I mean, when certain death is in front of you i believe it's very likely that the person is 100% truthful about accepting Jesus, at least in their minds. Does it undo a lifetime of being an atheist or whatever? Who the fuck knows?
I can't really fathom the concept of being damned for eternity because of a few things you did here on earth. An eternity in hell as a punishment for 60 or 70 years worth of sins? An eternity is an unfathomable amount of time, it isn't fair, and God is just and his acts are all perfect because he is a perfect being, so maybe he figured something out that we don't know about, idk.
RIP MY NIGGA SCOTT ADAMS
This is (and I'm not meaning to be a jerk, I didn't get this stuff until recently) a misunderstanding of what Christianity is. Folk Christianity - not just pop culture but what most folks mentally visualize and take for granted - is very different from formal doctrine. Fire-and-brimstone Hell isn't completely baseless - there's the story of Lazarus - but the way most theologians take it,
as I understand, goes like this:
"Sin" as a word is doing several jobs at once. It does refer to, essentially, violation of God's laws, but it also refers to a
state of being (I first got this by analogizing it to Shinto pollution) that one can have. Sin also applies just as much to
intentions and
capabilities as it does actions (see the Sermon on the Mount). The desire to sin and the capability of desiring to sin is itself sin.
To start, people are "made in the image of God" (imago dei) in that they are what you would call a
rational moral agent. We as a race are not just internally alive like other creatures, not just intelligent, but have the ability to actually conceptualize morality. This makes us moral agents, but at the same time, because we have a limited perspective - we're not wise or knowledgeable enough to see the full picture that God has - we inevitably act in ways that are out of order with God. This is original sin. The apple story? That's a mythic allegory. (Keep in mind, allegorical reading of this shit
is what most educated people in its own day did.) A species achieves a level of intellectual development - eats from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil - and suddenly falls into this moral trap that, in becoming moral agents, they are suddenly thrust into moral responsibility, in contrast to the amoral natural world around them.
Why does God allow this? Because for whatever reason, God wanted to essentially create more gods. He wanted to have little copies of him (in that imago dei) sense running around and the price of this was that they had to have free will so they could be moral agents and the world had to allow, then, for the possibility that they might fuck up his little diorama. Keep in mind, Christianity is built on virtue ethics, where moral goodness is not determined by fixed rules (deontology) or by how many happy points an action gives you (utilitarianism), but instead on the assumption that things have a nature they are trying to grow into, Man's is to be like God and the cultivation of traits is what furthers that. Actions are relevant in that they both shape virtues and reflect them. In a virtue ethicist framework you can't coerce good, it arises from choice because only by choice does someone actually exercise that virtue.
Ultimately, the goal here is reunion with God. Orthodox call this
theosis. Life cycle complete, mission achieved, God has another little god now (because you have repaired the broken relationship, aligned with the cosmos), but the world's richer for it because he's not alone. Fire-and-brimstone Hell is bullshit, mostly recycling Hades imagery as a spook story for peasants. Little Biblical basis for it. Hell is a state you put yourself into by not making yourself available to God. God
can't bring a person into union with him that isn't playing along.
Where Jesus figures into all this shit is that, as I take it, mankind had gotten so fucked up from the time of Adam that God had to start over, and by creating a being that was at once both God and a human Jesus was basically able to live and die as a model for humanity. You hear this metaphor of him being like grafting a vine. God is taking himself and putting it into a form that is accessible to our own nature as a direct lifeline. There is also the metaphor of Jesus as paying a debt, and this is goofy as fuck but it's probably closer to how ancient Christians, coming out of Mesopotamia (fuck you, I consider Canaan/Phoenicia/Israel Mesopotamia, same cultural world), thought. Sin is discharged through death, but it doesn't actually have to be the death of the sinner. (If this sounds stupid, so be it, that's how it is.) This is why Jews kill those chickens. Well, suppose you've come to realize that the nature of the problem is that you've got an infinity of sin, because it's not just your actions but also your thoughts, also this broken nature/relationship that you have an infinity of evil potential within you because you are at odds with the world. The only way to make it right is to sacrifice something of infinite value, and what has infinite value? God.
Also, if it makes you feel better, there are intellectually serious, pre-Globohomo theologians that believe that Jesus' crucifixion was accessible to everyone. Emmanuel Swedenborg was an Enlightenment Swedish scientist-turned-mystic who wrote on this.