Ask Lemmy

According to Pope Francis, only God knows

Protestants typically adhere to the doctrines sola fide ([salvation] by faith alone) and sola scriptura ([salvation] by scripture alone. This means:

• Your sincere effort to welcome God into your soul should be sufficient for salvation. God knows all you experienced and what effort you are capable of, including if you are overwhelmed with doubt, outrage and despair. It would be unmerciful and unloving of God to present you with overwhelming challenges and then flunk you for failing to meet them.
• Only scripture as you personally read and interpret it is a legitimate guide. Someone else telling you what's important and what isn't? Their opinion. Not valid. Someone suggests this is literal but that is proverbial? You can disagree. Think a given passage feels outdated and out of touch with the modern world? Take it up with God and no one else.

Note that apologists and ministries will opine differently, suggesting that even the most pious Christian has to worry about Hellfire. Catholic apologists will suggest your works for the Church are not quite enough to earn salvation. Not only do they not know, but are motivated to instill doubt, so you might show up to the pews and feed the collections plate. Even churches are capitalist in our capitalist society.

All that said, your nervous system will rapidly cease to function once you die, as will your capacity to sense the outside world, to remember events of your past and to process information. If any of these come back in the afterlife, it's through a different mechanism, and we have zero data on its capabilities. But we do see how the material versions fade slowly with conditions like Alzheimer's or dementia, and there's no sign that the being of any afterlife is connected in any way to the being that materially perished. So you may not be going anywhere.

But then, you won't be disappointed.