---

From friberg@will.brl.ntt.jpThu Apr 4 10:49:16 1996
Date: Fri, 5 Apr 96 0:10:25 JST
From: "Stephen R. Friberg"
To: talisman@indiana.edu
Subject: Religion, science, and religious liberalism

Dear Friends:

The current debate on Talisman shows why scientists doubt both those in the
humanities and those in the religions. Irrational, highly emotional, full of
sound and fury: it makes scientists appreciate their own reasoned, moderate
ways of discussing things. Certainly, when no experiment or observation can
resolve the problem, argument, fighting, and eventually violence must
invariably result. We look askance, go back to our mathematics and texts,
dismissive of the whole business.

Is my description of a scientist's perception of the futility of the
nonscientist's arguments too strongly drawn? We had better hope so. But it
highlights an aspect of the division between the culture of science and the
culture of humanities/arts/religion. Scientists view the nonscientific
disciplines as both lacking the means to arrive at shared truths and full of
people eager to hold sway by manipulative, irrational argumentation.

Is this too cool, all too common assessment correct? One might expect those
from the humanities to think not. Indeed, postmodernist attacks on once
firmly held scientific verities suggests an attempt to turn the tables.
Scientists too, postmodernists argue, are merely obeying convention, blinding
following rules, victims and perpetrators of institutional violence. However,
a stronger trend in the humanities, I would argue, is to adopt scientific
methods and usages, attempt to increase the use of arithmetical and
statistical techniques, and attempt to emulate the objective stance of
science. (A wag might argue that this is only means cloaking irrational,
emotional, manipulative argumentation in a veil of rationalism.)

What about religionists? How do they respond to the reasonableness of
science? One way, a way that Juan urges us to consider, is religious
liberalism. A good reference book, The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Modern
Christian Thought, has this to say about religious liberalism:

" . . . a single principle may be said to underlie all liberal
theological effort: that the claims of truth are ultimately higher than those
of revelation." (From liberalism: Britain)

"Liberal Christian theologies in North America have generally
maintained that religious beliefs are fallible and are thus to be held
tentatively, that reason and experience in some combination provide the
fundamental tests of beliefs, that divine and human realities are continuous
rather than oppositional, and that central to Christianity is its ethical
dimension, social as well as personal. Perhaps their most consistent mark,
however, is a methodological one: the supposition that theology should always
interrelate the spirit of its own time and the Christian past in a manner
that allows each to make an essential and substantive difference to the
formulation of theological claims." (From liberalism:USA)


Liberal American theologies flourished from around 1890 to about 1930 or so.
One of the two major schools of thought was the "Chicago School."
Representative scholars of this school were not only some of the most erudite
of the day, but active in the church and among society:

" . . . they devoted the full range of their activities to
propagating a blend of political progressivism, confidence in reason, science
and democracy, and a reconstructed Christian Faith. The key to their
reconstruction was the socio-historical' method. (They) interpreted
Christianity as a socio-historical movement the beliefs of which were to be
understood and evaluated pragmatically.

" . . . theirs was a dual allegiance, to Christianity and to the
spirit of their time. They hoped beyond hope that the esence of each would
turn out to be the same. Hence, for a while, they acted on that hope,
constantly adjusting their view of what the one really' meant in the light of
what seemed at the time to be the best in the other. By the end of the
1920's, however, the strategy seemed futile . . .. In particular, the
scientific spirit that once promised support for a modernized Christianity
was now increasingly hostile to all religion. On their left, the humanists
championed loyalty to modernity alone. On their right fundamentalists
advocated Faithfulness to Christianity alone." (From liberalism: USA).

Does Christian religious liberalism offer hope for us? Let us delay judgment
for a while until better arguments can be advanced. Clearly, what we
learn from the above is interesting to us as an explanation of the
thunder and lightning on Talisman. But we have yet to learn what it
offers with regards to reconciling the two cultures.

Yours respectively,
Stephen R. Friberg

From nineteen@onramp.netThu Apr 4 12:08:56 1996
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 96 10:56:44 -0500
From: "Richard C. Logan"
To: Joan Jensen
Cc: Talisman
Subject: Re: Thanks

> I personally have
>known several budding seekers who declined to continue in the exploration
>of the Baha'is Faith over this issue.


Are you certain that's the true reason? Does Baha'u'llah not say that
the "true seeker" must cleanse their heart of all love and hate, "lest
that love blindly icline him to error, or that hate repel him from the
truth."

Richard

Richard C. Logan nineteen@onramp.net
Maintain HomePage "The Baha'is of Lubbock"
http://rampages.onramp.net/~nineteen/

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
How manifold are the truths which must remain unuttered until the
appointed time is come! Even as it has been said:
"Not everything that a man knoweth can be disclosed, nor can
everything that he can disclose be regarded as timely, nor can every
timely utterance be considered as suited to the capacity of those who
hear it." --Gleanings from the writings of Baha'u'llah
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++



From jrcole@umich.eduThu Apr 4 17:56:04 1996
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 12:08:01 -0500 (EST)
From: Juan R Cole
To: "Stephen R. Friberg"
Cc: talisman@indiana.edu
Subject: Re: Religion, science, and religious liberalism



Stephen: Thanks for putting the time into that very useful and incisive
posting.

1) On the divide between the hard sciences and the humanities/social
sciences: Physicists lose their tempers too. One of the reasons adduced
for the lack of women in the hard sciences, in fact, is the rough and
tumble nature of discourse in those fields (this reasoning depends on an
image of women as having their feelings more easily hurt than men and
unable to give as good as they get in an argument, so I'm not sure it
holds water). Someone will give a paper, and a physicist in the audience
will stand up and say, "If you had half a brain you would have tried
this: . .!" Indeed, since the hard sciences are about relatively simple
things such that they can be relatively easily empirically verified,
mistakes in them are ridiculed much more forcefully than in a social
science such as anthropology, where both theory formation and
verification are often very difficult and sometimes virtually impossible,
because of the complexity of human beings and of human societies.

2) As for theological liberalism, I object to the characterization of it
as the proposition that reason outweighs revelation. That is the
Unitarian-Universalist formulation, but many Lutheran, Methodist, and
indeed Muslim liberal theologians would not assent to it.
For me, theological liberalism has as its premise that "revelation"
cannot come to imperfect beings perfectly; it has to be expressed in a
language, and with a set of cultural, scientific and other assumptions
that are *historically conditioned and bounded*. Baha'u'llah Himself
complains about being constrained to talk to humans in their own,
inadequate language. *Therefore*, one cannot immediately know what in
the scriptures is a pure revelation, and what is a side
effect of the medium in which the revelation is revealed.

One needs reason and empirical evidence as ways of checking
scriptural texts to distinguish in them between revelation and contingent
statements. Thus, historical documentation leads us to conclude that it is
highly unlikely that Socrates journeyed to the Middle East; that David and
Solomon were contemporaries of Pythagoras and Empedocles; or that Jesus was
believed by early Christians to have no father. A vast accumulation of
archeological, biological and genetic information has confirmed Darwin's
central insights about human descent from earlier primates and
relatedness to the apes. All this leads me to conclude that statements
to the contrary, found in Baha'i scripture, do not constitute revealed
truth, but are contingent flotsam in the sea of Revelation.

I think this theological liberalism helps make religion plausible
to thinking people, whereas fundamentalist insistence that everything in
scripture is revealed truth and trumps all other sorts of knowledge
drives thinking people out of religion. In short, I think the 40%
atheism rate in France was produced in some large part by the hidebound
rigidity of the Roman Catholic church. And I think France is humankind's
future to some large extent. Both Catholics and Baha'is take heart from
concentrating on teaching illiterate peasants in the global South. But
the peasants are all moving to the cities. Their children may be
factory workers and literate. Their grandchildren may be white collar,
educated persons not so different from the French atheists.

So the *long-term* problem is not in finding a way to make the
Baha'i faith plausible to illiterate peasants, though village teaching is
praiseworthy and I have done a good deal of it myself. The *long-term*
problem is finding a way to make the Baha'i faith plausible to 22 million
French atheists (the other 60% of the French are not exactly devout
believers; only something like 12% even attend Mass regularly). That
Baha'is have so far dismally failed to make any progress whatsoever on this
front is abundantly evident. Blaming the poor French for being "apathetic"
when all we have to offer them is a folk Baha'i theology consisting of one
part fundamentalist Protestantism, one part warmed-over Catholic
antimodernism, and one part Qum-style Shi`ite legalism, is somewhat
unfair, to say the least. The French atheists have heard all that stuff
from their bishops since 1789; they are not impressed. The Catholic
church is collapsing everywhere in the technologically advanced world,
including Quebec and the US and France. For Baha'is to take up the same
cudgels and try to refight the same battles, simply dooms them to
irrelevancy in the Western world. The key questions are how to have
religion without superstition; how to have revelation that does not
constantly produce cognitive dissonance with science. It won't work
simply to dismiss science and its claims (as people on Talisman have
constantly attempted to do); these claims are *very* powerful, and are
not going away. I don't think most scientists, or even most thinking
people, would be content to lead their lives with a split mind, one part
for science and another, contradictory part, for religion, as some
Talismanians apparently do. At some point the two have to be reconciled,
or one is being dishonest with oneself.


cheers Juan Cole, History, Univ. of Michigan

From asadighi@ptialaska.netThu Apr 4 17:59:19 1996
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 08:22:06 -0900
From: "Arsalan J. Sadighi"
To: talisman@indiana.edu
Subject: Re: Women and the House

OK, now we are getting somewhere. Now it turns out that all the Hands of the
Cause and the Universal House of Justice were somehow influenced by
misogyny. That the pioneers who forsook everything they had and went to
places some so called scholars would not even spit on were all misogynists.
That sure explains a lot of things. Thank you for the clarification.

Also, where is it documented that "several leading Persian pioneers"
advocated such a thing? Are we now getting into documenting what some
individuals might say at Conventions? I have heard much worse things from
delegates including the last International Convention. Does that somehow
make it a policy statement? Does that imply that somehow the outcome of a
Convention is tainted because some delegates said some stupid things?

Let me just say that I would take the words of the Hands of the Cause of God
over some of the opinions expressed by the self-appointed interpreters of
the Text anytime, and this is even not considering what the Guardian and the
Master said about the subject. As far as I am concerned, the service and
sacrifices the Hands provided during interregnum is beyond our ability to
appreciate. It was and is the understanding of those souls who were closest
to the Guardian and understood his mind better than anyone else that women
are not eligible to serve on the House of Justice. When one takes a careful
look at the statements made by the Master, the Guardian, the House of
Justice, and studies the historical record of what the Hands had to do to
prepare the Baha'i world for the election of the Supreme Institution of God,
it does not leave any doubt in my mind that the system has worked without
any flaws.




Jackson Wrote:
The basic idea behind this comment may not have been mentioned in the
current discussion, but it has certainly been discussed. I believe the
position to be simple: either women may _not_ serve on all houses of
justice, or women _may_ serve on all houses of justice. I do not see any
way to have a split decision that permits service on some only.

I think we might note that at the time the original ruling was made that
it was seem by many as needing some leaps of interpretation to go ahead
with any election of a UHJ at all. It is not surprising that the extent
of those leaps might be calculated to be as short as possible. We must
remember that whatever the teachings supposedly propounded by the faith
that misogynism was hardly absent from the community in the 1960s.
Indeed, it is documented that in one country's national convention
several leading Persian pioneers of prominent family personally
counselled all the delegates that although women were technically eligible
for election to the NSA they would of course bear in mind that it would
be most unsuitable and an affront to the dignity of the body if a woman
were actually elected.

