Via Breitbart:
A website launched Friday with the backing of technology industry and Hollywood elite urges people worldwide to help craft a framework for harmony between all religions.
The Charter for Compassion project on the Internet at www.charterforcompassion.org springs from a “wish” granted this year to religious scholar Karen Armstrong at a premier Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference in California.
“Tedizens” include Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin along with other Internet icons as well as celebrities such as Forest Whittaker and Cameron Diaz.
Wishes granted at TED envision ways to better the world and come with a promise that Tedizens will lend their clout and capabilities to making them come true.
Armstrong’s wish is to combine universal principles of respect and compassion into a charter based on a “golden rule” she believes is at the core of every major religion.
The Golden Rule essentially calls on people to do unto others as they would have done unto them.
“The chief task of our time is to build a global society where people of all persuasions can live together in peace and harmony,” Armstrong said.
“If we do not achieve this, it seems unlikely that we will have a viable world to hand on to the next generation.”
Charter for Compassion invites people from “all faiths, nationalities, languages and backgrounds” to help draft statements of principles and actions that should be taken.
Karen Armstrong is British, a former nun and academic who achieved international prominence several years ago with her book, ‘The History of God’. Several of her books, including her tome on Mohammed and its depiction of the Banu Qurayza tribe’s treatment at Mohammed’s hands, have been criticized as sacrificing truth to hagiography.
She strikes me as typical of the entropic thinker dominating public discourse today. Having a British theological education myself, I’ve come to recognize the type. There is a certain kind of mind that can’t live with rigor and clear distinctions and avoids friction by repeating, ‘It’s all the same.’ So, she now has a high profile project. The ‘Council of Sages’ listed on the project website include some interesting characters indeed (while also betraying a certain grandiosity).
Sister Joan Chittister is a Benedictine nun who has worked to undermine Vatican policy on abortion and the ordination of women. Desmond Tutu is, of course, the Anglican cleric who labored to abolish apartheid in South Africa but now cultivates celebrity while confusing leftist orthodoxy with the Christian variety. And then there’s Tariq Ramadan, whose U.S. visa was revoked in 2004 for his Islamist activities. Daniel Pipes described the visa issue in an article from that year.
And the whole project is sponsored by TED. But what’s TED?
‘TED’ stands for ‘Technology, Entertainment and Design’, and seems to be an updated – and turbocharged – version of the old Cooper Union. Begun and maintained by techno-glitterati, it’s currently the creature of The Sapling Foundation, a 501(c)(3) entity. It’s a substantial private foundation – its 2006 Form 990 shows income of just under $5 million. It claims to be an idea factory.
Core to this goal is a belief that there is no greater force for changing the world than a powerful idea. Consider:
An idea can be created out of nothing except an inspired imagination.
An idea weighs nothing.
It can be transferred across the world at the speed of light for virtually zero cost.
And yet an idea, when received by a prepared mind, can have extraordinary impact.
It can reshape that mind’s view of the world.
It can dramatically alter the behavior of the mind’s owner.
It can cause the mind to pass on the idea to others.
Of course, all this begs the question of (1) whether there really are any new ideas (as opposed to reams of new data), (2) whether all ideas are good ideas, and (3) where ideas come from in the first place.
TED seems to think they spontaneously generate in the imagination. I disagree. Most ideas (as distinguished from mere data) about the world and the human condition have been around for millenia and have been written about and discussed by successive generations. Only the current crop of chronological illiterates could vainly imagine that they think any new thoughts.
Further, this happy-smiley credo seems to assume that ideas are morally neutral things. I suspect a good reading of history (without the hagiography and entropics) would convince any honest student of just the opposite and that Crocker’s Postulate is always valid: that ideas have consequences and bad ideas have lethal consequences. But nobody seems to want a good classical or biblical education these days.
(Webster’s definition of ‘entropic’: the degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity or disorder.)
No related posts.
Twitter
Facebook
RSS
LinkedIn