We were taught to accept unjust accusations as part of the training.” She must have seemed like one of Freud’s case book hysterics. I didn’t hear any religious leader come forward to talk about this. Remember, after 9/11, George Bush telling us all to go shopping. It’s that outreach, that compassionate outreach because it’s that which makes religions viable because you’re not just engaged in some nice little soul-searching job, you are trying to heal the world because that’s what the Prophet did, that’s certainly what Jesus did. A friend persuaded her to go to a psychiatrist. She discussed her insights on compassion, the Golden Rule, nationalism, materialism, cosmopolitan ethics, religious literacy, the future of religion, perceptions of religious people, religious institutions, personal search, and her vision for the future. It requires of you that you look into your own heart, discover what gives you pain, and then refuse under any circumstance whatsoever to inflict that pain on anybody else. Each church or each mosque making a move towards a house of worship belonging to another faith in your vicinity etc. SB: It’s very fascinating. In this spirit, do you think it would be productive -- so, that we as a humanity can come together -- if humanity was to explicitly lay out a consensus of these shared values as a sort of universal code of ethics? Karen Armstrong has written histories of Buddhism and Islam. In 2006, she was invited by Kofi Annan to join the High-Level Group of the new UN Alliance of Civilisations; in 2008, she was awarded the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Medal; in 2009, she was awarded the TED Prize and with TED founded the Charter for Compassion, which is now a global movement. With the Charter for Compassion, we’ve created cities of compassion where the Mayor endorses the Charter and undertakes a program for the city that the city needs - it might be homelessness for example, or medical care, something of that sort. SB: I do want to talk about the future of religion and faith. You weren’t harping back to the past so that you would reproduce the conditions of 2nd century Arabia or the conditions of the early Christian church because that was God, you make that speak to the present. She attended St Anne's College, Oxford, while in the convent and majored in English. And I should be having meetings with them at the Parliament for World Religions that are taking place in Toronto in November. It now seems to me that, unless now we implement the Golden Rule globally, so that we ensure that all people whoever they are, are treated as we would wish to be treated ourselves, the world is simply not going to be a viable place. Jesus said when the kingdom comes, and the king comes to judge the people, he’s not going to be judging you on your sins or anything of that sort, but he said, "I was hungry, you gave me to eat. All these, every single one of them, all these sages insisted that you cannot confine this benevolence to your own group. SB: Right, exactly. No civilization until the now modern industrial civilization found an alternative to this inequitable system. Dr. Armstrong: Now, we know, we see on our televisions screens; the depths of massive inequity within our own societies. She looks down at the picture and says, “At that age you think you’ll never change. SB: —in a sense, we're seeing more tribalistic and nationalistic tendencies. I just finished that. Giving an ethical voice that will make people think, re-evaluate, and feel that they are not perhaps awaken, in a more ordinary funk, a sense that they are not alone in their feelings that something must be done. And to feel that they're good people and one with the world, and then not likely to [have it] impinge too much on their lives. EDITORS’ NOTE: Dr. Karen Armstrong — an internationally acclaimed scholar and bestselling author of numerous books — discusses her insights on compassion, the Golden Rule, nationalism, materialism, cosmopolitan ethics, religious literacy, the future of religion, perceptions of religious people, religious institutions, personal search, and her vision for the future. These voices need to be magnified more I think. Could you speak about the dangers of materialism for humanity in general, and how materialism may disrupt our commitment to compassion? But to find a way of putting it that shows, the urgency and also gives people something practical to do. But during the Iraq and Afghanistan war, it was quite right that they honored the soldiers who were brought home dead in their coffins. Whereas, the Buddha designed that this practice to show you that the self does not exist at all. A former nun, Karen Armstrong lost her faith while studying at Oxford and then spent years trying to build an alternative career as an academic and TV presenter. Dr. Armstrong: It’d better or it will just wither away. That's why also it's not just a political practice but a spiritual practice, too, because what holds us back from what is called enlightenment, or holiness, or deification, or whatever you wish to call it, is selfishness, preoccupation with ourselves. Compassion is often mistakenly confused with pity, but pity means that you are in a superior position, and you look mercifully down at somebody in a more inferior position, to who you can show pity. I think that we’ve got to shake up, we live in such a cocoon in the west. Her work has been translated into 43 languages. And that gives you a chance to switch channels or turn off. So that, all along our big motorways, there were huge emporiums of storage systems where people are storing mountains of stuff that they’ve acquired which we don’t need. Do you think the perception of religious people, of course, it might be worse for some faiths or better for others, will generally improve over time? SB: Even in the houses of worship themselves? If stocks fall in one part of the world, they plummet all around the globe that day. The more we discover, the more we’ve got in common, the more people are retreating into these denominational ghettos. We’ve got to really make ourselves aware of the pain in the world because it only makes sense because all this pain and anguish and suffering-- there are children growing up in Syria who’ve never known peace, they’ve just seen horror in their life. I looked also in China and India, as well as in monotheisms so that you have a wider view of what the issues involved there.
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