Jackson
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arsalan J. Sadighi

"Things are never quite as scary when you've got a best friend."

Calvin and Hobbes


From asadighi@ptialaska.netThu Apr 4 17:59:51 1996
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 08:29:15 -0900
From: "Arsalan J. Sadighi"
To: talisman@indiana.edu
Subject: Why are we so worried?

Why is it that everybody is so concerned about the Faith of God? Do we
really believe that the progress of the Faith of God depends on how we
answer a few questions about the so called inconsistent issues such as women
serving on the Supreme Body, or infallibility of one Baha'i Institution?

Let me put forward a different way of looking at this situation. Last time I
checked, this was His Cause and His Cause alone. In a sense, we have no
right or pride of ownership in it. We are all His servants and we all abide
by His bidding. So why are we so worried whether a wayward humanity is going
to accept His Cause or not? I am sure He is well aware of the so called
'inconsistencies' and has allowed enough flexibility in His Divinely ordered
system to deal with all of them. I think it is pretty self-centered to think
that the Faith's progress depends merely on how we answer some questions
about infallibility and women's membership on the Universal House of Justice.

I don't know, call me simple minded, but I don't care at all if folks don't
like it when I tell them we don't know the reason why women are not members
of the House, or if they don't like the idea of an infallible Institution.
My role is of a servant and nothing more. I deliver a message the best way I
can and the rest of it is with whoever hears the message. They can embrace
it with heart an soul, they can deny it, they can ignore it, or they can
arise against it. Not my problem! It is His problem and I am very
comfortable in letting Him deal with it. I do what I have been told and
don't worry about the consequences. I am a servant, nothing more. If I am
asked my opinion I will give it but I make sure everybody knows that what I
think is of no value. The only opinion that matters is His and His
legitimate interpreters. I know this is a hard pill to swallow for the
intellectual elite, but so be it.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arsalan J. Sadighi

"Things are never quite as scary when you've got a best friend."

Calvin and Hobbes


From asadighi@ptialaska.netThu Apr 4 18:00:07 1996
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 08:30:56 -0900
From: "Arsalan J. Sadighi"
To: talisman@indiana.edu
Subject: Re:

Richard Wrote:

> If we cannot raise our
>threshold for pain then how do we really expect to have the religion we
>all want?
>
>
>Richard C. Logan nineteen@onramp.net
>Maintain HomePage "The Baha'is of Lubbock"
>http://rampages.onramp.net/~nineteen/
>


Maybe we should consider a differing view point. It is not so much the
religion we want, but the religion He has given us. After all, it is His
Cause and He will take it where ever He wills it to go. The Faith does not
need us, we need the Faith. In the long term, what we want--no matter how
noble that may be-- is going to be negligible compared to His will.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arsalan J. Sadighi

"Things are never quite as scary when you've got a best friend."

Calvin and Hobbes




From 72110.2126@compuserve.comThu Apr 4 18:07:25 1996
Date: 04 Apr 96 14:17:41 EST
From: David Langness <72110.2126@compuserve.com>
To: Talisman@indiana.edu
Subject: Huston Smith in L.A.

Dear Talismanians,

A close friend who is also a thoughtful and incisive radio talk-show host
(yes, Virginia, such a person does exist) interviewed Huston (not Houston)
Smith here in Los Angeles yesterday.

I asked Warren to query Smith about his remarks on the Faith. (Warren
has a lifetime of search behind him, much of which has focused on the
teachings of Baha'u'llah, and often describes himself as an "irreligious
Baha'i") He felt that the question about the Faith was a tad narrow, so
instead he asked Smith what he thought the potential was for a unifying
force that could bring all religions together.

Smith replied in the cautious affirmative, and even suggested that "one
or two" such forces were now working in the world. Although he declined
to name those forces, I think we might want to read Smith's remarkably
scholarly and erudite works (read The Forgotten Truth -- a wonderful
treatise on progressive revelation and the perennial philosophy) in that
light rather than in the light of a single sentence he wrote many years
ago. I believe that Smith's views may have changed somewhat since then.

Love,

David


From Member1700@aol.comThu Apr 4 18:07:44 1996
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 14:34:49 -0500
From: Member1700@aol.com
To: Talisman@indiana.edu
Subject: Re: Bab's Martyrdom

Various accounts of the martyrdom of the Bab from non-Baha'i and non-Western
sources are included in the book MARTYRDOM OF THE BAB: A COMPILATION
published by (who else?) Kalimat Press.

Tony

From Member1700@aol.comThu Apr 4 18:11:26 1996
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 15:00:17 -0500
From: Member1700@aol.com
To: Talisman@indiana.edu
Subject: Re: 1902 Tablet

(The computer ate my first attempt to send this. Sorry if you get it twice.)

Richard-Jan:
I must say that your posting on the question of Women on the House of
Justice saddened me very much. I have read Juan's reply to your post, and I
agree with it completely. But, beyond the legalistic question, which I think
is far from settled, there is a large issue at stake. You seem to be saying
that you feel that while at one time the Baha'i Faith had the flexibility and
spirit to transcend its internal legalisms and cultural limits and respond to
the needs of humanity on a universal level, it no longer has that ability and
has lost that flexibility. If this is true, it is fatal.
Your post seems to agree with the assessment of Houston Smith that, while
the Faith originally showed some potential to become a universal religion, it
has not does so, but has simply become another parochial religion with its
own narrow agenda. That is indeed a sad conclusion. If it is true, all is
lost. I do not think that the Bab and Baha'u'llah suffered and died just to
add another religion to all the rest. I believe that their intention was to
provide humanity with a faith that could organically expand to meet the needs
of the future. If we have lost the ability to do that, it is very sad
indeed.

Tony

From 72110.2126@compuserve.comThu Apr 4 18:13:34 1996
Date: 04 Apr 96 15:12:52 EST
From: David Langness <72110.2126@compuserve.com>
To: Talisman@indiana.edu
Subject: My Friend Tom Returns

Dear Talismanians,

I heard yesterday from an old friend who I haven't seen in five years.
I'll call him Tom.

Tom wanted to call and talk about he and his wife's "re-entry into the
Faith," as he put it, after a five-year period of inactivity. He had
some fairly strong opinions -- Tom was never one to mince words -- and
I thought they might have some value in sparking discussion, so I'll
pass a few along. These are not necessarily the views of the management.

Tom has been a Baha'i for more than thirty years, as has his wife. They
have a large family, and all of their children consider themselves
Baha'is. Tom also has one of the finest minds I've ever had the privilege
of knowing. He told me that he decided very consciously to step back from
the Baha'i community, although certainly not from the teachings or his
belief in Baha'u'llah, for two reasons: first, that he felt the Baha'is
were stuck in a stultifying downward spiral in their community life; and
second, he had a very difficult time with many of the individual Baha'is
after he made large amounts of money in a very successful business. I'll
concentrate on what Tom said about number one.

"I couldn't believe it -- we went to our first feast in five years, and
there was this little dysfunctional community, smaller than when we left
it, and it was like they had turned completely inward. For God's sake,
they speak in acronyms! It took me a while to separate them all out,
but the big one was EBT! Entry by troops! Are you kidding? Where?
We've been talking about entry by troops for years, and we keep getting
further and further away from it. Get a clue! Until we start looking
out, and not in, we won't have entry by troops.

"What we see is the rise of dogmatism in the Baha'i community. We don't
want to see that, heaven knows, but there it is. We've gotten smaller,
we've grown rigid, we've become almost like some little exclusive sect
with our meetings and our acronyms and our secret passwords, and all of
that inevitably breeds dogmatic thinking and exclusion.

"When I became a Baha'i in the fifties, I thought this Faith could save
the world. Today I despair, at least in the US, whether or not it can
even save itself. Is anything happening out there? Is there growth in
anyplace around the country? I wouldn't think so, because we have this
mindset that actively prevents growth.

"I cried at the feast, I just sat there and wept. We sit around in our
rigid little living rooms and pretend that we're there out of a sense of
joy, but we're really there only out of duty. And duty to what? An
unrealized ideal of unity. If we had any real unity, if there was any
dynamism or life in the community, then it'd be different, but we don't.

"(Tom's wife) and I reached a conclusion -- what we need is a good Baha'i
comedian, somebody professional who can make us laugh about all of this,
because in a way it's profoundly funny. Some of the stuff that goes on
is just hilarious. When we stopped going to feast five years ago, the
community was arguing about the way to arrange the chairs. Five years
later, fewer people, same argument!

"And you know, it isn't the Faith itself. I think if 'Abdu'l-Baha came
to an American feast today, he wouldn't even recognize his Father's
Faith. It's us, the community. We have no vision for what brings
people to us. We have forgotten the spirit. We want to do good, but
it's like we're little children, trying to build a treehouse
without a hammer or nails.

"Can't we figure out that we've become irrelevant, and change something?

"I took one good thing away from our recent re-entry, and that's this --
things have obviously gotten so bad that we will now have to change.
If we're going to survive as a community into the next generation.

"We always thought the catastrophe was physical, nuclear, some unspeakable
worldwide violence, but it isn't, it's right here now, it's psychological,
it's in the death of our communities and the apathy of our youth and the
complete isolation from the real world we have enforced upon ourselves.

"But maybe people will get so fed up with the lifelessness that they'll
have to make radical change. I hope so."

Tom's points interested me because he seemed to have no axe to grind, but
was simply calling them as he saw them. Although some of his opinions
might seem harsh, it could be helpful to consult on them.

