Sunday, April 06, 2008
Charter For Compassion
Karen Armstrong gives her TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) wish of a worldwide charter signed by leaders of the world's primary religions. The charter would recognize the common goals of compassion rather the divisive abstract beliefs of all these faith traditions. I've enjoyed several of her books and few people have as much knowledge of world religions as Karen Armstrong.
""Belief, which we make such a fuss about today, is only a very recent religious enthusiasm. The word belief itself originally meant to love, to prize, to hold dear. In the 17th century it narrowed its focus... to include an intellectual ascent to a set of propositions."
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A couple thoughts. It seems odd to say 'belief once meant far more than JUST rational assent to propositions' and to then pretend like that means that 'therefore rational assent plays no part in belief'. The first claim may be true. The second is obviously false.
Second, her claim that 'compassion' runs through all major world religions is all well and dandy, but it is dishonest to claim that compassion looks the same in all these traditions. What is love? In Christianity, love is the cross. In Islam, the cross is sacrilege and blasphemy (for God is too powerful to die). How then are their conceptions of 'love' or 'compassion' the same???
Her reading of Jesus (reduced down to 'love your enemies') seems quite narrow.
She claims the traditions themselves mean THIS. It's just the silly practitioners of each religion who misunderstand it and interpret it as THAT. She seems unwilling to countenance the possibility that religious traditions might be bad, or at least, have dangerous threads running through them. How is this not a form of imperialism? (Let me tell you what your religion means...)
Not to focus on the negative mind, I think she said a number of worthwhile things.
Peace,
-Daniel-
Thanks for the comments Daniel. I always like your input.
First, she made an empirical statement that belief was not always an appeal to certainty of intellectual propositions. We can prove or disprove that. There is ample evidence and she presented several cases. You'll need to disprove those as well as provide evidence that belief has always and only been about intellectual certainty. Otherwise, your argument isn’t rational. I’m happy to entertain any contradictory evidence you might have.
On your second point, I think it is dishonest to claim that Christian love is defined by the cross. It may be one example of love. It may be a pointer to love. However, it is not the sole or complete definition of love. Neither is it the only pointer. If so, Jesus wasted much time and effort telling parables that also seem to be valid pointers.
I think the cross proves her point. Many religions have self-sacrificial love as their core and create similar symbolic stories to share it. She never claims all religions should use the same symbols. She also doesn’t condone religious fundamentalism that places its faith in the particular symbols and stories over and above the values to which they point. Her suggestion is that we gain the ability to talk about the values without always invoking our own symbols as a type of competition against other symbols. Explain to me how love and compassion could be different between religions. I suggest they can’t. Only the metaphors used to describe them are different. Compassion is compassion even if it differs in application and degree.
I have no doubt that religious bigots will object to this. No one should participate in the charter if they feel their own symbols are divine while everyone else’s symbols are not.
She does not in any way attempt to tell religions what “they mean”. She correctly locates compassion at the core of each religion based on their own teachings. Jesus himself reduced the whole of the commandments to loving God and neighbor. He clearly obtained that view from Rabbi Hillel (and/or others in Jewish faith before him). Nothing in the Bible suggests that Jesus and Hillel were wrong.
Finally, I think she is honest about the possibility of “bad” threads running through each religion. I blame foundational certainty for those threads. I think that is the whole point of her talk. Her targets for change are those foundational threads. Are you part of that fundamentalist thread in Christianity, Daniel? I hope your answer is no.
Lol--the definition of 'fundamentalism' is what's key, right?
I think you missed my point about belief. I'm fine with the claim that belief in the past was MORE than intellectual assent. But then she seems to go on and say that intellectual assent DOESN'T MATTER. Those are two different claims.
On the whole compassion thing: an evangelical would argue that to treat a homosexual lovingly includes calling them to celibacy in light of Scripture. Regardless of what you make of that, my point is simply this: even IF (and it's a big if) 'compassion' runs through all the world religions, that doesn't tell us which version of compassion is best. Some forms of compassion are 'live and let live'. Others are not. Am I being clear?
Also, to say that either A) one acknowledges that all that matters is compassion or B) one is a 'fundamentalist'... is, well, problematic. Wouldn't you say???
Peace,
-Daniel-
I think we could agree, if we could get past the language issues.
You seem stuck on the "form" of compassion. Nowhere does she argue that compassion always has the same form. Neither does she argue that any are more or less successful.
You said "even IF (and it's a big if) 'compassion' runs through all the world religions, that doesn't tell us which version of compassion is best."
Why do we have to declare a winner?
It seems to me I'm correctly defining a fundamentalist as one who has the notion that a single set of fundamentals is the "correct" set of beliefs and any others are either of less value or no value at all. Do you disagree with that definition or are you simply trying to wiggle your way off the hook before it catches you?
I'm trying to get at the question of if you are in fact a fundamentalist or if I have misunderstood your views.
thanks for your input!
tooting my own horn, i put a (somewhat) lengthy email together last year and sent it to a number of newspaper-people, government officials, radio talking heads, etc. in a nutshell, i said the time is now for doing what constantine did in 325, and that was to call all the leaders of religion - in his day it was Christendom; in ours, it would be a pluralism of various faiths - together. basically, technology has erased the geographic and cultural walls that used to separate various peoples and faiths, and we're now all in bed together whether we like it or not. i envisioned a sharing of history, creeds and beliefs, and somehow a "reconciliation" of sorts where everyone somehow agreed to disagree peacefully.
yes, it was an idealistic pipedream.
no, i didn't get any responses...
our third world war - if it isn't already under way - will have religion at its core.
heaven help us.
(see a related post here.)
mike rucker
fairburn, georgia, usa
mikerucker.wordpress.com
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