Comment by usernamesaretrite on 25/06/2017 at 23:41 UTC*

7 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)

View submission: Quick Questions on the Baha'i Faith

Welcome!

1. In short, they are all equally revered because Baha’is view them to be spiritually unified/in a state of oneness. It can get a little more complicated than that but still the answer remains essentially the same.

2. The Baha’is are new & poor. Additionally, the Faith is very widespread so as a byproduct, the wealth is similarly spread out and thus very few dedicated meeting houses exist (like the one in D.C. on 16th street). u/chaun2 mentioned the Houses of Worship and those would be more akin to churches. On this topic I will just briefly mention that Abraham was rejected for saying God is everywhere and does not necessitate a dedicated space to pray to Him. I always remember this when thinking about the supposed sacredness of a space.

3. I think the Baha’is have a lot to learn on this subject and I would caution against any answers provided. For example, I would even challenge the notion that everyone has to be a Baha’i as a pre-requisite for any world unifying federation.

4. This necessitates a long answer. Baha’is believe spiritual laws do not change, but material laws (what you can eat, when a man/woman is dirty, etc) change. Based on this premise, here are my interpretations on why the material laws might need to change and thereby create a perceived dichotomy:

• The Manifestations of God could only reveal/discuss that which the people of the time could understand. Sometimes the teaching was misunderstood either originally or when it was reintroduced by a later Manifestation and so there is an apparent dichotomy, when in reality it is a correction to the original teaching.

• Sometimes the people themselves have changed and thus the law needs to be updated. Thus the later Manifestation ‘updates’ the law to reflect the current time period and believers see this as a conflicting statement. I would say this is the most common.

• Sometimes the law had to change for just that Revelation in order to accomplish a task and then be changed back later.

• Sometimes the Messenger Himself had to correct what He previously said, thus appearing to contradict Himself many times while another viewpoint would see this simply as an update to His Teaching. A very clear example of this is Muhammad’s introduction to not drink alcohol. He introduced this teaching very gradually over the course of many years, each time limiting the number of drinks until it reached 0.

Either way, for Baha’is and I would say for anyone that believes in the spiritual truths behind the story of Noah, God can do whatever He wants at any time. His reasoning for doing so is typically beyond our comprehension. Either way, the laws have a purpose and a wisdom to them that tends to come out when followed.

5 Current expansion of the Baha’i Faith is a hard thing to measure because the numbers are not released publicly on a county level that we could then use to then track individual communities. Non-Baha’i sources provide some polling data that is more county based but that obviously raises accuracy concerns. From a very high level, the Baha’i Faith has not grown much for the past 15 years. I’m sure we all have our theories on why this is so. I’m curious as to why you are curious about this. Definitely within Baha’i circles it’s a question discussed.

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Comment by chicagoshufflin at 26/06/2017 at 00:06 UTC

4 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Thank you so much for some great answers, this is basically exactly what I was looking forward to. As to why I asked about the state of expansion, I guess it's because it seems like the Baha'i Faith is by its nature inclusive and expansionist. As you mention, world unity doesn't mandate everyone be of the Faith, but after reading the Universal House of Justice's letter to the Peoples of the World, it might be the easiest or most straight forward route as it holds itself up as a model to examine. So with that in mind, I would assume large scale growth would be desirable, as it was in the Pacific Islands of a few decades past, but I don't think I've heard of it in that sort of context as of late. So I guess my question was geared more toward whether there is growth that I'm not aware of, or if that was even a concern for the average member.