Love,

David


From M@upanet.uleth.caThu Apr 4 18:14:34 1996
Date: Thu, 04 Apr 1996 15:52:29 -0700
From: M
To: talisman@indiana.edu
Subject: "There is ne'er a one o' all your dead, so (foolishly) fell in fray"

Dear Friends:
I have been assiduously avoiding entering the fray re. Women on the House;
a) because I haven't felt I had any new insights to offer. b) I have taken
to heart the list owners admonition to not contribute to threads we believe
are "fruitless". c) I have read a letter from the Universal House of
Justice to the National Spiritual Assembly of New Zealand, dated May 31,
1988 titled "Women and the Universal House of Justiced" which is sufficient
unto me (I Have entered that item on disk and can e-mail it to anyone who
wants it but I won't post it to the list. d) I am fearful of falling into
the same intellectual trap that I perceive others are falling into, ie. by
focussing on what appears to be one very conspicuous contradiction within
the Faith, avoiding or evading the broader issue.
Certain elements of the discussion call to my mind the following
exerpt from a pamphlet published in London, 1589 . . . "The desire that
every man hath to show his true vein in writing is unspeakable, and their
minds are so carried away with the manner as no care at all is had of the
matter. They run so into Rhetoric as often times they overrun the bounds of
their own wits and go they know not whither. If they have stretched their
invention so hard on a last as it is at a stand, there remains but one help,
which is to write of us women." (Jane Anger: her Protection for Women to
defend them againft the scandalovs reports of a late surfeiting lover and
all other like venerians that complaine so to be overcloyed with women's
kindness. 1589)
The focus of the thread on "Women & the House" has not been on what
positive actions Baha'i men might take to manifest, or bring about the
establishment of the principle of the equality of men and women and make it
a characteristic of Baha'i culture and community life. No! It has been
focussed on how those with "power" or "authority" over us are perceived to
be preventing the establishment of the principle as a characteristic of
Baha'i culture and community. The A.A. cliche states "God grant me the
serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the
things I can and the wisdom to know the difference"; by focussing on the
issue of U.H.J. membership, Baha'i men are abdicating their power to
affect change in areas where they do have influence by claiming to be
"disempowered" by a higher authority; shifting the burden of responsibility
from themselves to that higher authority and indulging in a form of Baha'i
chivalry which only accentuates the desparate need for attitudinal change
and a "searching reexamination of the (deeply ingrained) attitudes and
assumptions that currently underlie approaches to (social and spiritual
development)". It is those antiquated attitudes and assumptions on which
some individuals base their insistence that the principle of the equality of
men and women and the all male membership of the U.H.J. are incompatible and
irreconcilable.
Men are no longer needed to defend or champion the cause of the
"fairer/weaker sex"; women are quite capable of doing that for themselves.
What men need to be occupied with at this juncture in history, is changing
& spirtualizing men. Feminist woman may focuss attention (sometimes
employing masculinist methods) on the need for men to change - Only men can
bring about that change in themselves. Reflect upon why Abdu'l Baha
revealed a prayer for husbands, to be recited by wives, but not a prayer for
wives to be recited by husbands. This used to be a mystery to me. It was
never a mystery to Valerie who recites the prayer for her husband every
morning. (I made up my own for her: "God grant her patience!")
Last night I caught part of a documentary entitled "Woman who Kill".
It was disturbing, thought provoking and eye-opening. It examined a number
of case histories of woman who had killed their husbands as well as case
histories of husbands who had killed their wives. It was not "feminist
propaganda"; it was a professionally produced, meticulously researched,
sensitive and articulate presentation of facts. It presented several
perspectives. It pointed out, for example that while "self defence" has
always been a valid legal defence for men who kill men; when women kill men
in self defence, their legal defence most often hinges upon their state of
mind at the time. The temporary insanity, P.M.S. and battered wife syndrome
defenses can all backfire on the defendant whereas the straight "self
defense" defense is relatively safe. An example was given of a woman who
had lost custody of her children to her estranged and abusive husband. The
judge ruled that because the woman had "battered woman syndrome", her
behaviour was undpredictable and she could pose a threat to her children.
Custody was given the abusive partner rather than the abused - (damaged
goods) mother. The argument was made that judicial systems, by focussing
on the mental state of a woman at the time she kills an abusvive partner, is
avoiding the underlying issue of male violence against woman. In these
cases we see the miscommunication pattern of "observation/inference
confusion", exercised in the extreme by the courts.
Towards the end of this documentary 2 statements were made which I
have heard before and which have infuriated me and put me on the defensive.
However, here they were so well framed and supported that they put me in a
rather reflective mood.
1. Women who kill men are encouraged to invoke defenses which
minimize the seriousness of the underlying cause - male violence against women.
2. Even men who do not abuse women, benefit materially and
politically from the abuse of women just as (and here's a real raw nerve
tickler) white men who are not racist, benefit materially and politically
from racism.
Now, you may ask yourselves, "What in tarnation does this
flea-pickin', butt scratchin' feminist-lovin', crock-stompin'
wannabe-intellectual-lay-yay-who think this has to do with the issue of
woman on the house."

Well if your one of those people who says "Hey, there was no sexism
during the English Rennaisance - like, they had Elizabeth I," or "Attitudes
towards women were different in Victorian England - or in Indian under
Indira Ghandi, or in Israel under Golda Mier, or the Phillipines under
Corey Aquino, or Pakistan under Benazir Bhutto, or in Mississagau Ontario
'cause they've elected that wonderful spunky ol' gal Hazel McAllion (sp?) as
Mayor year after year and she even came to a Baha'i conference!! If
you're one of those people who believe that a House full of women would be
bound by a different covenant than a House full of men, or would be paid
more attention to by the distracted mass of humanity, or that a few token
women on the UHJ would be a better way to exemplify and manifest the
equality of men and women than striving to eliminate every vestige of
sexism, racism and violence from our own local communities, then I'm afraid
this posting is just another irrelevant contribution to a fruitless debate.
It is my honest and humble opinion, gentlemen, that this persistent
harping on the issue of U.H.J. membership is the result of an instinctive
tendency to avoid that knowledge which Baha'u'llah says is the highest
station conferred upon our innermost being - that of the knowlege of our own
selves.

Now I shall bind myself to a rock and invite the vultures to feed on
my entrails.

Sincerely
G.

P.S. L, this is masochism!




**************************************************************
Human depravity, then, has broken into fragments that which is by nature one
and simple; men try to grasp part of a thing which has no parts and so get
neither the part, which does not exist, nor the whole, which they do not
seek. (Boethius; the Consolation or Philosophy, 524 A.D.)
**************************************************************


From Don_R._Calkins@commonlink.comThu Apr 4 18:15:06 1996
Date: 04 Apr 1996 16:34:02 GMT
From: "Don R. Calkins"
To: 72110.2126@compuserve.com
Cc: Talisman@indiana.edu
Subject: Re: My Friend Tom Returns

David -
I think your friend makes some good points, and I wouldn't be surprised if
your post generates considerable discussion. The problem I see is that the
exact same thing is going on here on talisman. How many people on here have
had a *personal* fireside in the last 19 days? Heck, how many have even
*mentioned* the Faith to an acquaintance face-to-face in the last 19 days?
I'm willing to bet that most subscribers are so involved in the 'scholarly'
discussions going on here that they don't have time, or don't get around to,
doing any sustained personal teaching. I don't see the discussions here as
being any more important to the progress of the Faith than the argument you
cite over the arrangement of the chairs at a meeting. Until the Baha'is have
sufficient faith in the future of the Faith and make it an integral part of
their lives, resulting in thir spontaneous sharing of it on a regular basis
there will be no change. In other words I see it as a spiritual problem
resulting from our attachment to 'all things save God'.

Don C



He who believes himself spiritual proves he is not - The Cloud of Unknowing

From asadighi@ptialaska.netThu Apr 4 18:32:42 1996
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 10:19:29 -0900
From: "Arsalan J. Sadighi"
To: talisman@indiana.edu, Doug_Moore@admin.state.ak.us
Subject: Re: 1902 tablet, Question for Juan

Dear Juan,

I have a conflict here. It is clear that the universal House of Justice sees
the issue as clear and settled. You disagree and interpret the Text in a
very different manner than the Supreme Body does. You tell me, which
interpretation should I believe?

It is clear that both the Hands of the Cause of God and the Universal House
of Justice have interpreted 'rijal' to mean male members of the Universal
House of Justice. Do you think your personal interpretation of the Text
should override their considered opinion and decision?

>
>
>Richard: I had determined not to say anything on the subject on this
>round, but the suggestion you have made that the issue is clear and
>settled is so contrary to the evidence that we both have that I cannot
>understand what drives you to express this certainty. The following
>issues remain unresolved:
>
>1) `Abdu'l-Baha interpreted Baha'u'llah's texts largely within the
>intellectual framework of the Islamic tradition of legal thought. In
>that tradition a mujtahid or jurisprudent (which was one of
>`Abdu'l-Baha's functions) applied his reasoning to a Qur'an text or set
>of texts in order to derive a judgment with regard to a particular case.
>The jurisprudent looks for an underlying operative principle (`illah) in
>the text that might be applied analogously to the real-world case. E.g.,
>wine is forbidden because it fogs the mind; therefore hashish (not
>mentioned in the Qur'an) would also be forbidden, since the same
>principle (`illah) would come into play. The jurisprudent is recognized
>as having the authority to abrogate his own earlier judgements upon
>giving the matter further thought or in the face of further knowledge of
>the situation.
> The reason `Abdu'l-Baha gives for excluding women from all houses of
>justice ("the House of Justice," i.e., that in Chicago and all others) in
>1902 is that Baha'u'llah uses the diction, "ya rijal," "O men," to
>address them. As we know, Baha'u'llah refers to members of *all* houses
>of justice, including local ones, as "men"/rijal. Baha'u'llah's sexed
>diction with regard to elective institutions is the `illah, and it
>applies to both cases, local houses of justice and the Universal House of
>Justice.
> When `Abdu'l-Baha reversed himself on this ruling and allowed women
>on the Chicago local house of justice in 1912, he implicitly (but
>powerfully) abrogated the legal grounds upon which he had earlier
>excluded women from houses of justice. This abrogation is logically
>impossible to confine only to local houses of justice, given the wording
>of the earlier, 1902 Tablet. The abrogation removes legal justification
>for barring the Universal House of Justice from engaging in its own
>juridical reasoning (istinbat or elucidation) with regard to this issue,
>since it is empowered to resolve obscure legal points. Nothing is more
>obscure than the apparently contradictory and ever-changing Baha'i texts
>on the service of women on elective institutions. The current Universal
>House of Justice has declined to rule, wisely in my view since the whole
>issue deserves much more study. But future Houses of Justice may decide
>they have competence to rule on the matter. I know that the members of
>the current Universal House of Justice privately would very much like to
>be able to allow women to be elected, if only a rock-solid legal case
>for it could be demonstrated.
>
>2. It simply is not the case that the 1909 letter unambiguously allows
>women onto local houses of justice but excludes them from the Universal
>House of Justice. Far more study of the terminology of the original
>Persian would be needed before such a conclusion could be finalized.
>Even then, some sort of `illah or legal justification would be desirable,
>rather than arbitrary fiat. Why can Baha'u'llah's wording be
>circumvented at one level (local houses of justice) but not at another?
>
>3. `Abdu'l-Baha's diction in his 1913 letter, printed in *Paris Talks*,
>is most confusing, since he there reverts to speaking of women being
>excluded from "the house of justice" generically, implying both local and
>universal--even though he had only a year earlier allowed women onto the
>Chicago and New York local houses of justice! (Is it that he was writing
>to a woman in Europe, and that women there still were not serving on LSAs?)
>
>4. The permanent exclusion of women from the right of eligibility to
>serve on the Universal House of Justice is in contradiction with the
>Baha'i principle of equality of rights and equality under the law for all,
>principles insisted upon and adumbrated by `Abdu'l-Baha over and over again.
>Valuing a poorly understood, juridically inexplicit and
>possibly ad hoc letter of 1909 (after all, he abrogated the 1902 letter,
>and for all we know the 1913 letter abrogates the 1909 one)
>over this compelling legal principle is in my view poor Baha'i jurisprudence.
>It is also a violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and
>subsequent U.N. covenants on human rights, for which documents the Universal
>House of Justice has expressed support.
>
>Baha'is' valuing of tradition and arbitrary authority over
>other equally important principles within their faith (reason, equality
>of rights, fairness and justice) is among the
>factors leading outside observers such as Huston Smith to conclude that
>the Baha'i Faith has become just another religion, having lost the
>opportunity to become Universal Religion. It is not too late for us to
>prove him wrong.
>
>
>cheers Juan Cole, History, Univ. of Michigan
>
>
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arsalan J. Sadighi

"Things are never quite as scary when you've got a best friend."

