Hi Lina, and welcome to the Close! As Menolly said, everyone is welcome to chime in and offer their opinion - in fact, you'll find that some of the best discussions here came about because of the inevitable clash (I remember the good ol' days between Prebe and me...). Anyway, back to the topic of the post.
I agree with you that simply proclaiming oneself Christian (or attending baptism, mass and so on) is hardly enough to guarantee a ticket to Heaven. But I also tend to disagree with you when you say that you think good works alone are not enough.
First of all, even within the Christian faith, there are lots of different ideas about how people are allowed to enter Heaven - is it by divine grace alone? is it also by virtue of a good life? is it just because of "sheer luck" (God chose you to go to Heaven long before you were born, while the other guy over there can be the most pious and generous person in the world, but he won't get in)? Each Christian denomination, or almost so, has its own ideas, and they can even contradict each other. So who would be right? Obviously, depending on the concept, "entry standards" would be more or less "relaxed", too. However, apparently most of them tend to give more emphasis to faith and divine grace than to good works (not that good works are considered useless, just that some dispense with good works altogether as a criterion).
But all in all, one could also ask - what of the people who were born before Christ and therefore could not, for obvious reasons, call themselves Christians or follow his doctrine? There were undoubtly good people among them - even just the people in the Bible, and hopefully many others - and is their destiny to end up in Purgatory or, like Dante wrote in the Divine Comedy, in Limbo? No matter how good they were? What of people born nowadays in countries where Christianity doesn't have a foothold, or who for one reason or another never gained access to Christianity? Or, for that matter, what of good people who simply follow another religion, such as the Hebrew faith or Islam or the Hindu faith or what have you? There are certainly good people among the followers of every faith, as in among atheists and agnostics; if good works alone were not enough to grant entry to Heaven, would all these thousands of people, some of whom likely made personal sacrifices to perform good deeds, be still denied Heaven upon death?
If mortal parents can forgive anything to their children, including their choice of careers among other things, how much more forgiving could a perfect Father be?
I do not mean to offend, but to me, saying that good deeds are not enough and that faith in Christianity is necessary to enter Heaven seems to demean God rather than glorifying him - it seems to say that He is a much stricter Father than a mortal parent, since He would not allow His children eternal happiness unless they chose the "career" He wants them to choose.
After all, did not God create mortals as we are? Did He not give us flaws so we might strive for improvement? Did He not give us free will? Surely then, having created us as flawed beings, He does not expect us to be inhumanly perfect - but He does expect us to strive to overcome our flaws and do what good we can in the time we have. And this, I think, is more important in the end than whether you belong or not to Christianity or any other faith (or no faith at all, for that matter).
... of course, as others here know, my own idea of what happens after death deviates quite a bit from mainstream Christianity, so to me the whole diatribe as to who is allowed into Heaven is a bit of a moot point
