I have a friend who's company I cherish. He has been a source of inspiration, calmness, equinamity in times of challenge, and just all-around good dude. He also professes to faith of a Christian bent. A recent conversation we had touched on (by "touched on" I mean we spent well over an hour on - and will likely spend considerably more time in the future) the Golden Rule.

I've found a couple of articles which delve into the etymology of the Golden Rule:

A friend was kind enough to give me a copy of The Moral Landscape (TML) by Sam Harris for Christmas (apparently she noticed that I was intrigued with an interview by Jon Stewart of Sam on The Daily Show). Well, the cover of this book mentions that Sam also wrote The End of Faith (TEF) so I picked up a copy of that and read it first (reading TEF first makes sense). I suspect I may also have a thing or two to say once I've read TML.

When I looked up morality, dictionaries gave differing definitions, but all of them relate morality to social conventions and agreements about what constitutes right and wrong in various situations.