Calvin and Hobbes




From jrcole@umich.eduThu Apr 4 18:42:38 1996
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 18:32:32 -0500 (EST)
From: Juan R Cole
To: "Arsalan J. Sadighi"
Cc: talisman@indiana.edu, Doug_Moore@admin.state.ak.us
Subject: Re: 1902 tablet, Question for Juan



Arsalan-jan:

"Blind imitation" (taqlid) is forbidden in the Baha'i Faith, unlike Shi`ite
Islam, where one is obliged to imitate the opinions of Ayatollahs.

You ask me what I would have you do. I would have you think for
yourself. There is no Authoritative interpreter now living, so anyone's
interpretation, if he or she is alive, can only be individual
interpretation. That goes for the Hands of the Cause, who to my
knowledge were never appointed to interpret the Writings. If you believe
otherwise, please provide some proof. The Universal House of Justice has
repeatedly stated that it does not have the authority to Interpret
authoritatively the divine Text, and this is consistent with what the
Guardian said in *World Order of Baha'u'llah.* Attributing to the House
unwarranted interpretational authority would for me raise issues of the
Covenant. :-)

What I offered was a study of the issues and texts involved from the
point of view of an individual historian. Take it or leave it. There is
no reward for conceding that I might be on to something, there is no
punishment for thinking I've gone completely dotty.

As for the Universal House of Justice, it considered the matter in 1988
and reached the conclusion that it could not legislate on the matter.
The Universal House of Justice is, however, empowered to reconsider such
rulings. Are you attempting to say that the Universal House of Justice
lacks the authority to at some point in the future resolve this obscure
issue? Do you wish to chain up the Hand of God?

In the meantime, I do not see what is wrong with the friends studying and
trying to understand, as individuals, the texts pertaining to this issue.

So, disagree with me all you like. But please do it because *you* have
come to other conclusions, not because some prominent Baha'i individual
has. Some prominent Baha'is have held truly loopy views at one point or
another.


cheers Juan Cole, History, Univ. of Michigan







On Thu, 4 Apr 1996, Arsalan J. Sadighi wrote:

> Dear Juan,
>
> I have a conflict here. It is clear that the universal House of Justice sees
> the issue as clear and settled. You disagree and interpret the Text in a
> very different manner than the Supreme Body does. You tell me, which
> interpretation should I believe?
>
> It is clear that both the Hands of the Cause of God and the Universal House
> of Justice have interpreted 'rijal' to mean male members of the Universal
> House of Justice. Do you think your personal interpretation of the Text
> should override their considered opinion and decision?
>
> >
> >
> >Richard: I had determined not to say anything on the subject on this
> >round, but the suggestion you have made that the issue is clear and
> >settled is so contrary to the evidence that we both have that I cannot
> >understand what drives you to express this certainty. The following
> >issues remain unresolved:
> >
> >1) `Abdu'l-Baha interpreted Baha'u'llah's texts largely within the
> >intellectual framework of the Islamic tradition of legal thought. In
> >that tradition a mujtahid or jurisprudent (which was one of
> >`Abdu'l-Baha's functions) applied his reasoning to a Qur'an text or set
> >of texts in order to derive a judgment with regard to a particular case.
> >The jurisprudent looks for an underlying operative principle (`illah) in
> >the text that might be applied analogously to the real-world case. E.g.,
> >wine is forbidden because it fogs the mind; therefore hashish (not
> >mentioned in the Qur'an) would also be forbidden, since the same
> >principle (`illah) would come into play. The jurisprudent is recognized
> >as having the authority to abrogate his own earlier judgements upon
> >giving the matter further thought or in the face of further knowledge of
> >the situation.
> > The reason `Abdu'l-Baha gives for excluding women from all houses of
> >justice ("the House of Justice," i.e., that in Chicago and all others) in
> >1902 is that Baha'u'llah uses the diction, "ya rijal," "O men," to
> >address them. As we know, Baha'u'llah refers to members of *all* houses
> >of justice, including local ones, as "men"/rijal. Baha'u'llah's sexed
> >diction with regard to elective institutions is the `illah, and it
> >applies to both cases, local houses of justice and the Universal House of
> >Justice.
> > When `Abdu'l-Baha reversed himself on this ruling and allowed women
> >on the Chicago local house of justice in 1912, he implicitly (but
> >powerfully) abrogated the legal grounds upon which he had earlier
> >excluded women from houses of justice. This abrogation is logically
> >impossible to confine only to local houses of justice, given the wording
> >of the earlier, 1902 Tablet. The abrogation removes legal justification
> >for barring the Universal House of Justice from engaging in its own
> >juridical reasoning (istinbat or elucidation) with regard to this issue,
> >since it is empowered to resolve obscure legal points. Nothing is more
> >obscure than the apparently contradictory and ever-changing Baha'i texts
> >on the service of women on elective institutions. The current Universal
> >House of Justice has declined to rule, wisely in my view since the whole
> >issue deserves much more study. But future Houses of Justice may decide
> >they have competence to rule on the matter. I know that the members of
> >the current Universal House of Justice privately would very much like to
> >be able to allow women to be elected, if only a rock-solid legal case
> >for it could be demonstrated.
> >
> >2. It simply is not the case that the 1909 letter unambiguously allows
> >women onto local houses of justice but excludes them from the Universal
> >House of Justice. Far more study of the terminology of the original
> >Persian would be needed before such a conclusion could be finalized.
> >Even then, some sort of `illah or legal justification would be desirable,
> >rather than arbitrary fiat. Why can Baha'u'llah's wording be
> >circumvented at one level (local houses of justice) but not at another?
> >
> >3. `Abdu'l-Baha's diction in his 1913 letter, printed in *Paris Talks*,
> >is most confusing, since he there reverts to speaking of women being
> >excluded from "the house of justice" generically, implying both local and
> >universal--even though he had only a year earlier allowed women onto the
> >Chicago and New York local houses of justice! (Is it that he was writing
> >to a woman in Europe, and that women there still were not serving on LSAs?)
> >
> >4. The permanent exclusion of women from the right of eligibility to
> >serve on the Universal House of Justice is in contradiction with the
> >Baha'i principle of equality of rights and equality under the law for all,
> >principles insisted upon and adumbrated by `Abdu'l-Baha over and over again.
> >Valuing a poorly understood, juridically inexplicit and
> >possibly ad hoc letter of 1909 (after all, he abrogated the 1902 letter,
> >and for all we know the 1913 letter abrogates the 1909 one)
> >over this compelling legal principle is in my view poor Baha'i jurisprudence.
> >It is also a violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and
> >subsequent U.N. covenants on human rights, for which documents the Universal
> >House of Justice has expressed support.
> >
> >Baha'is' valuing of tradition and arbitrary authority over
> >other equally important principles within their faith (reason, equality
> >of rights, fairness and justice) is among the
> >factors leading outside observers such as Huston Smith to conclude that
> >the Baha'i Faith has become just another religion, having lost the
> >opportunity to become Universal Religion. It is not too late for us to
> >prove him wrong.
> >
> >
> >cheers Juan Cole, History, Univ. of Michigan
> >
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Arsalan J. Sadighi
>
> "Things are never quite as scary when you've got a best friend."
>
> Calvin and Hobbes
>
>

From asadighi@ptialaska.netThu Apr 4 18:45:23 1996
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 14:45:04 -0900
From: "Arsalan J. Sadighi"
To: talisman@indiana.edu
Subject: Re: My Friend Tom Returns

I have one plea for all of you who are going to consider the issue of
stagnation and lack of spiritual maturity in our communities. Please,
please, do not ignore the legitimate role children and youth have to play
and their needs. I don't think we can afford not raising another generation
of Baha'is that not superior to us spiritually.

I would hate to see 10 years from now our youth participating on Talisman
Jr. discussing the same issues.


>David -
>I think your friend makes some good points, and I wouldn't be surprised if
>your post generates considerable discussion. The problem I see is that the
>exact same thing is going on here on talisman. How many people on here have
>had a *personal* fireside in the last 19 days? Heck, how many have even
>*mentioned* the Faith to an acquaintance face-to-face in the last 19 days?
>I'm willing to bet that most subscribers are so involved in the 'scholarly'
>discussions going on here that they don't have time, or don't get around to,
>doing any sustained personal teaching. I don't see the discussions here as
>being any more important to the progress of the Faith than the argument you
>cite over the arrangement of the chairs at a meeting. Until the Baha'is have
>sufficient faith in the future of the Faith and make it an integral part of
>their lives, resulting in thir spontaneous sharing of it on a regular basis
>there will be no change. In other words I see it as a spiritual problem
>resulting from our attachment to 'all things save God'.
>
>Don C
>
>
>
>He who believes himself spiritual proves he is not - The Cloud of Unknowing
>
>
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arsalan J. Sadighi

"Things are never quite as scary when you've got a best friend."

Calvin and Hobbes


From lora@creighton.eduThu Apr 4 19:18:21 1996
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 17:54:54 CST
From: Lora McCall
To: talisman@indiana.edu
Subject: Intellectual elitism?

Dear Arsalan,

I'm watching your multiple posts with interest. Now in one you said,
"Last time I checked, this was His Cause and His Cause alone."
And in another post you said, "Can someone tell me who this Huston
Smith character is and why I should care what he thinks about my
Faith?"

Is it His Cause or your Cause, His Faith or your Faith?

I think the answer is, it's both. You seem to be uncomfortable with
the discussion of inconsistencies in the Faith, and would like to
shut down further discussion by invoking *this is His Faith and He
will do whatever He wills* (i.e. save a wayward humanity -- how?
magically?) I realize it is uncomfortable, but we must have open
discussion if we are going to have real answers to give to real
questions asked by real people. The phrase *He said it, I
believe it, and that settles it* is a bumper sticker seen on cars
belonging to fundamentalist-types.

You say that you are comfortable in letting Baha'u'llah handle the
problem that the world doesn't accept the inconsistencies within the
Faith. Can you tell me, exactly, how Baha'u'llah is going to handle
*His* problem that a wayward humanity doesn't accept His message?

I don't buy the excuse "I am a servant, nothing more." That sounds
like a prescription for sitting back and doing nothing, and then
criticizing the "intellectual elite" as you say, for asking the tough
questions to begin with.

This is your Faith and His Faith and my Faith and our Faith. We have
to engage it *for real*. Nobody in the thinking world is going to
accept glaring inconsistencies just because you or I say "Well,
that's just the way it IS." That's blind acceptance without using
our sense of reason, which Baha'u'llah condemns.

No one is going to call you simple-minded, even though you gave
everyone permission to do so. Talisman has a rule against ad
hominems. And that means you don't get to spit venom at scholars by
calling them intellectual elitists either. Believe me, if they
considered themselves *elite* they surely wouldn't be here listening
to our literalist arguments and platitudes, patiently getting gray
hair while they try to shed light on the truths for us, desperately
trying to build bridges that we might cross in order to engage the
thinking world and people of capacity. Why do they do this? Only
one reason I can think of.

Love, Lora

From TLCULHANE@aol.comFri Apr 5 01:00:32 1996
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 19:45:28 -0500
From: TLCULHANE@aol.com
To: talisman@indiana.edu
Cc: TLCULHANE@aol.com
Subject: notes on Faith and Modernity

Dear Friends ,

What follows are some of my notes over the past 25 years on the subject
of the Bahai Faith and Modernity . It is with some fascination that I have
explred these in my time away from Talisman . You all didn't think I was
spending all my time looking for work . :)

I undserstand from my editor ( Lora ) that some of the same issues are
being played out again on Talisman and could not resist responding .

