Christianity teaches that as long as a person repents of sin and this is a response to an invitation from God and assisted by grace that person will enter eternal life. This mercy and forgiveness may be described as insane. But the religion says it is not. It is not like a mother acting towards her son who almost murdered her as if nothing happened. God supposedly comes in to fix and heal so it is not as reckless as it might seem.
The Church says while living a life without God and repenting near death is an option, it is not recommended.
Christianity teaches that God is merciful. If Hitler after all the Hellish harm he did, managed a bit of repentance when dying he is forgiven and numbered among the saints in Heaven. We feel that is very cheap. We feel that it makes what he did cheap. We feel it was no wonder he was so bad in the first place when he was raised in a society that endorses and celebrates that cheapness. He probably felt his actions reflected honesty. Mercy means allowances are made for a person who has done even the most twisted and heinous things but who cannot repent or who has forgotten them for some reason. Forgetting can happen in theory - brain injury or mental illness and no monster remembers everything. If an how and why they did such and such an act may escape them. Or maybe they do remember but it is too vague to count. If God is merciful then no person can get another chance when they are in the throes of their death and he has to simply just let it go and forgive. A loving God has to assume if you had another second you might repent and give the benefit of the doubt. If you are suffering terribly and about to die you are not in your right mind to repent properly and sincerely. To argue that if you repent he will forgive anyway is strange. He should make allowances if you do not. Either way you do not act from the heart for you are not yourself.
Mercy makes no sense unless we know what justice means and if it is practical. Justice matters in principle and in life. It is far from simple.
JUSTICE
In Christian theology, justice - or fairness - condemns the wrongdoer but love forgives. In Humanism, justice is what is meant by love. The system is always fair. Love in any other sense is an evil.
Jesus accused adulterous people and those who hated people of serious sin. He was very harsh. The Church condemns sin as seriously. Sin is not serious if you believe the sinner should get away with it. When a person is not made to suffer what she or he inflicted on others, the person does not see how grave the sin is. Also, evil needs to be repaid by evil otherwise you are treating the person as if the evil is not important. That is an insult to the person who does huge sacrifices to be good. The purpose of punishment is to deal with the imbalance in justice so that the relationship between the evil person and the people he hurts can be restored. You do evil and there is a debt to be paid before restoration can begin.
We plainly see how evil the love that Jesus preached is for it refuses to give people the evils in the form of punishment they have consented to by their sins. Thus it is merely artificial love. Why? Because Christianity claims that valuing a person necessarily demands respect for human free agency - giving people what they ask for even if they won't like it. Freedom is put before feelings. Christianity believes that to treat a person as a person you have to give them what they deserve. So its mercy contradicts this. Some say that mercy is important for it softens justice with kindness. This view says that kindness like justice is an important virtue too. It is nonsensical for if punishment is dignified then it is kindness to give it unpleasant and all as it is.
Some say you have to forgive for you cannot punish everybody. And to have mercy just because you cannot punish everybody all the time is not mercy. Real mercy is freely given while this is given because it has to be and it is grudging. Yet this is the reason Christians “forgive”.
PUNISHMENT
Punishment means giving a criminal the bad things they earn for doing wrong. This is really the only thing that free will is believed in for. If a person who loses their power of supposed choice through drinks and drugs and helps us we will still reward them. Rewarding is a response rather than an action done to say, "You freely helped me". We have motives for affirming free will and those motives are negative and punitive. And even then we do not really know how to pay a person for what harm they have done. What if somebody wants to be in jail?
People say you cannot deserve punishment if you did not do the wrong you did of your own free will. You can give rewards as incentives towards goodness – because free or unfree, we will not do good unless we get interested in doing it and so you can still tell a person what they should do without accepting free will. Again the punishment doctrine is just an excuse for hidden revenge. We can put criminals in jail so that the law is seen to be seriously opposing evil activity and we don’t need to bring in the notion that they really deserve it. All we need to know is that they are not deranged persons in the psychiatric sense. Evil people are all deranged but not medically deranged.
The best way to encourage evil is to condone it. Condoning says that an act is bad. Then when you do it there is no punishment. So it is not real disapproval. It is really a form of encouraging evil. Forbidden fruits are the most attractive. So the fake disapproval is necessary to make it more attractive. The Church never punished child molesting priests. It is no different from paedophile rings which admit the abuse is wrong but who facilitate it. In a sense the person who thinks what is evil is good and refuses to do anything about it is less bad than the person who does that believing that evil is bad. Religions like Christianity that tell people they can sin and face no penalties are frankly evil.
All may say, "To punish the car thief by throwing dung on his jeans is not to punish him at all because real punishment always fits the crime."
But why are you not taking his car from him and banning him from driving? Community service, a fine or jail is not fitting the crime.
If you hate, you deserve hate in return. God said in the Bible that the law is to be an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. To deny this is to deny that hate should be punished properly by hate. And if it should not be punished then why forbid it at all? To forbid what should not be punished is evil and shows there is hate involved.
A God of justice must necessarily be a God of hate. A person who commits an act of hate is usually punished not with hate but with community service or something. But there is still an undercurrent of hate there. If he doesn't deserve hate, then it is not wrong for him to hate. Then to punish him at all is an act of hate for he has done nothing wrong.
Some liberal Christians lie that when the Bible speaks of the wrath of God and God punishing that this is a metaphor. Suppose you drink a bottle of vodka a day you will destroy your liver. This is the punishment. It is the way your body reacts to your treatment of it. It is not a punishment in the sense that God wills it to happen to you or is angry with you. They then use the word punishment to describe the bad effects of your actions on you. That is stretching the meaning of the word. They don't believe in what they are saying. They say that it doesn't matter what you believe as long as you are sincere and mean well. But dangerous or wrong belief brings bad on the believers and those they live among. And they don't describe that as punishment! They are just pandering to and sucking up to those who are so arrogant that they think they should get away with their sins and misdeeds and even crimes. No wonder Christianity is popular in prison.
FINALLY
Mercy and divine pardon are tricks. "By their fruits you know them". Is it any wonder that whatever the Church offers in relation to them does more harm than good? The lies are lies. The abuse is abuse. Most Christians canonise the worst monsters when they die. Priests give eulogies that reflect that.