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Ted Turner's rousing nine minute speech was the highlight of the main UN session. His talk here is edited for space
I've been thinking of this conference for a lot of years. When I was a little boy, I was very religious. I was born into a Christian family and went to a Christian school, and I became a Christian, just like you become whatever you're exposed to as a little child. I was going to be a man of the cloth. I'd be sitting out there with you, and I would have loved that life. I really would. I was going to be a missionary. First I studied Christianity, but later I started studying the world's great religions and reading and was always thinking.
The thing that disturbed me is that my religious Christian sect was very intolerant. Not intolerant of religious freedom for other people, but they thought we were the only ones going to heaven. The Catholics weren't going to heaven, the other Protestants weren't going to heaven. The Jews weren't going to heaven, the Muslims weren't going to heaven, the Hindus weren't. The Shintos...I mean, nobody was going to heaven but just us! And there weren't but just a very few of us. I figured it wasn't even one percent of the world's population. It just confused the devil out of me. I said, "Heaven is going to be a very empty place with nobody else there." So I was pretty confused, and I was kind of turned off by it because, I said, "It can't be right!" Then I spent a lot more time studying and thinking.
Finally, in the last ten or twenty years, I have gotten to know indigenous people, native Americans... There is a lot to be learned from indigenous people. After all, they were here for millions of years. There are so many different languages, so many different forms of music, so much different dance, so many different cultures, but basically we are all the same. We love our children. We love our wives. We love our husbands. We love our religions. We love birds and butterflies. We love flowers, and we like to go on vacations. So I thought, "Maybe, instead of all these different Gods, maybe there's one God who manifests Himself and revealed Himself in different ways to different people." What about that, huh? All right!
When most of the great religions were started thousands of years ago, people didn't travel very much. We lived in little enclaves, and what we did didn't effect people, and we could afford to have fights with each other. Most of the fights in those days were with fists, like in prize fights, in boxing. You beat him up, then you helped him up, and that was the end of it. So in those days fighting wasn't that big a deal--no weapons of mass destruction, no civilians were getting hurt, not very much anyway.
In World War II some people still thought there were more than one race of man. There was the black race, the yellow race, and the red man... Remember, Hitler thought that there was an Aryan race. There's no such thing as an Aryan race! We now know because the scientists and the archeologists have demonstrated that we are just one human race. We are one human race. It's us! And we all came from Africa originally and spread out all over the world. We've got different colors because the white people lived in the North, and the dark people lived in the South. I mean, that's the way bears are. The bears in the North are white and the bears in the South are black. They are still bears, for Christ sake!
So, we are all one race and there is only one God that manifests Himself in different ways, but the religions that have survived are the ones that are built on love. I mean, God had to love us, didn't He? We wouldn't have made it if He had hated us. He would have gotten rid of us.
So what we have to do now is to work together. A lot of terrible things have been done in the name of religion over the past thousands of years, and we just can't afford it anymore. Now we've got nuclear weapons, poison gas and land mines and aerial bombardment, and it's not safe....
It's time to get rid of hatred.
It's time to get rid of prejudice. It's time to have love and respect and
tolerance for each other, care about each other, work together to survive.
I can't believe that God wants us to blow ourselves to kingdom come. I
can't believe He put us here so that would be our final act. I mean, I
think He wants us to love each other, live in peace and harmony and figure
out how to solve the horrible, grinding problems of poverty, to have a
more equitable, fairer, kinder, more peaceful, gentle loving world.
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