Speaker Karen Armstrong

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Duration: 3 minutes and 11 seconds

Country: United States

Language: English

License: Public Domain

Genre: None

Views: 437 (273 embedded)

Posted by: pangea on May 14, 2008

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This is an extraordinary evening
Karen Armstrong. Scholar/Author.
Extraordinary because our major task, whatever our faith
or lack of religious faith, is to build a global community
where people can live together in peace and respect.
Now for years, because of a difficult religious experience of my own
I had thought that religion was essentially divisive
that it was one of the causes of conflict
But I've spent the last twenty-five years studying
all the religious traditions of the world.
And I've found that at their heart, they all have the same objective
often being summed up by the golden rule:
Do not do unto others what you would not like them to do to you.
[Crowd noises]
Look into your own heart, discover what it is that gives you pain
and then refuse unto any circumstance what so ever
to inflict that pain on anybody else.
That, and not belief -- Belief is a very recent western
preoccupation with religion.
But the ideal of compassion, the ability to feel with the other
that's what we've been doing tonight.
One of the major ways of entering into the mind of others these days
is film. Which gets us beneath the headlines
and into the minds and hearts of others.
And every single one of the major world faiths insists
that it is not sufficient simply to confine your faith
to your own group. You must take it out to everybody.
As one the Chinese sages said, "You must have Jian Ai; concern for everybody."
The poet Wordsworth had a wonderful phrase.
He said, "There are in our existence spots of time.
Moments which stay with us always which we use as a wellspring
which we go back to in times of trouble, in times of joy
that act as a kind of symbol
as to where we are and where we're going."
Let tonight be such a spot of time for all of us.
Whatever our faith, or lack of it.
That tonight, we sat down together right through the world
and spent our time entering into the mind and heart of the other
and this experience can change the world.

Speaker Karen Armstrong

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