Karen Armstrong: 2008 TED Prize wish: Charter for Compassion

 

quotes from this lecture, and some of my thoughts, are written below
 (my thoughts are in helvetica)

pride of place in [religious] practice is given to compassion and it is an arresting fact that right across the board, in every single one of the major world faiths, compassion—the ability to feel with the other... is not only the test of any true religiosity, it is also what will bring us into the presence of what jews christians and muslims call god


in compassion, when we feel for the other, we dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world, and we put another person there.

once we get rid of the ego, then we are ready to see the divine

in particular, every single one of the major worlds traditions has highlighted and has put at the CORE of their tradition, what's become known as the "Golden Rule."

first propounded by Confucius five centuries before Christ "Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you. "
that, he said, was the central thread that ran through all his teaching and that is what his disciples should put into practice all day and every day. and it was the golden rule that would bring them to the transcended value that he call Rweign(?) (=Zen)(human heartedness) which was a transcendent experience in itself.

every verse should be dwelled upon until a lesson of compassion should be reached. good dress rehearsal for real life

we are living in a world where religion has been hijacked

eg terrorists

eg. where instead of taking jesus' words 'love your enemies' 'don't judge others'. We have the spectacle of Christians ENDLESSLY judging other people, endlessly using scripture as a way of arguing with other people, putting other people down.

throughout the ages religion has been used to oppress others

and this is because of HUMAN EGO, HUMAN GREED

we have a talent as a species for messing up vulnerable/wonderful things

the traditions also insisted, and this is an important point i think: that you cannot and must/should not confine/restrict your compassion to your own group. your own nation, your own co-religious brethren, your own fellow country-men... you must have what the chinese sages called yang eye(?) concern for everybody. love your enemies, honour the stranger.

(and this is where we find it difficult outer-group altruism is difficult because we dont have the processing power to retain strong feelings of empathy for more than 100 members in our immediate social group) can we though, with modern comunication and effective strategies get across the idea of the other and other, the other as meaning, can we gain a holistic understanding of our effects our actions have on others, and develop enough compassion to change our behaviour to the most appropriate?

we formed you into tribes and nations (said some guy) , so you may know one another. and this again, this universal outreach is getting subdued in the strident use of religion, abuse of religion for norfarious gains.

and then it get a little less relevant...

people say "religion has been the cause of all the major world wars" wrong! the cause of our present woes are political, but make no mistake about it, religion is a kind of fault line and when a conflict gets engrained in a religion, religion can get sucked in and become part of the problem.

our modernity has been exceedingly violent between 1914 and 1945 70million people died in Europe alone as a result of armed conflict. even football now causes riots where people die.
its not surprising that religion has been effected by this violent ethos

people now relate religious faith to believing things,

we call religious people believers, because that is mainly what they do.

this is a result of putting secondary things, beliefs, get pushed into the first place in of compassion - the golden rule.

that may be because the golden rule is difficult

sometimes when i speak to a congregation about compassion i sometimes see a mutinous expression cross some of their faces. because a lot of religious people prefer to be right ( which is egotistic) rather than compassionate.

but that's not the whole story,
after september 11 when my work on islam suddenly propelled me into public light in a way i'd never imagined,

i've been able to go all over the world and finding everywhere i go a URNING FOR CHANGE

wouldn't this happen throughout history?

i've just come back from Pakistan where literally thousands of people came to my lectures, because they were urning to hear a friendly western voice (shumck much?) especially the young people were coming. they were asking me "what can we do?" "what can we do to change things?" (this highlights the want is there but the how is not) my host said don't be too polite to us. tell us where we're going wrong. LETS TALK TOGETHER ABOUT WHERE RELIGION IS FAILING
because it seems to be that our current situation is so serious at the moment that ANY IDEOLOGY THAT DOESN'T PROMOTE A SENSE OF GLOBAL UNDERSTANDING and global appreciation of each other is failing the test of the times

religion should be a made a force for harmony in the world. which it can and should be, because of the golden rule: Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you. AN ETHOS THAT SHOULD NOW BE APPLIED GLOBALLY we should not treat other nations in a way that we do not wish to be treated ourselves. (A very good sentiment, but what about game theory that says where one 'player' says 'if the other is cheating, and im not, i'll get screwed, so i should cheat, to save myself.' both players think this way, and so both cheat? how do we overcome that logic?)
and this, whatever our wretched beliefs are is a religious matter, a spiritual matter, it is a profound moral matter, that engages and should engage us all.

