super interesting to hear your thoughts on this! also went and read your review of gilead and found that pretty interesting too.
you might find this funny wrt the "hell is real, but people in hell are free to repent & be saved from it at any time they choose" christians because I was fully "inventing" that idea in my head when I was starting to doubt/question certain parts of Mormonism.
mormon heaven endgame is three tiers of kingdoms + a bonus bad one for people who experience an almost physical level of confirmation from god (called outer darkness! spooky!) then reject that. it's (as I can recall) doctrine that once you're assigned to one of those three kingdoms (or bonus outer darkness) that's where you stay! it is what it is! (the highest kingdom is the one with the oft fabled mormon doctrine/lore of getting your own planet and all that. the others are for everyone else who didn't do good enough.)
it was always so puzzling to me that a god that wanted people to grow and learn and wanted them to suffer and learn from their trials and become better would confine them to a "hell" of their own choosing and not want them to learn anymore. (and every other teacher was so back and forth on if it was "hell" or not--it was never hell in the traditional christian sense. no fire, just living without the privileges of the other kingdoms. i had one teacher describe hell as an inability to progress. you could tell that there were people struggling a lot with this. what a fun fact! mormons don't technically believe in hell! but people wanted to and both didn't want to all at once.)
everyone was so caught up on it being what it was at that point. whatever kingdom you were put in, you were stuck there. you'd be put in a kinda limbo (not the usual christian limbo) after death and be given a chance to accept christ/repent after death, but if you didn't do it then, there was no progressing beyond that point. kingdoms were what they were! you were stuck!
which seemed... ridiculous. again. why would a loving, caring god want someone to suffer or stay in a place that was lesser if they had learned and wanted to be better? it seemed odd. i think, to myself, I started to believe that it couldn't possibly be that way, that there still had to be a way to progress after that point. Or maybe I was just scared of gettin' stuck in a lesser kingdom! I dunno! but i looked at all that and went "huh! i can't see that being true!"
I was always really keen on finding ways to marry religion and science and shape doctrine to what i believed (and I guess I still am, to some degree) and couldn't quite understand why people were so set on being so literal with religion. I have no idea how much of what I DIY'd in my head was heresy and what wasn't! But it sure was fun back in the day trying to puzzle out what I really thought and how it all had to fit together, and it felt kinder, at times, than how cruel some doctrine was.
(I still feel weirdly guilty about some of that theorycrafting even now. but that just seems to be how it is.)
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you might find this funny wrt the "hell is real, but people in hell are free to repent & be saved from it at any time they choose" christians because I was fully "inventing" that idea in my head when I was starting to doubt/question certain parts of Mormonism.
mormon heaven endgame is three tiers of kingdoms + a bonus bad one for people who experience an almost physical level of confirmation from god (called outer darkness! spooky!) then reject that. it's (as I can recall) doctrine that once you're assigned to one of those three kingdoms (or bonus outer darkness) that's where you stay! it is what it is! (the highest kingdom is the one with the oft fabled mormon doctrine/lore of getting your own planet and all that. the others are for everyone else who didn't do good enough.)
it was always so puzzling to me that a god that wanted people to grow and learn and wanted them to suffer and learn from their trials and become better would confine them to a "hell" of their own choosing and not want them to learn anymore. (and every other teacher was so back and forth on if it was "hell" or not--it was never hell in the traditional christian sense. no fire, just living without the privileges of the other kingdoms. i had one teacher describe hell as an inability to progress. you could tell that there were people struggling a lot with this. what a fun fact! mormons don't technically believe in hell! but people wanted to and both didn't want to all at once.)
everyone was so caught up on it being what it was at that point. whatever kingdom you were put in, you were stuck there. you'd be put in a kinda limbo (not the usual christian limbo) after death and be given a chance to accept christ/repent after death, but if you didn't do it then, there was no progressing beyond that point. kingdoms were what they were! you were stuck!
which seemed... ridiculous. again. why would a loving, caring god want someone to suffer or stay in a place that was lesser if they had learned and wanted to be better? it seemed odd. i think, to myself, I started to believe that it couldn't possibly be that way, that there still had to be a way to progress after that point. Or maybe I was just scared of gettin' stuck in a lesser kingdom! I dunno! but i looked at all that and went "huh! i can't see that being true!"
I was always really keen on finding ways to marry religion and science and shape doctrine to what i believed (and I guess I still am, to some degree) and couldn't quite understand why people were so set on being so literal with religion. I have no idea how much of what I DIY'd in my head was heresy and what wasn't! But it sure was fun back in the day trying to puzzle out what I really thought and how it all had to fit together, and it felt kinder, at times, than how cruel some doctrine was.
(I still feel weirdly guilty about some of that theorycrafting even now. but that just seems to be how it is.)