Karen Armstrong’s article in the The Huffington Post, “Bringing Compassion to the Middle East,” tells about her on-going efforts to bring peace to our world. In 2008, Armstrong won the TED Prize — $100,000 to pursue a project to make a better world — and she requested that TED help her create a Charter for Compassion.
The twenty minute video of her acceptance of the TED prize is well worth watching. (Embedded below.)
Armstrong is a former Roman Catholic nun who, after leaving her British convent, has written over 20 books. She says, the Golden Rule—“Do not treat others as you would not wish to be treated yourself”—is at the core of every single one of our traditions: Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Confucian.
Armstrong says she has “become frustrated that the religions, which should be making a major contribution to global harmony, are often seen as part of the problem. The compassionate voice of religion has been drowned out by the strident voices of extremism. I wanted to restore compassion to the heart of the religious life,” and that she has been delighted to discover that “secularist and atheist TEDsters” also wanted to take part in this endeavor.
“Religion has become hijacked,” Armstrong says, “Religion is used to oppress others.” She says she sees a hunger throughout the world of many people who are seeking a spiritual renewal built around an understanding of belief — not as dogma involving intellectual assent, but as commitment to positive action. “The fact that all the major world faiths have formulated their own version of the Golden Rule,” she says, “shows us something important about the structure of our humanity, that this is how human beings work.”
I heard an interesting segment on public radio about a Palestinian who had married into a Jewish family that included Holocaust survivors. He said that both communities had been so traumatized by their own victimization that they could not deal with the victimization of the other. He also thought that the only tenable alternative is that both peoples must eventually live together in peace, and that two states are the only way to do this, a solution that is threatened by the continued building of Jewish settlements on Palestinian lands. If both sides are unable because of traumatized history is turned into an ongoing violent present, the rest of the world, which can deal emotionally with the situation, must intervene on the side of peace. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126163240&ft=1&f=1008
which can deal emotionally with the situation
Did you mean, “which can deal rationally with the situation?”
No. I think rational people have known for years what needs to happen in the Israel-Palestine dispute. The hard part is getting there emotionally, particularly if your people were murdered by the millions while the rest of the world let it happen, as in the holocaust, or when your people have been thrown off their land, deprived of power and manhandled as second class citizens while the rest of the world let it happen, as in what Palestinians call the “Nakba”, and when both sides have been killing and terrorizing each other for decades.
Stan, what surprises me is that there seems so little discussion, and so little outcry about what you point out — the matter of “the continued building of Jewish settlements on Palestinian lands.” The U.S. every year pours billions of dollars into the Israeli government, yet, as a nation we act like we are helpless to influence a relentless and reckless Israeli policy that continues to inflame violence in the Middle East and throughout the world.