Today in Goodness

Two Three quick hits on the goodness trail.
Novelist Jostein Gaarder calls for a Golden Rule 2.0:

(T)he golden rule can no longer just have a horizontal dimension – in other words a “we” and “the others.” We must realize that the Principle of Reciprocity also has a vertical dimension: you shall do to the next generation what you wished the previous generation had done to you.

E.J. Dionne Jr. calls on religious conservatives to stop using virtue as a weapon.

Enough with dividing the world between moral, family-loving Christians and supposedly permissive, corrupt, family-destroying secularists.

Enough with pretending that personal virtue is connected with political creeds. Enough with condemning your adversaries, sometimes viciously, and then insisting upon understanding after the failures of someone on your own side become known to the world. And enough with claiming that support for gay rights and gay marriage is synonymous with opposition to family values and sexual responsibility.

TV critic Maureen Ryan pulls some lessons about good and evil out of the finale of Lost.

• It's never too late. You can always remake your fate (or take a run at resolving your issues in another Sideways life, brutha).
• No one is eternally good or bad. You can revise or redeem your character through your actions.
• No one can go it alone. It takes a village and all that.

And finally... I'll launch my own quest for goodness at my new blog, In Search of Goodness, in just six days.