Explain Like I'm Five

God will forgive who he chooses to forgive, but of us we are required to forgive all. Implicit in this is that God's forgiveness is not automatically given to everyone. It is offered to everyone freely. Christ has already paid the price, but it is up to us to accept that gift and repent of our sins. Not repenting means that well suffer for those sins in the afterlife, but doing so won't mean we then get to go to heaven. Our reward is dependent on how we lived up to the truths we understood in life. Christ invites us to repent and live a higher life, a holier life, a life of continual repentance.

You have to be sorry to be forgiven. If you weren’t trying in the first place, it’s hard to be sorry.

But also, the thing isn’t designed to be balanced or suitable.

Jesus will forgive you because that’s how it works. The system wasn’t designed by humans.

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.

God will only forgive you if you repent. You can't be a dick all your existence, say "Please forgive me at the end" without truly beliving it and that's it.

Answer according to anyone christian: (note- not me) You don't. You have have to "Be sorry" and "ask forgiveness". You can still be an enormous piece of sh*t if you say you're sorry that you were bad.

Oh snaps! A Christian question I'm qualified to answer! I'm not sure this will be five year old appropriate, because the cross is a difficult topic for theologians, but I'll do my best. This will be an oversimplification.

A lot of people think the people think the cross and forgiveness are about going to have a heaven when you die, but that's not really correct. The eternal life is more of a side effect.

The cross and resurrection are an invitation to partner together with God in the rescue of creation. Which means bringing the world back to the place God originally intended before humanity sinned.

In practical terms, it is the possibility of living like Jesus and treating others how he did. This way of living is so radical and transformative that not even death can overcome it.

I had a teacher in school who believed in predestination. Basically, whether you go to heaven or hell is pre-ordained before your even born and there's nothing you can do to change it. I told him that sounded to me like I should be a Satanist because if I'm predestined for heaven I've worshipped Satan all my life for nothing and I get to chill in heaven. If I'm predestined to go to hell I've spent so much time worshipping Satan it probably won't be too bad. I'm personally not really religious myself but I really was dumbfounded at the whole predestination thing.

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.)

Welp you don't want to hear it but the best explanation is religion is a system to scam commoners of their devotion and money. If things start not making sense then you should stop believing in Santa Claus

You see, there are these things called eigenvalues. They dimentionalize the vector space. We can contruct a personality vector space and assign a set of orthogonal personality vectors. (Sees that this is elif). Erm, think of a "which Harry Potter character are you" quiz. We can add and subtract weighted , erm, Harry Potter characters, to get to you. You are half Harry plus two Rons minus 1.5 Malfos.

Now those numbers might change over time. That is you at that moment. If you, erm, took a DeLorean back to 1955, but still had those same numbers, you would still be you. If you wiped your memory but still had those numbers, you would still be you. Stands to reason if you went back in time and got your memory wiped, you would still be you. What if someone in the past (or future) had the exact same numbers? That would be you, even though no time travel occurred.

Now (erm, how do I explain vector projection to a five year old), ummm, if your numbers are close, you are mostly you? Now Jesus, ahh, scored a particular score on the sigh Harry Potter quiz. Remeber how I said your numbers change? Well, if your numbers are close enough, you could say that he is you, or Jesus is living Through you. And as long as more people in the future get numbers close to both yours and Jesus's, you could say you are living on, or having eternal life. And in order to change those number to Jesus's, you have to be good.

What? Oh, yes I got Hermonie. How did you know?

You absolutely don't have to. But when you're a Christian, you love God with all your heart, all your mind, and all your soul; and you love your neighbor as yourself. The result is that you do good works by virtue of doing God's will. Good works are a result of salvation.