Karen Armstrong: Let's revive the Golden Rule

Karen Armstrong: Let's revive the Golden Rule




key ideas in bold, my notes in italics

"for years ive been feeling frustrated  because as a religious historian i've become acutely aware of the centrality of compassion in all the major world faiths. Every single one of them have evolved their own version of whats become known as the Golden Rule. Sometimes it's known in a positive version: always treat all others as you'd like to be treated yourself; and equally important is the negative version: Don't do to others what you would not like them to do to you; look into your own heart, discover what it is that gives you pain and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever to inflict that pain on anybody else.
people have emphasized the importance of compassion, not just because it sounds good, but because it works. people have found that when they have implemented the golden rule as Confucius said 'all day and every day (not just a question of doing your good deed for the day and then returning to a life of greed and egotism) but to do it all day and everyday: dethrone yourself from the centre of your world, put another there, and you transcend yourself (or 'the self'?) and it brings you into the presence of what's been called God, nirvana, Ramón, tao. Something that goes beyond what we know in our ego bound existence (it has been said the only way to reach god is the destruction of the ego --> where?) But you know, you'd never know it a lot of the time, that this was so central to the religious life. Because with a few wonderful exceptions, very often when religious people come together, religious leaders come together, they're arguing about abstruse doctrines or uttering council of hatred or envaying  against homosexuality or something of that sort.
Often people don't really want to be compassionate. I sometimes see when I'm speaking to a congregation of religious people a sort of mutinous expression crossing their faces because people often want to be right instead (of compassionate). and that of course defeats the object of the exercise.
now why was I so grateful to TED? because they took me, very gently from my book-line study and brought me into the twenty first century enabling me to speak to a much, much wider audience than i could have ever conceived. Because I feel an urgency about this: if we don't manage to implement the Golden Rule, globally, so that we treat all peoples, whoever and wherever they may be as though they were as important as ourselves, I doubt that we will have a viable world to hand on to the next generation. One of the great tasks of our time is to build a global society where people can live together in peace. And the religions, that should be making a major contribution, are instead being seen as part of the problem.
And of course it's not just religious people who believe in the Golden Rule this is the source of all morality. Imaginative, active empathy putting yourself in the place of another.
and so we have a choice it seems to me. We can either go on, bringing out, or emphasizing the dogmatic and intolerant aspects of our faiths or we can go back to the rabbis. rabbi helel, the older contemporary of jesus, who when asked by a pagan to recite the whole of jewish teaching while he stood on one leg (she does a better sumation of this story in her other video) said "that which is hateful to you do not do to your neighbour that is the Torah, and everything else is only commentary. And the rabbis and the early fathers of the church who said that any interpretation that bred hatred and distain was illegitimate. And we need to revive that spirit, and its not just going to happen because a spirit of love wafters down; we have to make this happen. And we can do it. With the modern communications (that TED has introduced).
Already I've been tremendously heartened at the response of all our partners. In singapore we have a group who are going to use the charter to heal divisions that have recently sprung up in singaporean society, and some members of the parliament want to implement it politically. In Malaysia there's going to be an art exhibition in which leading artists are going to be taking young people and showing them that compassion also lies at the root of all art. Throughout Europe Muslim communities are holding events and discussions, discussing the centrality of compassion in Islam and in all faiths. But it can't stop there, it can't stop with the launch. Religious teaching (and this is where we've gone so wrong, concentrating solely on believing abstruse doctrines) Religious teaching must always lead to action. And I intend to work on this to my dying day. And I want to continue with our partners to do two things: to educate and stimulate compassionate thinking. Education because we've so dropped out of compassion, people often think it only means feeling sorry for somebody. But of course you don't understand compassion if you're just going to think about it, you also have to do it. I want to get the media involved because the media are crucial in helping to dissolve some of the stereotypical views we have of other people, which are dividing us from one another (there also largely responsible for it! ---- us and them mentality)
The same applies to educators, I'd like youth to get a sense of the dynamism, the dynamic challenge of a compassionate lifestyle, and also see that it demands acute intelligence, not just a gooey feeling.
I'd like to call upon scholars to explore the compassionate theme in their own and in other people's traditions.
And perhaps above all, to encourage a sensitivity about un-compassionate speaking... so that because people have this charter, whatever their beliefs or lack of them, they feel empowered to challenge un-compassionate speech, disdainful remarks, from their religious leaders, their political leaders, from the captains of industry.
Because we can change the world. We have the ability. (I would never had thought of putting the charter online, I was still stuck in the old world of a whole bunch of buffoons sitting together in a room and issuing yet another arcane statement. TED introduced me to a whole new way of thinking and presenting ideas, because that's is so wonderful about TED; in this room are all these expertise, if we joined it all together we can change the world ) of course the problems sometimes seem insuperable, but i'd just like to quote/finish at the end with a reference to a British author, an Oxford author, who i don't quote very often, C.S Lewis. but he wrote one thing that stuck in my mind ever since I read it when I was a school girl. It's in his book 'The Four Loves' He distinguished between erotic love: when two people gaze spellbound into each other's eyes and then he compared that to friendship: when to people stand side by side, as it were, shoulder to shoulder, with their eyes fixed on a common goal. We don't have to fall in love with each other, but we can become friends. I am convinced, I felt it very strongly during our deliberations at Verve´ , that when people of all different persuasions come together, working side by side for a common goal, differences meld away and we learn amity and we learn to live together and get to know one another."