It may seem (and be) pointless to reply to a doctrinal question with personal experience or feelings, but that's just what I will be doing anyway, at least for a start. :)
I can still remember one particular moment in my exit from the JWs long ago (I was still in France Bethel) when, suddenly, while talking rather freely with a couple of close friends, the whole idea of God making creatures to judge them struck me as utterly ludicrous and unbelievable. Oh yes it was "scriptural" all right, there were dozens of prooftexts to back it up, but I still found it laughable as an incredibly poor joke. I still believed in God -- just not that kind of God. And at the same time I was overwhelmed by much of what I was reading in the NT, the Gospel pictures of Jesus and christology presenting him as God's image or revelation in particular. To me there was definitely much more to the Christian God than this bogeyman picture, and they just couldn't stand together -- at least on the same plane.
Later on I came in contact with all kinds of Evangelical Christians and theologians, Calvinists, Arminians, who all shared some belief in divine judgement and final reprobation (whether eternal punishment or annihilation) of at least some. But I was an instinctive universalist. I could no longer buy into a version of Christianity ending in a final dualism of "good" and "bad," "righteous" and "unrighteous," "elect" and "reprobate". To me the Pauline-Lutheran notion of salvation by faith not works destroyed the basis for a moral judgement -- a logical conclusion that Paul actually cringed at and tried to avoid, unfortunately he seemed to lose his rhetorical power at that point. And the Evangelical alternative -- condemning people formally "for their sins" but actually because of their non-belief made even poorer sense than strictly moral judgement to me: in effect it was making the criterion for judgement a shibboleth -- you can say the password correctly, you're saved, you don't, you're toast. Making it all a matter of election and predestination in the Augustinian-Calvinist way only added consistency to the absurdity. And btw there was a lot of NT stuff (Matthew, James) against this idea of judgement on belief.
What I chose to read and love in the NT (I put it deliberately in subjective terms, thus admitting that my reading was certainly "biased") was quite different. I did find a "universalistic horizon" in many texts (Pauline, post-Pauline and Johannine in particular) to which "judgement" was second (or, more exactly perhaps, penultimate: God's "next-to-last word" so to say). And I also found that universalism, although repressed in official dogma, had been continually resurging in the history of Christian theology -- from the ancient apokatastasis doctrine of Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, to the modern "dialectical universalism" of Karl Barth or the Catholic version of Karl Rahner ("anonymous Christians," "hope for all"). Iow I don't think Christianity as a whole can really settle in a final dualism which is definitely too small for its ambition. It can't be ultimately satisfied until God is "all in all" as Paul put it. How some Christians can really accept and enjoy this idea, that they will be saved whereas others won't, even if they have many prooftexts to back it up, is beyond me. Sincerely.
