How do those who reject both predestination and purgatory justify their beliefs? For the sake of this question:

Predestination = from the foundations of the universe, God chose who will be saved.

Purgatory = a place where people suffer / are purified, and afterwards, they go to heaven.

Now, the difference between heaven and hell is quite large (positive infinity and negative infinity). In the predestination case, the gap between those that go to heaven and those who go to hell is justified as follows: God chose to save some, and Jesus's blood was paid for their debt. In this case, salvation is a binary choice by God.

In the purgatory case, everything looks more continuous: the gap also makes sense in that: depending on how "sinful" one was, one spends less or more time in purgatory.

Now, what I don't understand about the Armenian case is as follows:

*) there lacks a binary choice by God (since there was no predestination)

*) yet, the suffering/punishment after death is not continuous -- there's no purgatory

Thus it seems very weird that on a continuous scale of human sinfulness, in the absence of a binary choice by God, the gain/loss after death is so different.

Note

Suggestions / clarifications to this question welcome.
There is still a binary choice, but it's not God who makes the decision. He leaves it to each of us to choose for ourselves one way or the other, and gives us our whole lifetime to make that decision. God could make the decision for us &mdash; He has that power &mdash; and He knows in advance &mdash; if concepts like "in advance" even have any meaning for a being that exists outside of time &mdash; what choice each of us will make. After all, He made us. What He desires is for each of us to choose Him of our own will. It is not interesting to Him if the choice is forced upon us.

There is an interesting philosophical question here of whether there is really any difference at all between determining an outcome and merely knowing an outcome with absolute certainty, when those outcomes are produced by a system that one designed, set in motion, and directs for oneself, as God does with us and our environment. God gives us something akin to free will, but is it really free will as we know it if He made each of us in the first place, knows what our choices will be in any situation, and has absolute power over all situations? This is especially interesting when you look at psychology studies that show how human behavior is much more about programmed responses and brain chemicals than any of us want to acknowledge.

For this reason, I don't really find the question of predestination vs free choice very interesting... I tend to think of it as two sides of the same coin. Do we have free choice? Yes! You can say we do. Are we predestined? You can say that as well, and not be entirely wrong about it. This question has historically caused a huge split in Christiandom, but I ultimately see it as more about philosophy than theology. Your answer has implications for how your view soteriology, but either way you still look to Jesus. Does it really matter how you view soteriology as long as you're looking at the right source? I think also that Jesus would find the question uninteresting... at least in a relative sense. He is far more concerned that look at Him as Lord, and with how you treat your fellow man.