Karen Armstrong: 2008 TED Prize wish: Charter for Compassion

the following are comments on the above video:

The problems that result from a society increasing in selfishness and lack of community and social values are significant and widespread. Values now considered beneficial include working high stress jobs, winning at all cost, perfectionism and excessive spending. These 'process addictions' are every bit as deadly as substance addictions, and affect our approach to even the most lauded pursuits including religion, science and academic enquiry.
In the Qur'an, religious opinion -- religious orthodoxy -- is dismissed as zanna: self-indulgent guesswork about matters that nobody can be certain of one way or the other, but which makes people quarrelsome and stupidly sectarian" From Karen Armstrong TED talk.

I think there's nothing new here that Kant hasn't already said, and much more eloquently too.

Recently researchers have discovered that we actually are "wired" for compassion and that we are happiest being compassionate, generous, kind. Mirror neurons exist in the brain that allow us to empathize with one another's experience and this creates true compassion - not just a sense of feeling sorry for someone but relating with them.

Proposing that we acknowledge and live this way is now scientific truth, not only philosophy or morality or religion.

(Those of us who are atheists or agnostic please let's not "throw the baby out with the bathwater" because we may feel offended by the mention of religion and religious precepts - in fact it's useful to address and attempt to include the religious via the teachings they profess to believe. There are billions who claim to be religious and if they alone could live this ethic the world would take a turn.)

if we just forgot about the nuances of theism and focused on the root of morality and ethics, then we could stand shoulder to shoulder and help fix the problem. "

In those words you pretty much summed up Humanism. If you take a second to think about it, you might realize that this is already achieved by those who don't have any religion.

Religion is not the source of morality - morality is the source of religion. Morality unites us - religions divide us.

"All religions shd simply cease to exist" might not be the most realistic suggestion of a way forward in the real world. Lots of evidence that we have to some extent co-evolved with religion. The desires it taps into are core to who we are. You can't just wave a wand and make it all go away. Even if you don't believe in any religion -- and many at TED are probably in that camp -- respectful engagement is probably a more promising route forward.