First I want to give one good answer to the question so you'll have an idea where this is going. The answer is: not if God can help it.
I'm writing this to summarize a very good talk I heard this evening. The priest who gave the talk grew up in an era when there was a lot of preaching about how terrible hell is and about all the things that would get you sent there. (He told the story of the old Irish priest who was going on about the pains of hell. "There will be the gnashing of teeth," he said; and a little old lady asked, "Father, what about them that have no teeth?" and the priest thundered, "Teeth will be provided.") He, like a lot of others, couldn't take the constant reminders and threats, so at the age of fifteen, he stopped going to church.
In his junior year of college, at a university in Ohio, a new Catholic chaplain (Fr. Brennan Manning) came to campus and started having Mass at midnight every Saturday. Then 20, the speaker decided to check it out. The gospel passage for that Sunday was John 3: 14-21, and Fr. Manning focussed on verses 16 and 17, "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him."
The chaplain's preaching on that text was very different from what our speaker (and I) had grown up with. We had known of a vindictive God, always on the alert for our sins and ready to send us to hell for them. But here's the truth instead: God's trying to save us, to bring us to heaven. That's because he loves us that much. And what's more he loves us just the way we are at every moment of our lives. He loves us when we're good, and he loves us when we're bad. He loves us when we're sinning; he loves us when we don't love him; and — just like every other lover — he wants us to love him so he can make us part of his life, share his life with us.
Often in the church we seem to think that we have to become good in order to love God, but that's putting the cart before the horse. It's when we love God that we are drawn to be good.
To add my own comment: I think in a number of cases when people reject God, it's not the real God that they reject — the one who loves them so much that he sent his Son to save them — rather they are rightly rejecting a false picture of God as one who seeks to condemn them.
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he loves us just the way we are at every moment of our lives. He loves us when we're good, and he loves us when we're bad. He loves us when we're sinning; he loves us when we don't love him; and — just like every other lover — he wants us to love him so he can make us part of his life, share his life with us.
And those who don't love him? What happens to them?
Well, he doesn't force anyone to come to him who doesn't want to. So theoretically, it's possible they'd choose an eternity without goodness. But maybe the "light" to which people go in near death experiences is some sort of manifestation of his lovability.
"he doesn't force anyone to come to him who doesn't want to"
Yes, but there is a consequence. Those who don't come to him, and that includes non-believers, people who practice other faiths, and people who have never heard of him, end up in, to use your terms, "an eternity withouth goodness." In other words, they end up in Hell.
It's basically a "love me or else" scenario.
I don't think it's that cut and dried.
Are non-believers really non-believers in the true God or in some inadequate, and therefore false, image of God?
Do people who practice other faiths really refuse to go to God?
How can anyone who has never heard of God reject him?
You are imposing a view of salvation — that one must consciously and explicitly embrace the Christian faith during one's life or be damned to hell — which the Catholic Church, myself included, does not teach. Granted, there are Christians who do believe it, but I'm not one of them.
You see, I don't think salvation — eternal life and happiness — is a question of passing a theology test. I think it is ultimately a matter of love, because, as it says in the First Letter of John, 5:16, "God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in him."
I believe that there are objective standards of right and wrong in human conduct, but God does not reject us for honest mistakes about what's okay and what isn't. It's a matter of following our conscience and being loving at heart. And love is a matter of wanting what is good for others.
So, again, I do not agree that non-believers, those of other faiths, or people who have never heard of God are doomed to hell.
It is not I that am imposing a view of salvation; Jesus seemed pretty clear on that in John 14:6.
Like every other verse of scripture, that one needs to be correctly understood. And it has to be interpreted consistently with Matthew 25:31-40. Love in action toward the least of Jesus' "brothers" is done to him. So those who do those things are going to the Father through Jesus.
The 20th century theologian Karl Rahner coined the phrase "anonymous Christians" to refer to the beneficiaries of this judgment. Perhaps we could even call them unwitting Christians.
God doesn't seek to condemn. He seeks to save. He's given us the means by which we can reach safety. All we need is the will.
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