What is the point of inventing distasteful and unlikely dogmatic theologies, and then tut tutting at them?

Would you not be better employed trying to think of ways that life can be meaningful and worth the living?

It is not I who invented the theology you call distasteful and unlikely.
A search for truth involves pointing out problems and flaws in belief.
I can think of no better way to employ my time than searching for truth.

@Art48, you make a lotta sense! Why all the complicated in-between stuff (life on Earth) when the outcome was already decided right from the get go? All that trouble we go through being/trying to be good, all the heartbreaking guilt we endure when we slip up, all that...for nuthin'!

It makes life on dear ol' Earth a farce, ethics is bogus, and God is an a**hole! :snicker:

A search for truth involves pointing out problems and flaws in belief. — Art48

No it doesn't. You have come up completely empty handed on the truth front. You have dismissed beliefs you never held, in favour of nothing at all. The truth dividend is zero.

So you've shown the folly of a literalist caricature version of Christianity. Challenge yourself and arrive at a version that makes sense to you.

@Art48

Did you read up on predestination? What motivated it? Does it have anything to do with omniscience?

Hanover: a literalist caricature

I claim Christianity says that eventually there will be only heaven and hell.
If that is not correct, please tell us 1) where it’s incorrect and 2) what is the correct view.
Prediction: you can’t.

claim Christianity says that eventually there will be only heaven and hell.
If that is not correct, please tell us 1) where it’s incorrect and 2) what is the correct view.
Prediction: you can’t. — Art48

"Good people go to heaven as a deserved reward for a virtuous life, and bad people go to hell as a just punishment for an immoral life; in that way, the scales of justice are sometimes thought to balance. But virtually all Christian theologians regard such a view, however common it may be in the popular culture, as overly simplistic and unsophisticated; the biblical perspective, as they see it, is far more subtly nuanced than that."

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heaven-hell/#:~:text=According%20to%20a%20relatively%20common,of%20earthly%20lives%20we%20live.

From the same article:

"So one way to organize our thinking here is against the backdrop of the following inconsistent set of three propositions:

All human sinners are equal objects of God’s redemptive love in the sense that God wills or aims to win over each one of them over time and thereby to prepare each one of them for the bliss of union with the divine nature.
God’s redemptive love will triumph in the end and successfully win over each and every object of that love, thereby preparing each one of them for the bliss of union with the divine nature.
Some human sinners will never be reconciled to God and will therefore remain separated from the divine nature forever.
If this set of propositions is logically inconsistent, as it surely is, then at least one proposition in the set is false. In no way does it follow, of course, that only one proposition in the set is false, and neither does it follow that at least two of them are true. But if someone does accept any two of these propositions, as virtually every mainline Christian theologian does, then such a person has no choice but to reject the third.[1] It is typically rather easy, moreover, to determine which proposition a given theologian ultimately rejects, and we can therefore classify theologians according to which of these propositions they do reject. So that leaves exactly three primary eschatological views. Because the Augustinians, named after St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430), believe both that God’s redemptive (or electing) love will triumph in the end (proposition (2)) and that some human sinners will never be reconciled to God (proposition (3)), they finally reject the idea that God’s redemptive love extends to all human sinners equally (proposition (1)); because the Arminians, named after Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609) for his opposition to the Augustinian understanding of limited election, believe both that God’s redemptive love extends to all human sinners equally (proposition (1)) and that some of these sinners will never be reconciled to God (proposition (3)), they finally reject the idea that God’s redemptive love will triumph in the end (proposition (2)); and finally, because the Christian universalists believe both that God’s redemptive love extends to all human sinners equally (proposition (1)) and that this love will triumph in the end (proposition (2)), they finally reject altogether the idea that some human sinners will never be reconciled to God (proposition (3))."

Hanover,

Thanks for your response. Some comments.

As to your first paragraph, pointing out that the views of theologians are “subtly nuanced” does nothing to explain what points of the OP are, in your view or in the view of theologians, incorrect.

As to the remainder of your post, I can only guess what the point is. It points out a conflict between universalism (all will be saved) and the view that only some will be saved. Universalism does contradict the first point of the OP. But universalism is a minority view among Christians; it’s not normative. What the large majority of Christians believe is that people ultimately end up in heaven or hell.

So, as far as I can tell, your points are:
1) Theologians have a more subtly nuanced view than the OP presents.
2) The uncommon, non-normative view of Christian universalism contracts point 1. of the OP.

Did I miss anything?