Comment by jwiegley on 26/11/2017 at 22:55 UTC

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View submission: Religion teacher trying to understand the Baha'i Faith.

I'm not sure we try to reconcile each religion's later institutionalized beliefs with their associated Manifestation of God.

That is, we believe in the divine origin of Christ as a Messenger from God, and the Bible as the spirit of His Teachings, but this doesn't mean we take on the burden of reconciling later Christianity (and its many christologies) with Christ Himself. For example, you can google for "did Christ believe He was God", and see debates between learned Christians on whether He did or didn't think or say this.

In Bahá’í thought, Chris is both God, *in relation to humanity*, and is not God, *in relation to God's Unknowable Essence*.

For Buddhism, it's hard to know exactly how much of Buddha's exact words are captured in the centuries-later writings we have. That they evince the spirit of Buddha's message is without a doubt, given their continued efficacy. But what do "God" and "self" and "rebirth" really mean? Did those ideas become overtly flavored by a cultural background that sought to re-explain the concepts in a doctrinal context?

For example, if you read the Kitáb-i-Íqán's description of the true seeker, and how he must purify himself before being capable of recognizing God -- and then squint a bit -- several of the Buddhists ideas about "self" and "God" (i.e., the God of our conceptions) begin to line up quite nicely. The Íqán evens goes into some depth on the ideas of "life", "death", "rebirth" and "resurrection", which make it sound like it's not the ideas the Manifestations ever disagreed on, but humanity's misunderstanding of those conceptions.

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