, and it is all forgiven when you die because you made that one choice. So in essence, there really *is* only one thing worth exercising your free will for. Everything else is pretty superfluous, in the grand scheme of things.


>> If Hitler is in heaven, I don't want to be >>there.
>
> Nor, I suppose, would I. But I don't think >Hitler would have sacrificed his Son for us.
>He'd have turn his back, let us rot, and not even
>provided the option.

What does this have to do with anything? I wasn't comparing God to Hitler, if that's what you thought. I was merely saying that if a man like Hitler (the prototypical "pure evil" person who nevertheless perported to be a Christian) who was throughout his life a hateful, spiteful, immoral, and by all reports unrepentant scum bag gets to go to heaven because of his one "right" choice, then I don't want to have to go visit him.

The point I'm trying to make is that there doesn't seem to be *any* accountability in the "system." You don't even have to feel *bad* about anything you did. You don't have to know why it was wrong, or even what it was you did that was wrong. You just have to accept a gift, and in you go.

Again, the Catholics have a nice way around this, with the idea of purgatory. You still get to go to heaven, but you have to spend a few millenia being bored out of your skull and possibly tortured a bit first if you were an exceptionally bad person in life.