Start with What You Know

Friend of the JG Bruce Charlton has an excellent post about starting with what you know.
Instead of taking an abstract ideological or creedal concept and then fitting your experience of goodness into that concept, start with goodness.  You know what goodness is, you can live it, experience it, refine your taste for it–and then assume that God is like that, only more so.   When  He said He was good, He was speaking in our terms.  (Yes, goodness can be demanding and inspiring, it’s not all grandfatherliness).

I would also add, you can just know God.  You can just talk to the Father and the Son.

I would also extend this to atheists and materialists.  A man can study and do experiments and come up with theories that he feel leads him to the scientific  materialist conclusion, and then come up with epicycles to explain why most features of our existence are illusions.  Or he can just accept the basic fact, that he himself experiences from day to day and moment to moment, of agency and meaning.  He is swaddled in them.

Sidenote:  I personally don’t believe that all children who die young are automatically saved, i.e., forced to be saved.  Of course nearly everybody is going to be saved, whether they die young or not, so I guess the real question is exaltation, full participation in the divine family and friendship and companionship.    For that I would say that either in divine providence only those souls who have already fully chosen die  young or else those who die young will have other experiences and other chances to choose and grow in the afterlife or the millennium or elsewhere.  There are other options.