Help us create a Charter for Compassion

Dandelion Salad

The Golden Rule

“That which is hateful to you do not do to another … the rest (of the Torah) is all commentary, now go study.”

– Rabbi Hillel

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http://charterforcompassion.com/

People of all nations, all faiths, all backgrounds, are invited to contribute.

By recognizing that the Golden Rule is fundamental to all world religions, the Charter for Compassion can inspire people to think differently about religion. This Charter is being created in a collaborative project by people from all over the world. It will be completed in 2009. Use this site to offer language you’d like to see included. Or inspire others by sharing your own story of compassion.

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Do Unto Others

World religions too often seem predicated on prejudice, when their true roots lie in compassion

By Karen Armstrong
Information Clearing House
November 14, 2008 “The Guardian”

The practice of compassion is central to every one of the major world religions – but sometimes you would never know it. Instead, religion is associated with violence, intolerance and seems more preoccupied by dogmatic or sexual orthodoxy.

People don’t even seem to know what compassion is; they imagine that it means to feel pity for somebody, whereas the root meaning of this Greco-Latin world is “to feel with” the other, realising at a profound level that we share the same human predicament. This is crucial at a time when we are bound together – politically, economically, and electronically – as never before but have rarely been more perilously divided.

This is why we have launched a Charter for Compassion. During the next few days, millions of Jews, Christians and Muslims worldwide will be invited to comment, stage by stage, on a draft Charter on a multilingual website. Later, a council of inspirational thinkers representing the different faiths will examine their findings and write the final version. Finally, there will be a large signing ceremony.

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via Do Unto Others      : Information Clearing House – ICH

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Karen Armstrong: 2008 TED Prize wish: Charter for Compassion

TED on Mar 19, 2008

As she accepts her 2008 TED Prize, author and scholar Karen Armstrong talks about how the Abrahamic religions — Islam, Judaism, Christianity — have been diverted from the moral purpose they share to foster compassion. But Armstrong has seen a yearning to change this fact. People want to be religious, she says; we should act to help make religion a force for harmony. She asks the TED community to help her build a Charter for Compassion — to help restore the Golden Rule as the central global religious doctrine.