Here is TED award winner Karen Armstrong’s speech about religion and compassion. It will hopefully be another step toward dispelling harmful stereotypes about religion in general and Islam in particular (although it does not simply let religious people off the hook for taking responsibility for their traditions…)

Excerpts from the talk:

I found some astonishing things in the course of my study that had never occurred to me. Frankly, in the days that when I thought I’d had it with religion, I just found the whole thing absolutely incredible. These doctrines seemed unproven, abstract, and, to my astonishment, when I began seriously studying other traditions, I began to realize that belief, which we make such a fuss about today, is only a very recent religious enthusiasm. It surfaced only in the West, in about the 17th century. The word “belief” itself originally meant to love, to prize, to hold dear. In the 17th century it narrowed its focus, for reasons that I’m exploring in a book I’m writing at the moment, to include — to mean an intellectual ascent to a set of propositions — a credo. “I believe” did not mean “I accept certain creedal articles of faith.” It meant, “I commit myself. I engage myself.” Indeed, some of the world traditions think very little of religious orthodoxy. 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.

Now, pride of place in this 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, and the way we’ve been thinking about this evening — 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” or the “Divine.” It is compassion, says the Buddha, which brings you to Nirvana. Why? Because in compassion, when we feel with the other, we dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and we put another person there. And once we get rid of ego, then we’re ready to see the Divine. And, in particular, every single one of the major traditions has highlighted — has said — 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 unto 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 his disciples should put into practice all day and every day. And it was the Golden Rule would bring them to the transcendent value that he called rén, human-heartedness, which was a transcendent experience in itself…

There’s also I think a great deal of religious illiteracy around. People seem to think— now equate religious faith with believing things. As though that… We call religious people often “believers, as though that was the main thing that they do. And very often secondary goals get pushed into the first place, in place of compassion and the Golden Rule. Because the Golden Rule is difficult. Sometimes when I’m speaking to congregations about compassion I sometimes see a mutinous expression crossing some of their faces because a lot of religious people prefer to be “right” rather than compassionate. But that’s not the whole story. Since September the 11th, when my work on Islam suddenly propeled me into public life in a way that I’d never imagined, I’ve been able to sort of go all over the world and finding everywhere I go a yearning for change. I’ve just come back from Pakistan, where literally thousands of people came to my lectures because they were yearning first of all to here a friendly Western voice. And especially the young people were coming, and were asking me, the young people were saying “What can we do? What can we do to change things?”