and as i say, there is a hunger for change out there.Here in the united states i think you see it (*scoffs*) in this election campaign (*retreats scoff?*) a longing for change.

after 911 people started coming together, locally from churches and mosques, synagogues to create networks of understanding. (not everyone, some were preaching the hate) saying we must start to speak to one another. i think its time we moved beyond the idea of toleration [of the other] and moved towards appreciation of the other

and then slightly less relevant again...

there's one story i'd just like to mention, it comes from the Iliad. it tells us what this spirituality should be. you know the story of the iliad, the 10 year war between greece and troy. in one incident, archilis the famous warrior of greece takes his troops out of the war, and the whole war effort suffers. and in the course of the ensuing muddle, his beloved friend petrockis is killed by one of the trojan princes, Hector. and arkilis goes mad with grief and rage and revenge. he kills hector, he mutilates his body and then he refuses to give the body back, for burial to the family, which means, in greek ethos Hectors soul will be eternally lost. then the king of troy comes into the camp, incognito, makes his way to archilies tent, to ask for the body of his son. and everybody is shocked when the old man takes of his head covering and shows himself. and archilis looks at him and thinks of his father and starts to weep. and priar looks a the man who has killed so many of his sons and he too starts to weep. and the sound of their weeping filled the house. in greek they believe weeping together creates a bond. archilies then hand the body, tenderly, to the king. and then, the story goes, both men look at each other and see each other as divine.

that is the ethos too found in all religions. its what is meant by over coming the horror that we feel when we are under threat from our enemies, and beginning to appreciate the other.

the world for holy in hebrew, that applied to God was hardosh, separate, other. and it is often the 'otherness' of our enemies that can give us intimations of that utterly mysterious transcendence, which is god.
and now here's my wish 

i wish that you would help with the creation, launch and propagation of a charter for compassion crafted by a group of inspirational thinkers from the three abrahamic thinkers from judaism, christianity and islam. and based on fundamental principle of the golden rule. We need to create a movement among all these people... who want to join up in some way and reclaim their faith which they feel has been hijacked. we need to empower people to remember the compassionate ethos and to give guidelines as how to we are to interpret the scriptures, these texts that are been abused. remember what the rabbis and what augustine said about how scripture should be governed by the principle of compassion. lets get back to that. and the idea too of Jew, Christians and Muslims working together to create a document which we hope will be signed by a thousand at least major religious leaders through all the traditions of the world. you are the people, i'm just a solitary scholar, you're the people with media knowledge to explain to me how we can get this to everybody on the planet. i've had some preliminary talks with the arch bishop, for example ....


i would be working with the alliance of civilization at the united nations
which was formed to diagnose the causes of extremism and give practical guidelines to member states about how to avoid the escalation of further extremism

.... NOW Some of my thoughts :

undeniably greed is fundamental to all of us, (and therefore it makes (financial) sense to prey on that value in consumers)

but we need not have a system that ENCOURAGES IT! we have to overcome our vices, not celebrate them, not glorify them, not exploit (and hence encourage) them!

there are obvious examples of many who have gone before me, (eg. ALL OF RELIGIONs).

but these have failed. they now seem to, in some ways promote judgement, hatred, greed, wasting resources

they have failed because they have been hijacked.

they have been hijacked because of our egos. our greed.

and yet THIS IS (egos and greed) THE VERY TRAITS WE ARE NOW CELEBRATING AD ENCOURAGING! the same traits that corrupted all those religious teachings