TED prize winner Karen Armstrong launched her TED wish at the National Press Club in DC today. Simultaneously, hundreds of groups worldwide, both secular and faithful, celebrated the Charter for Compassion, Armstrong’s call for the world’s adults to re-insert the Golden Rule into our daily existence.

I covered one such event today for InMenlo.com, the hyperlocal blog that spouse Linda and good friend Scott Loftesness cooked up some months ago. Interestingly the Charter includes language that I, who has spent a lifetime struggling with faith, found immediately sympathetic:

We acknowledge that we have failed to live compassionately and that some have even increased the sum of human misery in the name of religion.

Oh yeah. We’re definitely not wild about mindless fundamentalists of any stripe, or mindless secular ideologues, either. Secular extremists are just as vile as religious extremists, in my very humble opinion. Faith, however you want to describe it, keeps this world from going completely to the hell that religion, in its many guises, works to produce.  Ms. Armstrong is onto something, and TED has risen in my estimation for supporting her work…

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