There is a lot of gatekeeping in christianity. One of the reasons I tend to not be a fan of organized religion. Although I do think there are some positives. Faith should be on one's own terms.

My wife is fairly religious and takes the kids to church every week. I don't go. We have come to an agreement on how the kids will be raised as relates to religion/faith.

Last time I went to church was my daughter's first communion last year and I left extremely annoyed at having to listen to the priest lecture little kids for an hour about how they must put Jesus first in their lives and they have to coerce their parents to take them to church.

So this is a long winded way of saying there should be no rules as to whether you jumped through the appropriate hoops to get into heaven. I don't think God is sitting around thinking "nah you didn't believe hard enough, to hell with you". I think faith and trying to be a good person is more important than jumping through arbitrary hoops created by the church. But that is just my own opinion.

It's such a great question!

Here's the relevant bit that is attributed to him:

Did he mean it? He was dying, he knew he was dying, so he probably had more reason to mean in than the rest of us, but like how do you measure sincerity of something like that?

I don't know how good a representation of Christian I am (in the past at least I was quite serious about faith, almost became a Franciscan novitiate...), but I kind of connect this sort of thinking to the idea of forgiveness in general.

If there is such a thing as a sin, and it takes you away from God, and God offers a way back which entails you acknowledging that you sinned and feeling some sense of remorse or not wanting to do it again, then all that is required is wanting to be closer to God. Of course, "wanting to be closer to God" isn't exactly a recipe.

I was wondering similar thoughts to you when I read Adams last note there. My wonder was more along the lines of why did he need to tell the world about it? For me, at least, it cheapens it a little, but maybe others feel it is a "powerful witness."

Maybe it just comes down to being scared of death and nothing afterward, and wanting there to be more. In my book that might be enough if enough is relevant.

The question isn't whether any action he did or didn't take was good enough to get him into heaven. By that metric we'd all fail. The more important question is whether he trusts that Jesus's death and resurrection are sufficient for his justification before God.