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Religion, Secular Morality, and What CompassionReally Means for Our Shared Human Futureby Maria Popova

“Compassion… asks us to look into our own hearts, discover what gives us pain, and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to

inflict that pain on anybody else.”

“Have compassion for everyone you meet,”Lucinda Williams sings, for “you do not know what wars are

 going on down there, where the spirit meets the bone.” This ode to what should be our baseline behavior to

one another echoes like a great secular psalm in the cathedral of the human experience — a sorely needed

one, and yet one which humanity has a long history of tuning out, to its own detriment.

Karen Armstrong joined a convent at the age of seventeen, but soon found herself both miserable and, per 

her own admission, a failure! as a nun. "even years later, she left and decided to become a secular

scholar, cutting off all ties to religion and setting out to study #nglish Literature in $xford. %ut what she

learned about instead — and what she dedicated the next four decades of her life to — was compassion.

&lthough it might not seem this way — especially amid today's gruesome distortions of spiritual

traditions, which are hardly new — &rmstrong was startled to find, through her secular back door, that

compassion was the common core of all religions. "he became a historian of religion, received the

 prestigious ()**,*** T#+ ri-e in **/ for her work promoting interfaith dialogue, and founded

the 0harter for 0ompassion, a multilingual effort to transmute the world's religions into a force of global

harmony rather than discord, enlisting leading thinkers from a wide range of religious and moral traditions.

&rmstrong encapsulates a lifetime of studying and championing this height of the human spirit in the

wonderfully wise, urgently necessary book Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life 1 public library2. "he

writes3

One of the chief tasks of our time must surely be to build a global community in which all peoples can live together

in mutual respect; yet religion, which should be making a major contribution, is seen as part of the problem. All faiths

insist that compassion is the test of true spirituality and that it brings us into relation with the transcendence we call

God, Brahman, irvana, or !ao. "ach has formulated its own version of what is sometimes called the Golden

#ule, $!o not treat others as you would not like them to treat you,% or in its positive form, $Always treat others as youwould wish to be treated yourself.% &urther, they all insist that you cannot confine your benevolence to your own

group; you must have concern for everybody ' even your enemies.

&rmstrong counters the la-iness of the commonly held opinion that religion is the cause of all major wars

in history3

(n fact, the causes of conflict are usually greed, envy, and ambition, but in an effort to saniti)e them, these self*

serving emotions have often been cloaked in religious rhetoric. +here has been much flagrant abuse of religion in

recent years. +errorists have used their faith to justify atrocities that violate its most sacred values. (n the #oman

atholic hurch, popes and bishops have ignored the suffering of countless women and children by turning a blindeye to the se-ual abuse committed by their priests. ome religious leaders seem to behave like secular politicians,

http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/01/08/karen-armstrong-compassion/http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/01/08/karen-armstrong-compassion/http://www.brainpickings.org/author/mpopova/http://www.brainpickings.org/author/mpopova/http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/11/04/lucinda-williams-compassion/http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/11/04/lucinda-williams-compassion/http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/01/charlie-hebdo-shooting-parishttp://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/01/charlie-hebdo-shooting-parishttp://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/01/charlie-hebdo-shooting-parishttp://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/24/mark-twain-on-slavery-empathy-compassion/http://www.ted.com/participate/ted-prizehttp://www.ted.com/participate/ted-prizehttp://charterforcompassion.org/http://charterforcompassion.org/http://charterforcompassion.org/http://www.amazon.com/Twelve-Steps-Compassionate-Karen-Armstrong/dp/0307742881/?tag=braipick-20http://www.worldcat.org/title/twelve-steps-to-a-compassionate-life/oclc/630500252&referer=brief_resultshttp://www.brainpickings.org/author/mpopova/http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/11/04/lucinda-williams-compassion/http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/01/charlie-hebdo-shooting-parishttp://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/01/charlie-hebdo-shooting-parishttp://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/24/mark-twain-on-slavery-empathy-compassion/http://www.ted.com/participate/ted-prizehttp://charterforcompassion.org/http://www.amazon.com/Twelve-Steps-Compassionate-Karen-Armstrong/dp/0307742881/?tag=braipick-20http://www.worldcat.org/title/twelve-steps-to-a-compassionate-life/oclc/630500252&referer=brief_resultshttp://www.brainpickings.org/2015/01/08/karen-armstrong-compassion/http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/01/08/karen-armstrong-compassion/

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singing the praises of their own denomination and decrying their rivals with scant regard for charity/ !isputes that

were secular in origin, such as the Arab*(sraeli conflict, have been allowed to fester and become $holy,% and once

they have been sacrali)ed, positions tend to harden and become resistant to pragmatic solutions. And yet at the

same time we are bound together more closely than ever before through the electronic media/ (n a world in which

small groups will increasingly have powers of destruction hitherto confined to the nation*state, it has becomeimperative to apply the Golden #ule globally, ensuring that all peoples are treated as we would wish to be treated

ourselves. (f our religious and ethical traditions fail to address this challenge, they will fail the test of our time.

&rmstrong 4uotes the final version of the 0harter for 0ompassion, which was launched in 5ovember of

**6 and came to embody this spirit by offering an antidote to the voices of extremism, intolerance, and

hatred3

+he principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat

all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. ompassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of

our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honor theinviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without e-ception, with absolute justice, e0uity

and respect.

(t is also necessary in both public and private life to refrain consistently and empathically from inflicting pain. +o act or 

speak violently out of spite, chauvinism or self*interest, to impoverish, e-ploit or deny basic rights to anybody, and to

incite hatred by denigrating others ' even our enemies ' is a denial of our common humanity.