First a little background concerning intellectual origins and my years as
a Bahai .

I come from a conservative Catholic theological background with a long
strain of prairie populists in my family, otherwise known as Jeffersonian
democrats. I am one of those increasingly rare folks , catholics included ,
who actually read Thomas Aquinas's _Summa Theologica._ That makes me a
Thomist of sorts . I like to think more of a Thomistic purist than what the
church did with his thought.

Aquinas , in a nutshell , or at least my nutshell , was attempting a
synthesis of Augustins revelatory neo-platonism with the newly emerged
thought of Aristotle in Western Christendom which had arrived via Muslim
philosphers . The heavy hand of Augustin's dualism had focused so heavilly on
the transcendent and world denying dimensions of platonic thought that the
"world had become insignificant . Aquinas attempted to infuse Aristotle's
concern with the physical world and the importance of rational and empirical
thought with a more platonic transcendental view transmitterd through
Augustine. One of my Jesuit professors once said Aquinas baptized Aristotle
and made him a Christian. I find it intriguing that Aquinas infused the
Christian thoughts about "revelation" with Aristotle and what seems to me an
Islamic notion of all created things as "signs of God." The effect of this
synthesis was to divinize the physical world as partaking in the divine
nature and granting legitimacy to the rational study of the world as
partaking of the will of God .

Aquinas managed to draw the objections of two groups of people . First the
emerging rational secularists who were championing Aristotle without any
desire for reconciling him with Christian notions of revelation. Second form
the institutional representatives of the Catholic Church. The first wanted
intellectual autonomy , the second wanted control with strict observance of
the "law" and a view of the souls salvation as institutionally defined and
mediated . In other words salvation consisted of what the Church said it was.
This is still an important isue for Bahais . A good deal of my Bahai life was
spent in accepting - not without a struggle - just such a view of the Faith.
I have before called this the community = administration fallacy. This
argument frequently appears in discussions about the *Covenant * and firmness
therein and is remarkably similiar to the position taken by the medieval
Catholic church. It was this attempt by the Church that lead it to condemn
not only rational secularists , people outside the pale of the Covenant as
institutionally mediated and defined but also Aquinas .

I like to think Aquinas represents an historic opportunity to reunite
Platonic and Aristotelian elements of western thought with the concept of
revelation - and one which I would argue was significantly influenced by
Islamic philosophical treatments of Aristotle. Had the principle
institutional authority of western Christendom The Catholic Church) responded
differently the unprecedented dynamism of modern secular thought may have
been directed to more noble ends than has been the case. In short the rise
of modern science would have been different in that the institutional
authorities had a basis for justifying rational study of the world via
Aquinas as partaking in God;s grace.Instead they rejected the secularists and
only later adopted Aquinas's argument for the rational basis of revelation
and scripture as ameans of thought control and an attempt to stem the tide of
secularism . In other words Aquinas was used in my view to try and salvage
the wordly authority of the Church over life and thought , not to divinize
the study of the physical world or grant reason a status of acceptance as an
approach to apprehending the truth . The rest is history as they say . For
800 years now the realist - empirical aprroach to the world has continued to
triumph in the societies of the North Atlantic world and has spread to the
rest of the planet transforming it as well .

This , I believe, is significant because so many of the arguments put
forth by Bahai's have this strange reactionary medieval quality to them . We
have managed to continue Augustine's dualism about good and evil and the
Christian revelation as its resolution as mediated through the institutional
structure of the church . We know this argument as conducted along the lines
of "the new world order vs. the old world order" with the revelation of Baha
u lah as mediated by the administrative institutions as the justification of
invididual and collective salvation. I would find this more humorous if at
this late stage of history it were not so sad. I also think it constitutes a
serious misreading of Baha u llah and the pivot principle of the oneness of
humankind.

This same Augustinian and elaborated medieval notion identified the
Christian community not as a mystical communion of the believers but as a
hierarchical institution. The emphasis shifted from the Christ as the
embodied "logos" and salvation as mystical union with this "logos" as appears
to have been the case in the early church , to an emphasis on obediance to
the will of God, the law, as by extension to obediance to the acts of the
Church - whose acts were granted equivalent status with the revealed law
itself. It was this obediance , institutionally defined, which constituted
the basis of salvation and the reception of God's grace. The argument is one
Bahais make constantly with respect to the role of the administrative
institutions . It did not particularly work then and I have no reason to
believe it will now , especially when cast in the all too frequent tenor of
medievalism . The response has frequently been that Bahai institutions are
dinine in origin . It is no longer persuasive for me , perhaps because the
elaboration of this idea is almost always cast in the same vein as the
medieval church. In addition the mystic union with the Glory of God has been
relegated to such a distant position within the community and our
understanding and consciousness of the institution which symbolizes this
union - the Mashriqu l Adhkar -
is virtually non existent. I would be more persuaded if it did not appear we
were recapitualating the same mistakes as Christianity in the second Bahai
century instead of the fifth Christian one.

These issues are also important to me because the get at our self-
understanding as a religious community. There is in popular Bahai culture a
sense that Bahai institutions are governing bodies in a civil sense. I shared
this assumption for a good deal of my Bahai life .I no longer do . It is tied
to a pre- modern sense of "exceptionalism and triumphalism". This view simply
becomes one of a number of competing views in the world and replays an age
old religious dilemna magnified by the communications and transportation
revolutions of modernity. We are now aware that such exceptionalist cliams
are commonplace among human beings and their religious communities. I
understand the reluctance to let go of this notion. What it could it mean to
be human if "we" were not somehow special ? Where does al the meaning go if
"we" are not the leaven to raise the whole and destined to become the whole?
I believe the answer lies somewhere in the direction of shedding
exceptionalism for universalism.

As I have mentioned before I now understand Baha u llah's messianic
claims as validating the "revelatory status of all religions, truly
validating them, and removing the basis for conflict and hatred; not as
claiming some "exceptional" status for himself or those who come to accept
his vision. It seems to me the continued attempt to justify this
exceptionalism is a carryover of the same attitude which has crippled
religion in the past and inadvertantly contributed to the ascendency of
secularism.

What might it mean to say the Bahai administrative institutions are not
going to rule the world - now or ever -? What justification is there for
developing a sounder sense of jurisprudence? bills of rights ? If we are not
going to govern the world , who cares. I would like to suggest the answer in
Baha u llah's desire that a reigious community ought to be in the forfront of
an "ever advancing civilization". To be in the forefront a community must
embody the best of the world around them and point the way to that which is
beyond what already exists. In other words it must "model" it. Our seeming
reluctance to face up to modernity and rresort to pre-modern arguments -
quite medieval ones at that - hinders our capacity as a community to be taken
seriously and model anything which large numbers of people may give serious
consideration. We speak a language all to often that was on the defensive and
receeding in human history several hundred years ago . I suspect this
explains a good deal of why the Faith is at a numerical standstill .

If we would extract underlying principles and look for modern
applications rather than adopt the principle, its specific time bound
explanation, and forms, I believe we would be further along . For example - I
find little problamatic in Aquinas's formulation of the sanctity of reason
and revelation as examples of God's grace or the existent beings of the
physical world as real and "signs " of God . What is problamatic is his
limitation of this to Christian revelation . One can accept the principle
without limiting it to that specific formulation. In turn the principle can
have ethical and epistemological effect without being tied to a specific
institutional authority for its legitimacy, in this case what the Catholic
church did with Aquinas's ideas. The same applies it seems to me as Bahai's
. We can accept reason and revelation as examples of God's grace without
asuming some medieval form of authority and control must come with it tied to
notions of covenental purity in thought . Nor is it necessary that this
principle must be "brokered " through an institutional authority for its
justification. Institutions can speak to the ethical implications and
consideration of scientific or artistic or political or economic acts
without engaging the ultimate validity of the epistemology behind the acts.
One can accept reason without positioning revelation as a trump.

Reason can discover the truth, as Bahau llah notes in the Kalimat, and
what it will discover is the ethical truth embodied in revelation which in
turn will allow all to recognize the great Announcement of the Glory of God
in all things. There is no neccessity to disparage revelation when it does
not attempt to trump reason - both are aimed at the same *Reality*. What we
can have is a multi -valent path to Reality - a unity of conscoiusness if we
are willing to let go of the medieval worlds attempt to trump rational and
empirical thought . I believe our contribution as Bahais can be to contribute
to creating a world which rejects orthodoxy scientific or religious and
accepts the mulitple expresions of the human spirit. In my notes is this from
Robert Bellah 25 years ago .
" We may be seeing the beginnings of a new reintegration of our culture
. . Such
a new integration will be based on the rejection of all univocal
understandings of reality . .and the necesssity to translate
constantly betwen different scientific and imaginative vocabularies..
.It will recognize in both scientific and religious culture
all we have finally are symbols, but that there is a big
difference between the dead letter and the living word. "

If we can move beyond our all to frequent "medievalism " I believe
there is something powerful Bahau llah - through us - can say to the world.

warm regards,
Terry

From TLCULHANE@aol.comFri Apr 5 01:00:51 1996
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 20:38:52 -0500
From: TLCULHANE@aol.com
To: talisman@indiana.edu
Subject: re:Religion,scienceand religious

Dear Stephen ,

Lora forwarded your thoughts to me . Do scientists really think what you
described? The exchanges between Bohr and Einstein were rather . . shall I
say less than cordial. Ok down right hostile. And about what? Oh just a small
matter regarding the nature of order in the universe. I wonder if one of
the problems in the "hard sciences" is they lack a good appreciation of their
own history .

Its good to know you are still out there . A toast to Taos!

warm regards,
Terry

From derekmc@ix.netcom.comFri Apr 5 01:02:50 1996
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 17:39:30 -0800
From: DEREK COCKSHUT
To: talisman@indiana.edu
Subject: re. Response to Derek C.

Message: 456
To: "BAHA'I-TALISMAN-LIST"
From: John Dale <73043.1540@compuserve.com>
Subject: Response to Derek C.
Date: 04 Apr 96 05:39:41 EST
My dear John
...................................................................
Dear Derek,


You write,

>I always have problems with a person who attempts to denigrate the
views of
others by stating their opinion has no intellectual value. <

What I said was that impugning people's motive's for engaging in a
discussion is
inconsistent with consultation and is simply emotionally diversionary.
You may
think things like that in private, but when you go public with it, it
adds
nothing to the actual substance of the debate and diverts its into a
totally
different channel.
.......................................................................
..........................................................
Reply : As I was not involved in \lquote your\lquote debate I diverted nothing and
nobody, nor did I question anyone\rquote s intentions or motives that honor
rests solely with you my dear Sir.The fact remains you regard the only
opinion of value as your own and clearly showed that. It appears are
continuing to do so with the repeated inane remark \lquote emotionally
diversionary\rquote . In future when one wishes to post on any matter do we
have to obtain the Dale mark of approval before going public, I think
not. Intellectual discourse is based upon private thoughts coming into
the public domain for the development of them and the interchange
between differing and varying minds. To require all and every person to
agree with a solitary perspective is not consultation but dictatorship
and mind control.
.......................................................................
.............................................
> women serving on the House of Justice has absolutely nothing to with
the
Equality of
>Women and Men. <

Oh really? Not everyone would agree with you.
.......................................................................
...................................................
Reply: If that is your view it is,that is perfectly okay with me.
However placing one or more women on the House will not create a Baha\rquote i
community that reflects the spiritual principle of equality of the
genders. I see it more as a papering over of the problem. It could well
be that just as when we become worthy of the Laws they are given to us.
I quote the example of the Right of God being given to the whole Baha\rquote i
World when we had matured sufficiently. Does that mean when we have
matured women will serve on the House, maybe not , but it could be it
will not therefore be an issue in a matured society. The reason I
mentioned the aspect of personal power
and serving on an Institution. That an individual member serving on an
Institution has personal power and thereby a defacto \lquote cleric\rquote . Is once
we understand that service on such bodies gives no personal power and
prestige to the person. Then we can start building a world in which the
personal virtues are valued above all else. Then you will have a world
which will reflect all of the spiritual principles that Baha\rquote u\rquote llah
requires of us.
.......................................................................
.........................................................
>There is no gender of the soul therefore women not serving does not
mean they
are spiritually inferior to men.<

I'm glad we agree they are not inferior. In fact the genderless nature
of the
soul is not the issue here.
.......................................................................
................................................
Reply:This is the first Religion that has been revealed with this
precise information as part of its Holy Text For women to know that the
theology of various religious systems that they were spiritually
inferior was the machinations of biased male minds and nothing to do
with the Divine Source is not to be undervalued. Especially in due of
how spiritual inferiority was used as a justification to subjugate
women amongst other things.
.......................................................................
............................................

