The Dubai Expat Diaries

We urge you to take a moment to watch a short video that went live on the web today. Beautifully filmed and edited by Jesse Dylan and his team at Form TV, it might just be the most inspiring thing you see this week. 

At TED2008 in March of this year, TED Prize winner Karen Armstrong was granted a wish to change the world. This is what she asked for:

“I wish that you would help with the creation, launch and propagation of a Charter for Compassion, crafted by a group of leading inspirational thinkers from the three Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and based on the fundamental principles of universal justice and respect.”

Since then support for idea has built among numerous religious groups, spiritual leaders such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan, and Britain’s first female Rabbi Julia Neuberger have joined a special Council to oversee the Charter, and Kluster, a collaborative decision making platform, has built a groundbreaking site that will allow anyone to contribute to the Charter.

This video, and this website (www.charterforcompassion.com) mark the launch of an inspiring global endeavor to celebrate compassion and to promote a new collaboration between the world’s religions. What we’re doing, starting today, is to begin writing the Charter for Compassion that Karen Armstrong called for earlier this year when she made her TED Prize wish. 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 we’re* (*refers to TED) using special collaborative web tools created by the geniuses at Kluster to enable this be truly a charter “created by the world for the world”. Later this week millions of Muslims, Christians, and Jews will be sent an email inviting them to come to the site and offer their choice of words, 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. Join the world at http://www.charterforcompassion.org to write the Charter for Compassion. The Charter brings together the voices of people from all religions. It seeks to remind the world that while all faiths are not the same, they all share the core principle of compassion and the Golden Rule.

The Charter will change the tenor of the conversation around religion.

It will be a clarion call to the world.

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