Goodness happens

Q: Is there good without God? Can people be good without God? How can people be good, in the moral and ethical sense, without being grounded in some sort of belief in a being which is greater than they are? Where do concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, come from if not from religion? From where do you get your sense of good and evil, right and wrong?

Goodness happens because we cultivate certain virtues that make it more likely to happen. Goodness happens not because we make an ideal faith model and then expect human beings, despite all evidence to the contrary, to stop being greedy or violent and just get with the program. Goodness is learned and it is practiced.

I once had the pleasure of having dinner with the man on whom the film Hotel Rwanda is based, Paul Rusesabagina. Hotel Rwanda is a 2004 historical drama film about events during the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. Rusesabagina, played by Don Cheadle, is a hotel manager who manages to save more than one thousand refugees and his own family from being slaughtered during the genocide. He grants them shelter in the hotel where he is manager, the Hotel des Milles Collines.

At dinner, I asked Mr. Rusesabagina why he had done what he had. Why had he risked his life and the lives of his wife and children to save so many refugees? He said that as a hotel manager, it was his training to try to make people comfortable. At first, sheltering people, even in the incredible carnage of the genocide unfolding around the hotel, he saw as just part of doing his job. Then, he said, he found that his ability to calm people down and get them to accept creative solutions to their problems was a big help in negotiating the safety of the people in his hotel with the warring factions.

I was impressed by him as a person, certainly, but it struck me that he was telling me the simple truth. He was good at his job and he just found himself extending his ability to do that work very well further and further into an enormous conflict. It was a step-by-step account, as the film well portrays, of the practice of goodness.

In the Rwandan genocide, over the course of approximately 100 days, devout people of faith, and people of no expressed faith, together managed to kill 500,000 people. The final death toll was somewhere between 800,000 and 1,000,000. That is a killing spree of between 5,000 and 10,000 people per day over that period. Rwanda is a small country and today the population is just over ten million.

Abstract questions about whether God is necessary for there to be morality, for there to be a sense of right and wrong, simply will not stand in the face of events such as the genocide in Rwanda. The genocide is too real to respond with abstractions.

Rather, the answers we seek about how goodness happens are found in the simple practices of decency, of goodness, that some people perform and by their performance teach others. Or, by their acts of indecency and murderous violence, they teach other lessons: the lessons of cruelty and inhumanity.

From a faith perspective, I believe people learn goodness and God rejoices. When people butcher each other, God weeps.

By Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite  |  October 27, 2009; 8:35 PM ET
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Posted by: clearthinking1 | November 1, 2009 1:22 AM
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