>.The Bahai Faith is the only religion in recorded history that had a
woman as
its Head. Women serve in the highest personal appointed positions.<

Yes! Wonderful! So why aren't they on the House of Justice? Who
better could
help bring justice than they, these herioc wonderful rijal women?
.......................................................................
................................................
Reply: Might not the freedom to go out and work directly humanity with
the backing, honor and respect of the men in their Baha\rquote i community
enable them to be the bringers of peace on this troubled world.
.......................................................................



>. There is no moral dilemma except in your own mind.<

It is obvious that you are not focused outward in this statement toward
the
world that looks at this Community from the point of view of its
appearance of
moral inconsistency. That world sees a problem. I see the world
seeing a
problem. Therefore I see a problem. The world of other thoughtful
people is
not as blinded as some of us are by like or by dislike. If it saw no
problem,
if many of us saw no problem, there would be no debate, and you would
not have
to engage in impuning people's motives in debating it.
.......................................................................
................................................
Reply: I do look at the World spiritually because that is where the
ultimate solution must be.The 20th century is the century of failed
political theories. You are approaching this matter it seems from a
political stance ,that representation is required. However the most
important aspect of the Baha\rquote i Administration is the voting of the
individual, if this is done as required it really is a prayer. If the
Baha\rquote i Faith stands firm collectively and individually and puts into
the practice all of Baha\rquote u\rquote llah\rquote s teachings how can we be morally
inconsistent. There is no immorality that women do not serve on the
House. If the Baha\rquote i community told the world at large that women could
serve on the Institution and secretly precluded women from
consideration. That would be immoral and I would agree with you we
would be acting morally inconsistent.
The question of motives was never part of anything I posted. It is
obvious you see this as a major problem for yourself greater than
anyone looking into the Faith.Sometime ago on Talisman the query was
raised regarding this matter and how was it received by women in
general. I never have not informed a woman seeker of the situation. It
is of interest that women want to know how are women treated in the
Faith, do they receive respect and proper consideration, are they
treated as fully functioning human beings,. Yes questions are raised on
the matter of women on the House but I have always found that honesty
is the solution and has never caused one women in
my experience not to enter the Cause.< I am not saying people have not
been turned away but not in my personal experience on two continents
and in three countries>
.......................................................................
................................................

As for the rest of your comments, they reflect an intellectual
hysteria. Nobody
is attacking the House of Justice per se or saying to disobey it. It
is
precisely the appearance of this unexplained moral inconsistency that
attacks it
and weakens its ability to command respect in the eyes of a skeptical
world.
Until it resolves the issue by either voting to allow women to serve on
it or
can in some way clarify why they should not be on the House of Justice,
the
appearance of moral inconsistency will inherently remain and this issue
will
continue to cause only problems. I am pointing to an objective
phenomenon that
should be obvious to anybody. If people cannot acknowledge a simple
basic
appearance of a problem and discuss it without running off into
hysterics,
impugning people's motives, impugning people's loyalty, etc., then
indeed this
Community has a real problem, and we should not at all be surprised
that we are
not prepared for entry by troops
.......................................................................
................................................
Reply: The hysteria rests with you and emotional at that. Your various
statements have been and are an attack on the Universal House of
Justice. To question the integrity of the Institution by accusing it of
human selfhood and moral inconsistency, to name but two, is nothing
else. Whether you like it or not it is inexcusable. The
non-clarification indicates there is no underlying agenda not to have
women on this Institution. The Baha\rquote i Faith does not have to conform to
any of the dictates of present day society just those laid down by
Baha\rquote u\rquote llah, Abdu\rquote l-Baha, Shoghi Effendi and the House of Justice.
.......................................................................
...............................................

Do you think the questions I ask, that we have all asked, will not be
asked by
every new soul who attempts to enter the Baha'i Community? If not,
think again.
They will be asked a million times, until the appearance of a problem
is
resolved.
.......................................................................
...............................................
Reply: I spend most of my life these days answering questions. You will
find it hard to accept but this one you care so much about is of little
consequence. The great mass of humanity care about how to bring up
their children, relate to each other and have a world fit to live in,
devoid of hate, bitterness, prejudice and conflict. Will they be able
to look after those they love and how do they nurture their spiritual
life. What is the Baha\rquote i answers to those matters of today and
tomorrow. How to talk to a mother whose child has just seen her best
friend murdered before her eyes for some gang initiation. To learn to
have empathy with a parent whose child has committed suicide. What can
you do when a child is devastated by its parents divorce or been the
subject of abuse. These are the problems and more we need to have the
answers for and be doing something about. If we don\rquote t then millions of
questions will be asked.
Equality of the genders will only be one of those questions.
.......................................................................
................................................

Respectfully,

John Dale


PS: I am finished with this issue, which is one which affected me and
my family
very deeply.
.......................................................................
................................................
Reply: Well I am happy that you intend to finish with this subject. I
have no problem with you posting on any subjects. However please note:
if you post at me in general posting on this list or attack the House
of Justice I will respond.
I noticed on another list today the explanation of your family
situation. I have as much as another person can have empathy with your
hurt.But it only showed to me that you see this matter in an subjective
light rather than an objective one.The Faith was and is not to blame
for that situation however deeply you have been hurt. The anger you
demonstrate is not good for you or anyone else for that matter. Whether
you can place it behind you and move forward only you can decided. I
hope and pray for your sake you can find balance relating to this
subject. It does not mean you have to change your mind just acquire
acquiescence and patience.
Kindest Regards
Derek Cockshut
PS The custom on the List is not to personalize postings although I
take no offence at you doing so.





From friberg@will.brl.ntt.jpFri Apr 5 01:03:25 1996
Date: Fri, 5 Apr 96 10:46:02 JST
From: "Stephen R. Friberg"
To: lora@creighton.edu
Cc: talisman@indiana.edu
Subject: Re: Intellectual elitism?

Lora, Lora, Lora!

What are you saying?

> And that means you don't get to spit venom at scholars by
> calling them intellectual elitists either.

Are you saying that you don't think that my dear friend should
be allowed to say what he wants to? Is our conversation really
supposed to be only a one way street . . .

> Believe me, if they
> considered themselves *elite* they surely wouldn't be here listening
> to our literalist arguments and platitudes, patiently getting gray
> hair while they try to shed light on the truths for us, desperately
> trying to build bridges that we might cross in order to engage the
> thinking world and people of capacity.

I'm getting gray hairs not because our elitists are listening to us,
but because many times they aren't listening to us, and because they
don't seem to have any respect for views other than their own, and
because they seem so often to be so dogmatic and irrational.

I long for reasoned, rational argument, not ones where people call
other people snakes or put them down as being not thinking or people
of capacity.

Sorry for being confrontational here, but I feel I must defend the
rights of *all* my dear friends to speak freely.

Yours sincerely,
S. Friberg




From PIERCEED@sswdserver.sswd.csus.eduFri Apr 5 01:05:45 1996
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 18:11:36 PST8PDT
From: "Eric D. Pierce"
To: TLCULHANE@aol.com, talisman@indiana.edu
Subject: (***THANKS***) Re: notes on Faith and Modernity

Howdy Terry!

Your wonderful message gives me hope that so much of the
current talisman discussion and the respresentative
elements of the general community may eventually rise
from the mire they are sunk in.

Your message reminded me of how interesting it was to hear
the depth of emotional expression and sentiment of the
Catalans when we were visiting the ruins (some restored) of
the primitive early romanesque mountain church-sanctuaries
in the Pyrenees 2 years ago. The vivid sense of suffering
and oppression of spirit during what they described as the
collapse of civilization in the "dark ages" was sobering.

re: Augustin's dualism, not having been Catholic, I am
interested in what this was about, especially in social-
historical terms, and what time period. Was Augustine
a major political/religious player in the late roman empire,
etc.? Maybe a few others on talisman would also benefit
from a quick explanation.

As usual, whatever rack you hang your coat on, I always like
it.

Best wishes to you in your job search and to your family
and the Omaha friends!

EP

> From: TLCULHANE@aol.com
> Date sent: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 19:45:28 -0500
> To: talisman@indiana.edu
> Copies to: TLCULHANE@aol.com
> Subject: notes on Faith and Modernity

> Dear Friends ,
>
> What follows are some of my notes over the past 25 years on the subject
> of the Bahai Faith and Modernity . It is with some fascination that I have
> explred these in my time away from Talisman . You all didn't think I was
> spending all my time looking for work . :)
...




From lbhollin@uxmail.ust.hkFri Apr 5 15:57:57 1996
Date: Fri, 5 Apr 1996 14:20:15 +0800 (HKT)
From: HOLLINGER RICHARD VERNON
To: Juan R Cole
Cc: Jackson Armstrong-Ingram ,
talisman
Subject: Re: 1902 tablet


Juan and Tony,

You have both inferred from my posting some implications that I did not
intend, which suggests that I did not communicate my ideas effectively.
The main point I was trying to make was that the Baha'i Faith emerged in
specific historical contexts that shaped it in significant ways.
Baha'u'llah and `Abdu'l-Baha were constrained in what they wrote and said by
their audiences (as any effective communicator is). A number of elements
of the Baha'i teachings, including some Baha'i laws, reflect the
conditions of the nineteenth century Middle-East. How could they not?
My concern was that Baha'i principles not be extrapolated from such
elements. For example, I would not like to
see a "separate but equal" approach to gender equality in the civil
sphere develop either because of the exclusion of women from the
Universal House of Justice or because `Abdu'l-Baha validated in his
writings the practice of having gender-segregated meetings and institutions.

To what extent can we separate those historically and
culturally-conditioned elements from the rest of the revelation as the
community transcends the historical and cultural contexts out of which it
emerged? I think that the Faith has incredible flexibility to adapt to
new cultures and new historical periods; indeed I think it is the only world
religion that has a scriptural basis for this in the twin
principles of the relativity of relgious truth and the unity of science
and religion. But there are still limits. I do not think, for example,
that at some point in the future the dowry (bride-price) could be
discarded on the basis that the law was rooted in social conditions in
which women had not acheived financial equity with men, and that those
social conditions no longer exist. I am not entirely
sure where the parameters of these limits lie, and think that this broader
question might make a very interesting thread.