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3e urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polari)ed world. #ooted in a

principled determination to transcend selfishness, compassion can break down political, dogmatic, ideological and

religious boundaries. Born of our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to human relationships and to a

fulfilled humanity.

%ut compassion can't be enacted without first grasping its essence in a way that reclaims it from the realm

of abstraction and makes it an actionable 4uality. &rmstrong offers a necessary definition3

ompassion is aptly summed up in the Golden #ule, which asks us to look into our own hearts, discover what

gives us pain, and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else.

ompassion can be defined, therefore, as an attitude of principled, consistent altruism.

7n fact, the first person to formulate the 8olden 9ule predated the founding figures of 0hristianity and

7slam by five centuries and a millennium, respectively — when asked which of his teachings his disciples

should practice most tenaciously, all day and every day,! the 0hinese sage 0onfucius 1::);

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ade0uately correspond to any of the familiar categories of his day. (t could be understood only by somebody who

practiced it perfectly and was inconceivable to anybody who did not. A person who behaved with ren $all day and

every day% would become a jun)i, a $mature human being.%

0ompassion, thus, is a matter of orienting oneself toward the rest of humanity, implicitly re4uiring a

transcendence of self>interest and egotism. 0enturies later, the three major monotheistic religions would

arrive at strikingly similar conclusions — but the compassionate disposition is indiscriminately ennobling,

whether its manifestations come from the secular world or the religious, and something we have

historically admired in human beings from all backgrounds. &rmstrong illustrates this with some familiar

examples3

3hen we encounter a truly compassionate man or woman we feel enhanced. +he names of the 4uaker prison

reformer "li)abeth &ry 56789:689:6?69=, the hospital reformer, and !orothy !ay

568?7:6?89=, founder of the atholic 3orker movement, have all become bywords for heroic philanthropy. !espite

the fact that they were women in an aggressively male society, all three succeeded in making the compassionateideal a practical, effective, and enduring force in a world that was in danger of forgetting it. +he immense public

veneration of @ahatma Gandhi 568?:6?8=, @artin uther Cing Dr. 56?>?:6?8=, elson @andela, and the !alai

ama shows that people are hungry for a more compassionate and principled form of leadership/ But in many

ways compassion is alien to our modern way of life. +he capitalist economy is intensely competitive and

individualistic, and goes out of its way to encourage us to put ourselves first.

%ut &rmstrong laments — and 7 wistfully agree — that compassion has slipped woefully low in our

hierarchy of cultural priorities. #ven those of us most resolutely resistant to succumbing to the epidemic of 

cynicism can't help but notice the systematic eradication of compassion from even our small everyday

gestures to one another and our most basic forms of public discourse. 9ecently, for instance, when a certain prominent young entrepreneur announced his resolution to read a book every two weeks in the new year, a

headline cropped up on the internet instantly denouncing his aspiration as a shameless act of propaganda.!

?ow did cynicism gobble us up so completely as to automatically dismiss even the possibility of

earnestness@ What failure of compassion has led us this far astray from even holding up a mirror to one

another's highest selves and not our basest, or even giving each other the benefit of the doubt@

&nd yet 7 continue to side with #.%. White's beautiful case for keeping faith in the human spirit, for as

long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread

and the scene is not desolate.! This is what renders the entirety of &rmstrong's Twelve Steps to a

Compassionate Life, in which she goes on to outline how to cultivate this vital and vitali-ing virtue in our

everyday secular lives, so very emboldening and so very necessary.

0omplement it with +avid +e"teno on the psychology of compassion, artist &nn Truitt on what it means

to extend it to others, and Aark Twain on how he learned about it from his mother .

http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/05/06/e-b-white-letters-of-note-book/http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/05/06/e-b-white-letters-of-note-book/http://www.amazon.com/Twelve-Steps-Compassionate-Karen-Armstrong/dp/0307742881/?tag=braipick-20http://www.amazon.com/Twelve-Steps-Compassionate-Karen-Armstrong/dp/0307742881/?tag=braipick-20http://www.amazon.com/Twelve-Steps-Compassionate-Karen-Armstrong/dp/0307742881/?tag=braipick-20http://www.brainpickings.org/2012/10/22/david-desteno-compassion-resilience-poptech/http://www.brainpickings.org/2012/10/22/david-desteno-compassion-resilience-poptech/http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/09/12/anne-truitt-humility-compassion-righteousness/http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/09/12/anne-truitt-humility-compassion-righteousness/http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/09/12/anne-truitt-humility-compassion-righteousness/http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/09/12/anne-truitt-humility-compassion-righteousness/http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/24/mark-twain-on-slavery-empathy-compassion/http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/24/mark-twain-on-slavery-empathy-compassion/http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/24/mark-twain-on-slavery-empathy-compassion/http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/05/06/e-b-white-letters-of-note-book/http://www.amazon.com/Twelve-Steps-Compassionate-Karen-Armstrong/dp/0307742881/?tag=braipick-20http://www.amazon.com/Twelve-Steps-Compassionate-Karen-Armstrong/dp/0307742881/?tag=braipick-20http://www.brainpickings.org/2012/10/22/david-desteno-compassion-resilience-poptech/http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/09/12/anne-truitt-humility-compassion-righteousness/http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/09/12/anne-truitt-humility-compassion-righteousness/http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/24/mark-twain-on-slavery-empathy-compassion/