Charter For Compassion

I wanted to draw your attention to a short video that went live on the web a few days ago. If you have some spare surfing time then please do click through and have a look. It’s very inspiring.

It marks the launch of a global endeavor to celebrate compassion and promote collaboration between the world’s religions. The background to it is a TED Prize wish by Karen Armstrong, calling for a Charter for Compassion.

And the exhilarating twist here is that the writing won’t be done behind closed doors. It will be done by you… and perhaps millions of others around the world. Because they’re using special collaborative web tools created by the geniuses at Kluster (a collaborative decision making platform) to enable this be truly a charter “created by the world for the world”.

Millions of people around the world will be contributing, in their own language, to help create a charter capable of inspiring the world to focus on what the great religions share, as opposed to what divides them. Already people are responding to this amazing idea with passion and excitement. The goal is to obtain all input from global participants within the next four weeks, select the best contributions with the help of a council of religious “sages”, and conduct a major launch of the finished document in 2009.

Although Buddhism is a philosophy, not a religion, I think this is very exciting and very relevant to something we all hold close to our hearts.