-snip-
Mostly because the people have not made a conscious choice to keep Jesus Christ out of their hearts. In that, I'll admit, my original example was incorrect. Jesus's gift of salvation is most akin to this, I suppose:
Someone is before you with a gift in their hand. You can either choose to accept said gift or reject it. Then there are those that can't even see it; they are the ones of which we're speaking. For these, the person leaves the gift on the table for later (when they die).
That may not be a great example either. What I'm trying to say is that Jesus *can* forgive you as long as you let Him into your heart; this may happen after death in the case of those that did not have a chance to know him during life. For those of us that are aware of Him during life, however, we are forced to make a choice: believe or not believe. Denying Him restricts Jesus from your heart; the opposite for believing.
Then again, I'm no priest or pastor or anything, so I may not be the best person to ask. Woohoo.
The underlined part is an interesting explanation. However it sounds that based on that in life we have 3 choices (Believe A, Believe !A and Undecided) the undecided should under this explanation be given a time after death to decide (Believe A or Believe !A). What if a soul cannot decide?
That's the thing. Undecided essentially means that you've been exposed to Christianity and are still skeptical of it. Thus, you are rejecting God and are refusing his gift of salvation.
Okay, I think you guys aren't fully understanding what I'm trying to say. I'll try to start from scratch.
Let's go through three people and see how their salvation works out. Person A, Person B, Person C.
A: Person A is a child who was born with a disease that results in his death before he turned one. Jesus, out of love (see scriptures I've already quoted) forgives him his sins despite not being consciously accepted. He is able to do so because the baby never denied or barred his heart, either.
B: Person B is a tribal native in Africa. Just like with the child, he never is exposed to Christianity. Jesus forgives his sins as the native didn't deny him either.
So you see, in these two examples, the two people have a common factor: they are infants in their spiritual walk. The reasons they are still in their infancy with their spiritual walk with Christ are different, but spiritually, they are both babies unable to comprehend God's grace for one reason or another.
C: Person C is a logical fellow in the States. He grew up in an atheist household but was still exposed to Christianity through acquaintances, charity, and the general saturation of religion in the United States. However, because he believes himself to be a man of logic, and there is no empirical evidence of God, he chooses to become agnostic and takes a stance that it is impossible to know whether or not God is real. Consciously or not, he has closed his heart to Jesus by doing so. He is not an infant in his spiritual walk; far from it. By not having faith and believing God to be real, he is unable to receive Jesus's gift of salvation.
(And as a side note to johannhowitzer, I too struggle with the "principle of intellectual honesty," but choose to have faith that what Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote is generally true and Jesus Christ truly did come to save us. It seems contradictory, I know, and it's hard for me to explain, but it's just what I feel, man. Ya feels me brah?)