Today in Goodness

Some quick hits on the goodness beat.

A Christian joins into a conversation about Jesus and worries that one of Christianity's key tenets is immoral and that God himself may be "morally inferior."

Most people I spoke with in India shared the same gratitude and love for their beloved Ganesha that I did for Jesus. Does this, as the Bible has been traditionally interpreted to suggest, mean that all those beautiful, hardworking, sincere people are going to hell, forever?

For the first time in such a visceral way, the morality of eternal hell - a cornerstone in the Christian faith - struck me as severely lacking.

Francisco Ayala, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Irvine, argues that morality comes from both biology and culture.

The book, Bozo Sapiens, takes on the topic of why it's human to make mistakes.

There will be no self-flagellation here; if anything, the message should be hopeful: if we are more conscious of the shared mistakes that define our humanity, we can live more comfortably in this world we have created but will never fully understand. It will not make us right, but could help us be wrong better.

A group of Veterans Affairs counselors argue that the guilt and remorse troops feel when they see or do bad things in war creates a psychological wound. The group is calling that wound a moral injury.

They argue that service members who don't talk to loved ones, clergy or some other confidant will become convinced what they did is unforgivable, leading to recognized symptoms of PTSD, such as withdrawal, self-condemnation and avoidance.