The season of Christmas and Hanukkah is just another season for National Public Radio to describe religion as a negative force for judgmental people massaging their own ego by being self-righteous. On the December 19 TED Radio Hour -- a spinoff of the TED Talks enterprise -- host Guy Raz asked author Karen Armstrong about how divisive religion is:
GUY RAZ, NPR HOST: I wonder if religion is the source of compassion, or is compassion the source of religion?
KAREN ARMSTRONG: I think compassion is in us. I think that the various religious traditions have emphasized the role compassion because it's deeply embedded in the structure of our humanity. It's instinctive. But compassionate ethos developed, you know, not in peaceful groves with people meditating peacefully on a mountaintop; they developed in societies like our own where violence had reached an unprecedented crescendo. And many of them, the Chinese sages in particular, said unless, now, we treat each other as we would wish to be treated, human beings will destroy one another. And that has never been more true than today, thanks to the weapons that we've created.
RAZ: Yeah, I mean, if compassion is the core of all the world's religions, as you write and argue, why do they seem so divisive?
ARMSTRONG: Because people don't - a lot of people just don't want to be compassionate. They'd rather be right. And people use their religions to make them - instead of surrendering the ego - to enhance their identity.
(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)
ARMSTRONG: We are living in a world where religion has been hijacked, where terrorists cite Quranic verses to justify their atrocities, where instead of taking Jesus's words - love your enemies, don't judge others - we have the spectacle of Christians endlessly judging other people, endlessly using scripture as a way of arguing with other people, putting other people down. Throughout the ages, religion has been used to oppress others, and this is because of human ego, human greed. We have a talent, as a species, for messing up wonderful things.
So the traditions also insisted - and this is an important point, I think - that you could not and must not confine your compassion to your own group, your own nation, your own coreligionists, your own fellow countrymen. You must have what one of the Chinese sages call jian ai, concern for everybody. Love your enemies. Honor the stranger. We formed you, says the Quran, into tribes and nations so that you may know one another. And this - again, this universal outreach is getting subdued in the strident use of religion, abuse of religion, for nefarious gains. Now, I've lost count of the number of taxi drivers who, when I say to them what I do for a living, inform me that religion has been the cause of all the major World Wars in history. Wrong - the cause of our present woes are political. But make no mistake about it, religion is a kind of fault line. And when a conflict gets ingrained in a region, religion can get sucked in and become part of the problem.
Armstrong is a favorite of the TED folks:
In 2008 she was awarded the TED Prize and began working with TED on the Charter for Compassion, created online by the general public, and crafted by leading thinkers in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism.
Also in 2008, she was awarded the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Medal. In 2013, she received the British Academy's inaugural Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Transcultural Understanding.
PS: Atheist Adam Frank boosted Armstrong’s Charter for Compassion on NPR’s Cosmos and Culture blog in 2010, suggesting the Golden Rule fits Darwinism:
Compassion: they call it the best idea humanity ever had. When it comes to religion it seems to be built into the core of almost every attempt to focus human spirituality. Then, alas, it gets almost completely lost....It is likely that the Golden Rule has some basis in evolution. It may be that altruism in individuals (based on modeling others as oneself) confers evolutionary fitness. That would be a fascinating result if true.
