Promoting The Golden Rule  

AFP reports this year's TED Prize has spawned a meta-religion via a web site called Charter for Compassion - World asked to help craft online charter for religious harmony

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.

This sort of thing tends to wind up old-school anti-New World Order tinfoil types no end (being an atheist it tends to leave me mostly unmoved and it sounds harmless enough - so long as no one tries to make it compulsory for all). Kevin at Cryptogon has a fairly restrained rant on the subject - World Asked to Help Craft Online Charter for Religious Harmony.

The old tinfoil is a fully unfurled, in-your-face fact now.

I’m not a religious person, but all of the world’s religions contain memes that, if followed, would produce the rhetorical peace on earth effect that the elite say that they desire. Why not encourage religious people to focus on the “golden rule” aspects of their own religions WITHIN their own religions? The problem isn’t different religions. The problem is far more related to the fact that societies have become gigantic psychopath hatcheries. New mumbo jumbo isn’t going to solve the psychopath problem, especially when the worst offenders are sitting highest in the temple, or should I say, pyramid?

The elite are smart in some ways, but they’re really stupid in others. Of their many plans, the One World Religion is the most boneheaded and doomed to fail. How many flavors of each major religion are there? HA.

The existing religions, or factions within them, will call this the Devil, or some equivalent, and they’ll never buy into it.

Oh well, at least the mask is off and the debate about whether They want this or not is over.

Note: Stanford Research Institute already went through this exercise with Changing Images of Man in the 1970s.