Religion is often a divisive topic, but there are certain beliefs that are shared so closely between faiths that they can unify people across all backgrounds. The Golden Rule is one such belief.

Karen Armstrong

Official Spiel: As she accepts her 2008 TED Prize, author and scholar Karen Armstrong talks about how the Abrahamic religions — Islam, Judaism, Christianity — have been diverted from the moral purpose they share to foster compassion. But Armstrong has seen a yearning to change this fact. People want to be religious, she says; we should act to help make religion a force for harmony. She asks the TED community to help her build a Charter for Compassion — to help restore the Golden Rule as the central global religious doctrine.

My Spiel: The talk is largely about the Golden Rule, “treat others the way you would like
to be treated”, and about how compassion is at the heart of every major world religion. The speaker was in a convent, then left disenchanted. In time she came back to religion after studying other religions and realizing that it is action aligned with your beliefs that matters, not blind belief alone, and that everything else in a religion is mere window dressing to the application of the Golden Rule.

In talking to my atheist engineer/geek friends I have found that their disagreement with religion comes when religious people use religion to a)  forward non-religious political ends b) defend their own actions in the face of all logic to the contrary or c) to excuse hatred or bigotry.  Most atheists I know believe in the Golden Rule themselves and lost religion in their youth because they found hypocrisy instead of compassion in their Sunday sermons.

A compassionate talk, strongly recommended.

Sometimes it seems the world is just stuffed with good men and women.

Official Spiel: Accepting his 2008 TED Prize, physicist Neil Turok speaks out for talented young Africans starved of opportunity: by unlocking and nurturing the continent’s creative potential, we can create a change in Africa’s future. Turok asks the TED community to help him expand the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences by opening 15 new centers across Africa in five years. By adding resources for entrepreneurship to this proven model, he says, we can create a network for progress across the continent — and perhaps discover an African Einstein.

My Spiel: This is an honest, good man, who is doing something effective by creating a postgraduate institution for learning in Africa in mathematics and asking TED to create 15 more institutions in other fields.

What really struck me in watching this video is how many brilliant TED speakers have come from an impoverished area, found a way to escape into higher education via Europe or the U.S. and then returned home to help their kinsmen with some brilliant, innovative idea. When they returned they carried contacts, knowledge and skills they could have never attained by staying home. I hear of the “brain drain” from time to time, and I can only think that if there is a chance, any chance, to return home and help their old neighbors with their new skills that many will choose to do so and have in fact done so.

When you watch the video pay particular attention to the equation he shows that summarizes all of the fundamental physics we know to be true in the universe. Note how few names go with each piece of the equation: Schroedinger, Feynman, Einstein, etc. There are a few men, men far brighter than I or, with my apologies you, that change the way we define the universe or the structure of society and livingness. We waste these precious resources in impoverished nations by starving them with lack of opportunity.

I am sitting in a darkened room at work at 9:30pm on a Wednesday, surrounded by robotic parts and wiring diagrams, and wondering how I could possibly channel anything I do into something as significant as Neil Turok’s work.

Well, any young/brilliant/inspired/hopeful/unappreciated/other folks out there with a fire for robotics, drop me a line- I’ll show you my robots. It’s a start.