Bessy
First of all, there are no good people. Well, maybe One, depending on how you define ‘people’. I don’t really subscribe to the idea that there’s these white hats over here that deserve one thing, and those black hats over there that deserve another. I only know my own heart, and I certainly don’t think I have lived well enough that God owes me Heaven.
I don’t have the answer to your question- I’m really not sure what God does with the problematic “Good Heathen”, and no matter how the terms are defined, I grant there are such things as “Good Heathens”, to the extent that any of us are good.
There is one important point I’d like to make, though. It’s commonly expressed that how good a person lives is a more fair judge of who gets rewarded than if they believed a certain thing. I disagree, I think it just seems that way. Let me show you what I mean:
If you accept the basics of what I’m saying, that there’s no (or very few) stereotypical white hats and black hats, then there’s a scale of goodness and badness in people. To let us in on merit, God would have to have some cut off point- how good you have to be to get in. But why couldn’t God set the standard so high that Ghandi, Mother Theresa, and only like 6 other people make it in to Heaven? To take the opposite, why couldn’t He set the standard at “Everyone who’s not personally responsible for an act of genocide gets in”? Neither seem fair, but it’s so subjective that the only answer we can give is ‘somewhere between those two extremes’. But here’s the problem with putting the line somewhere in the middle- that’s right where most of us are. In other words, if the line is in the middle, there’s going to be billions of people that don’t quite cut it because of a technicality- their toe was over the line. How ‘fair’ would it be to send someone to hell for that?
So anyways, I just don’t have the answer to your question, Bessy, but I do think there are serious problems with the “Good person vs Bad person” idea, such that having an absolute like “Did you believe in X or didn’t you?” isn’t any worse.