I did not intend to present the matter of `Abdu'l-Baha's intentions in
his writings about the house/houses of justice as being
certain--historical questions can never be resolved with certainty.
Indeed, it is not even entirely certain that `Abdu'l-Baha ever did prohibit
women from serving on the House of Spirituality (despite the fact that
everyone thought he did) since his 1902 tablet would be entirely consistent
with his other writings in its terminology and its policies if he had intended
to refer to the International House of Justice in it--that is to say, it
is quite possible to read `Abdu'l-Baha's writings on this a being
internally consistent. As Juan
and Tony know, I personally think that the weight of the evidence that we
have seen thus far more strongly supports the proposition that
`Abdu'l-Baha intended in his writings to exclude women from membership on
the Universal House of Justice than contrary propisitions.
>From my perspective, this is the only proposition that can explain all the
evidence. But this is a narrow question, and there are important
questions that have been raised about terminology and other matters.

Juan has raised even more critical issues about the principles that underly
Baha'i jurisprudence. This is such an underdeveloped area of Baha'i
Studies--and I am so unquallified to make forays into this field--that I
am reluctant to say anything about this. I think, however, the most
important issue is one of authority (ie. who has authority to engage in
jurisprudence that would change the rulings of `Abdu'l-Baha and/or Shoghi
Effendi, and under what conditions can these changes be introduced). There
is a lot of spade work to be done before we can say much about Baha'i
jurisprudence, and a scripture-based study on this question would seem to
be a high priority at this stage in the development of the field.

Richard







From gladius@portal.caFri Apr 5 16:27:48 1996
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 23:23:53 -0800 (PST)
From: Linda de Gonzalez
To: Juan R Cole
Subject: Re: Religion, science, and religious liberalism

>At some point the two have to be reconciled,
>or one is being dishonest with oneself.

Absolutely. Thank you. Yours is the first post on this subject that was
actually worth reading all the way through -- and not just because I agree
with you!!!
(former convent girl).

Linda de Gonzalez
Gladius Productions








From asadighi@ptialaska.netFri Apr 5 16:50:43 1996
Date: Fri, 5 Apr 1996 09:05:40 -0900
From: "Arsalan J. Sadighi"
To: talisman@indiana.edu, Doug_Moore@admin.state.ak.us
Subject: WARNING: This is a Flame War

WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING
WARNING WARNING
****************************************************************************
***********
This is a flame and unsuitable for the fainthearted, and pure and
sensitive souls!
ENTER THIS AREA AT YOUR OWN RISK
****************************************************************************
***********

Dear Ms. McCall,

Let me quote for you from a letter written by the House of Justice.

"Service to the Cause of God requires absolute fidelity and integrity and
unwavering faith in Him. No good but only evil can come from taking the
responsibility for the future of God's Cause into our own hands and trying
to force it into ways that we wish it to go regardless of the clear texts
and our own limitations. It is His Cause. He has promised that its light
will not fail. Our part is to cling tenaciously to the revealed Word and to
the institutions that He has created to preserve His Covenant.

"It is precisely in this connection that the believers must recognize the
importance of intellectual honesty and humility..."

It is His Cause and we can not assume responsibility for the future of God's
Cause. I draw your attention to the term 'evil' the Supreme Body chose to use.

You say,"The phrase *He said it, I believe it, and that settles it* is a
bumper sticker seen on cars belonging to fundamentalist-types." I am afraid
I can not take credit for this as it is the House of Justice that said it.

Dear lady, I doubt anyone can shut down any discussions on Talisman. I have
no interest in doing so. Yet, I do stand by my right as a participant to
freely express my views and if I am called a simpleton who is injecting my
venom in this group, so be it. I wear that badge with honor.

Dear lady, let me clarify something for you. I love attention and I thrive
on attention. Negative attention is much better than none. That is why I am
so thrilled that you have chosen me as a target of your attacks and that at
least, as you say, "I'm watching your multiple posts with interest." I am
indeed honored.

TO BE CONTINUED,

Arsalan







Ms. McCall Wrote:

>Dear Arsalan,
>
>I'm watching your multiple posts with interest. Now in one you said,
>"Last time I checked, this was His Cause and His Cause alone."
>And in another post you said, "Can someone tell me who this Huston
>Smith character is and why I should care what he thinks about my
>Faith?"
>
>Is it His Cause or your Cause, His Faith or your Faith?
>
>I think the answer is, it's both. You seem to be uncomfortable with
>the discussion of inconsistencies in the Faith, and would like to
>shut down further discussion by invoking *this is His Faith and He
>will do whatever He wills* (i.e. save a wayward humanity -- how?
>magically?) I realize it is uncomfortable, but we must have open
>discussion if we are going to have real answers to give to real
>questions asked by real people. The phrase *He said it, I
>believe it, and that settles it* is a bumper sticker seen on cars
>belonging to fundamentalist-types.
>
>You say that you are comfortable in letting Baha'u'llah handle the
>problem that the world doesn't accept the inconsistencies within the
>Faith. Can you tell me, exactly, how Baha'u'llah is going to handle
>*His* problem that a wayward humanity doesn't accept His message?
>
>I don't buy the excuse "I am a servant, nothing more." That sounds
>like a prescription for sitting back and doing nothing, and then
>criticizing the "intellectual elite" as you say, for asking the tough
>questions to begin with.
>
>This is your Faith and His Faith and my Faith and our Faith. We have
>to engage it *for real*. Nobody in the thinking world is going to
>accept glaring inconsistencies just because you or I say "Well,
>that's just the way it IS." That's blind acceptance without using
>our sense of reason, which Baha'u'llah condemns.
>
>No one is going to call you simple-minded, even though you gave
>everyone permission to do so. Talisman has a rule against ad
>hominems. And that means you don't get to spit venom at scholars by
>calling them intellectual elitists either. Believe me, if they
>considered themselves *elite* they surely wouldn't be here listening
>to our literalist arguments and platitudes, patiently getting gray
>hair while they try to shed light on the truths for us, desperately
>trying to build bridges that we might cross in order to engage the
>thinking world and people of capacity. Why do they do this? Only
>one reason I can think of.
>
>Love, Lora
>
>
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arsalan J. Sadighi

"Things are never quite as scary when you've got a best friend."

Calvin and Hobbes


From Member1700@aol.comFri Apr 5 16:51:10 1996
Date: Fri, 5 Apr 1996 13:10:58 -0500
From: Member1700@aol.com
To: Talisman@indiana.edu
Subject: Re: WARNING: This is a Flame War

Arsalan-Jan:
I am astonished that you would wrap yourself in a letter from the House of
Justice and then start a flame war! Do you really think that such a letter
can justify your behavior? You know, this is the kind of stuff that gives
religion a bad name.

Tony

From asadighi@ptialaska.netFri Apr 5 16:51:19 1996
Date: Fri, 5 Apr 1996 09:46:08 -0900
From: "Arsalan J. Sadighi"
To: talisman@indiana.edu
Subject: Re: WARNING: This is a Flame War

Tony, Get off the soap box, will you?

Arsalan


>Arsalan-Jan:
> I am astonished that you would wrap yourself in a letter from the House of
>Justice and then start a flame war! Do you really think that such a letter
>can justify your behavior? You know, this is the kind of stuff that gives
>religion a bad name.
>
>Tony
>
>
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arsalan J. Sadighi

"Things are never quite as scary when you've got a best friend."

Calvin and Hobbes


From gec@geoenv.comFri Apr 5 16:51:47 1996
Date: Fri, 5 Apr 1996 13:54:29 -0500
From: Alex Tavangar
To: Talisman@indiana.edu
Subject: Re: WARNING: This is a Flame War

Actually, if Arsalan had not called it a FLAME, I would have thought of it
as another emotional exchange, rated "medium" in pepper quotient as compared
to some of the other scholarly exchanges I have seen on Talisman.

Be that as it may, the nature of this discourse reminded me of a routine
engineering practice of including by design, a safety valve in any
pressurized system just for the occasions when excess steam must be blown
off if we are to avoid significant damage to the entire system. If I saw
high pressure steam bellowing from a pressure vessel (strong tank) I would
not attempt to block the safety valve. I would though look into altering
the operating conditions in order to prevent excess heat/pressure build ups
in the future.

Confusing enough?!

ABT


From asadighi@ptialaska.netFri Apr 5 16:52:18 1996
Date: Fri, 5 Apr 1996 10:10:25 -0900
From: "Arsalan J. Sadighi"
To: talisman@indiana.edu, Doug_Moore@admin.state.ak.us
Subject: Re: WARNING: This is a Flame War

Now that I have more time....

I do use the statements from the House anytime and I find it amazing that
some folks are 'astonished' by that. Of course it is acceptable to wrap
ourselves in any and all detractors of this Faith (Huston, an example) but
when one, with the best of intentions, uses quotes from the Writings, oh no,
it is cause for astonishment.

I did not start a flame war, mind you. If folks don't have a sense of
humour--in case of some, anger and resentment has clouded all senses--it is
not my problem. Do bear in mind that I have never accused any one person of
any wrong doing or wrong thinking.

Oh, I see, using the statements of the Universal House of Justice gives
religion a bad name. Goodness gracious. I was not aware there was a
prohibition against using relevant quotes in our discussions. Ain't that sweet?

Dear Tony, I stand on what I said. You don't like it, fine. But do not
attempt to silence voices you do not agree with using these kinds of
useless, and senseless attacks. It is not becoming of you.


Arsalan



>Arsalan-Jan:
> I am astonished that you would wrap yourself in a letter from the House of
>Justice and then start a flame war! Do you really think that such a letter
>can justify your behavior? You know, this is the kind of stuff that gives
>religion a bad name.
>
>Tony
>
>
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arsalan J. Sadighi

"Things are never quite as scary when you've got a best friend."

Calvin and Hobbes


From Sen.Mcglinn@rl.rulimburg.nlFri Apr 5 16:52:35 1996
Date: Fri, 05 Apr 1996 16:26:54 +0000 (EZT)
From: Sen.Mcglinn@rl.rulimburg.nl
To: talisman@indiana.edu
Subject: UHJ, power


Tony:
>We can't just pretend that we are talking about spiritual
> constructs. We claim that he \{we\} have institutions which
> will eventually rule the world.



God forbid!




fortunately, God did

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sen McGlinn ph: 31-43-3216854
Andre Severinweg 47 email: Sen.McGlinn@RL.RuLimburg.NL
6214 PL Maastricht, the Netherlands
***
When, however, thou dost contemplate the innermost essence of things,
and the individuality of each,
thou wilt behold the signs of thy Lord's mercy . . ."
------------------------------------------------------------------------


From TLCULHANE@aol.comFri Apr 5 16:53:56 1996
Date: Fri, 5 Apr 1996 14:31:43 -0500
From: TLCULHANE@aol.com
To: friberg@will.brl.ntt.jp
Cc: talisman@indiana.edu, TLCULHANE@aol.com
Subject: Re: Religion,scienceand relig...

Dear Stephen ,

I look forward to your ideas on the science /religion interface. it is
a shame as Bahais we have not paid the attention appropriate to what
scientists nd mystic theologians have ben discussing in this area the past 20
years. The thought of david Bohm is , I believe , quite congenial to a non
dogmatic , sectarian understanding of true religion and science.

As for Bohr and Einstein . there conversations early on in their careers
were cordial and as you say intense . However I must disagree with the idea
that they were not quarrelsome . SOme of the accounts by Bohm , a student of
Einsteins , would bely that fact . By the end of their lives they were not on
speaking terms and avoided being present at the same events. Bohr thought
Einstein had betrayed the implications of his own relativity theory and in
turn Einstein accused Bohr of avoidung the "tough" questions and clinging to
what he called a "tranquilizer philosophy." The problem - well in
contemporary terms I would say it was one of Wittgenstein language games .
The conceptual language they used , grounded in different assumptions about
the *order*of *nature * lead to an impasse in their conversations and
frienships . In other words , in myview, their respective epistemological,
and whether they acknowledged it or not ontological, assumptions led to a
form of divisive ethical behavior i.e. they would not speak to one another.
Scientists bring assumptions to their work which influence , not the
*reality* of *nature* but rather the knowledge that can be elicited from
*nature*. I guess that makes me an objectivist of sorts.

Precisely why i believe Bahau llah is relevent to this issue is in His
"standpoint epistemology " or differing stations and capacities of
individuals. it is not *reality* which is limited or relative but the
respective stations of individuals which influence the knowledge obtainable
from reality . If Bohr and Einstein could disagree and not speak- a breakdown
of consultation , and this is an ethical issue , about atomic structure and
order in the physical universe what might this imply for deeper levels of
reality. After all they were quarrleing about the most fundamental but least
significant component of existence. Once one moves from fundamental to
significant the level of ethical engagemewnt increases accordingly .By the
time we are speaking of ultimate meaning , God and the purpose of life the
ethical issues become more profound and their consequences more significant.


The role of the Prohpets , in my view, is to elaborate upon and guide
our ethical actions with respect to the most significant dimension of
*reality* for human beings that of our relationships to one another as human
beings and by extension , as imagio dei , to our relationship to God . In the
case of Bahau llah I believe His ethical presecriptions and proscriptions are
well suited to a the world in which live and its particular ethical issues
, starting with religious fundamentalism and dogmatism. Sort of a clean up
your own house :) first Prophet with regard to religius communities. Powerful
arguments can be made for those ethics if we get past the mere assertion of
prophetic truth and demonstrate it , intelectually and spiritually. Then
religion may have something to say to science by meeting science on its own
ground and raising the level a notch by expecting ethical action and
reflection from scientists. I do not find the role of the prophets in
dictating the *nature* of physical *reality.*
As a result I do not look to Bahau llah to tell me whether light is a
wave or a particle or whether socrates went to Israel or how many stare have
intelligent life. I look to HIm for ethical guidance and for a way to
understand the purpose of life and my relationship to *reality*. He could not
explain *reality * to me if he wanted to. Its a whole lot bigger than my mind
or anyone elses.

I think Bahau llah's contribution in religious thought,
epistemologically and ethically, is ananogous to the shift in science fron a
bound and closed universe to one which is open and infinite. I see Bahau
llah saying the same thing with respect to views of *reality* , they are
infinite and none will exhaust our understanding of *reality*. SO consult and
study and learn and you will discover a richness within *reality* which has
thus far ecaped you.This same ethical injunction applies to scientists , who
are after all human beings, which means as a human being you must remain
open to new manifestations of that which prior to this has remained hidden.
Now that would be a good description of the true ethic of science as well .
It seems to me a key piece of Bahau llah;s ethics and applies to scientists
or non scientists whatever our perspective or field of *human * endeavor.
Bahau llah grants the pursiut of knowlegde legitimate status in my view. He
sacralizes the such pursuit of knowledge- and actually commands it - and like
a good prophet warns and guides us about the ethical ends to which that
knowledge will and ought to be directed. I do not find Bahau llah dicatating
any particular view of *reality* either as Prophet or by grant to an
institution as capable of mediating that *reality*. The Tablet of Wisdom has
that remarkable passage about cosmology affirming both eternal creation and
creatin ex nihilo. Now that is my kind of Prophet. I see no reason why he
could not be the "prophet "of choice :) to ever larger numbers of scientists
, artists and thinkers in general . We just have to present Him as such .

A current counterpoint to this view would be Richard Rorty. Who I
consider merely the latest in a long line. Rorty for instance, is in my view,
simplistic and one dimensional. he represents a philosophical and scientific
orthodoxy which by a wave of the hand dismisses deeper levels of *reality* as
unworthy of consideration . While it may pass itself off as a kind of avante
garde postmodernism it is an orthodxy ever bit is flatland as religious
orthodoxy. I consider this kind of work the philosophical equivalent of the
earth is flat theory. Folks like Rorty can get away with it and be taken
serious;y because they have the immense "cultural "authority of science to
draw upon as an unstated *legitimation * for their work. And inthis instance
it is realy scientism.

Look forward to more of your thoughts on all this and "gentle "critique.
:)

warm regards ,
Terry




From sscholl@jeffnet.orgFri Apr 5 17:04:07 1996
Date: Fri, 5 Apr 1996 11:36:06 -0800
From: White Cloud Press
To: talisman@indiana.edu
Subject: Huston Smith

Dear Friends,

One more thought on Huston Smith. Recently I have struck up a pen pal
relationship with Prof. Smith as he serves as an advisor on White Cloud
Press' SAGA anthology volumes. This has been a real pleasure as I have had
the opportunity to see in a personal way the openness and generous nature
of this man. Smith, for me, is both a fine scholar of comparative religion
and a living example of a truly religious human being. He has taken much
more seriously than I or most Baha'is I know to "consort with the followers
of all religions with joy." In this sense he is a shining light and a
living example of the Baha'i teachings (and Christian, Buddhist, Hindu,
Quranic, Jewish teachings as well).

Some Baha'is seem scornful of Smith since he does not spend much time on
Baha'i. As Megha noted, Smith did mention only the positive in his Jesus
Seminar comments on Baha'i. But Smith for good reasons has focused his
attention as a scholar on the major traditions. I am constantly amazed that
Baha'is think religious studies scholars should devote their time to our
faith when we have no distinguishing forms of worship and ritual, when we
have not developed any kind of systematic theological viewpoint, when we
are still, in world terms, statistically a minor new religious movement. I
think Smith's early views on the faith that were noted may have stemmed
from the fact that the Baha'is were at that time even more insular, even
less involved with world affairs, had no worship or devotional content to
their communities, yet claimed to be the last and only true hope for
mankind. This combined with many Baha'is arrogance toward other faiths as
being superceded by Baha'i or that other faiths are good but infantile
compared to Baha'i as the latest revelation does tend to turn off folks who
study religions academically, scholars who know that the great traditions
are great partly due to their ability to adapt and change and renew
themselves to meet the challenges of every time.

As David Langness intimated, perhaps Smith's more recent postive feelings
toward Baha'i should be seen as signs of our community's evolving from
concern only with ourselves to greater concerns for the needs of our age.
Some have fumed that it matters not what Smith or other religous scholars
think about Baha'i. That is true to some extent in that no man's faith
should be conditioned by another's. But it does matter what people of
capacity such as Smith think about us because they are keen observers of
faith communities. If sympathetic souls such as Smith have trouble with the
way the Baha'i world presents itself as a faith community, then I think we
should listen carefully so that we might learn something helpful.

And, please, if you can get to a television of Tuesday nights, tune in to
Smith and Moyers. This is a wonderful opportunity to see a man who lives in
multiple worlds in a way that reminds me of E. G. Browne's description of
Abdu'l-Baha, where he writes how the Master was at home with Christians,
Jews and Muslims, conversant in their teachings and ways, so that each felt
him to be their friend along their path to God.

Steve



From sscholl@jeffnet.orgFri Apr 5 17:05:34 1996
Date: Fri, 5 Apr 1996 11:36:19 -0800
From: White Cloud Press
To: talisman@indiana.edu
Subject: Moral consistency

Dear Friends,

I share John Dale's concerns regarding moral consistency in terms of the
denial on the part of the current Baha'i administration to women to serve
on all Baha'i elected bodies. I think it is a real problem and as Joan
Jensen noted one that many of us have felt personally or seen as a cause of
rejection by those investigating the faith. It is no different from taking
another fundamental Baha'i principle, say, the oneness of mankind, and then
asking how we would react if there was but one mysterious test: Baha'is
believe in the oneness of mankind and are for the elimination of racial
prejudices. However, Caucasians are not allowed to serve on the Universal
House of Justice. Now some Baha'is would develop intricate theories as to
why (no doubt due to their genocidal history, Caucasians are less developed
socially, but of course since the soul is genderless we are still all equal
in the sight of God.)

This is not just a small matter but goes back to the issue of moral
consistency. And it seems to me (and obviously growing numbers of Baha'is)
that there is a solution that is grounded in the sacred texts and Baha'i
history for moving the faith toward wholeness on this issue. The trajectory
of Abdul-Baha's ministry is for expanding opportunities for women to the
point that "in the future" they will serve at the highest levels in EVERY
SPHERE OF HUMAN ENTERPRISE. It seems to me that in these discussions
those who see no hope for change fail to place this mysterious ban of women
from service in the context of all of the Baha'i writings on the equality
of the sexes and Abdu'l-Baha's vision of the future role of women in
society, including the future Baha'i society.

Yes, having women on the House will not suddenly change the situation of
women who are living under oppression. But the continuance of this moral
inconsistency within the Baha'i community is a significant impediment to
the development of the Baha'i community as it demonstrates that the Baha'i
community, for all its good words and good intentions, has not advanced
beyond other religious theologies on the matter of equality of the sexes.
In fact, one could argue that at least the Catholics are consistent in
their ban and have at least some historical and scriptural ground to stand
on (though even that case has been persuasively agrued against in recent
years by Christian scholars of primitive Christianity!). Also, never
underestimate the power of symbols and role models. Yes, Rosa Parks refusal
to give up her seat did not change the conditions of African Americans, but
it raised all of our awareness and changed the consciousness of millions of
Americans. Yes, when the first woman minister was ordained, the position of
women in the Methodist communion did not suddenly change, but it was a
clarion call to Christian women to serve as equals with men. And when the
first woman is elected to the House, neither the world or the Baha'i
community will change in a flash, but we will have made a significant step
toward fulfilling the promise of world peace enshrined in the teachings of
Baha'u'llah.

With love,
Steve Scholl



From Sen.Mcglinn@rl.rulimburg.nlFri Apr 5 17:06:56 1996
Date: Fri, 05 Apr 1996 16:27:57 +0000 (EZT)
From: Sen.Mcglinn@rl.rulimburg.nl
To: talisman@indiana.edu
Subject: Women & UHJ: Paris talks

Juan:
you say that the letter re Women's exlcusion which is printed in
*Paris Talks*, is addressed to a woman in Europe. Could you give
some background - especially, whether the original of this letter
is available anywhere?


Richard, you asked:
> the universal House of Justice sees
> the issue as clear and settled. You disagree and interpret the Text in a
> very different manner than the Supreme Body does. You tell me, which
> interpretation should I believe?

Your own, of course. Until a better one comes along.
It's one of the Baha'i principles I think, "independent something-or-other"
Probably absorbs far too much of our valuable energy when we could
be concentrating on social problems etc, but there it is

Sen

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sen McGlinn ph: 31-43-3216854
Andre Severinweg 47 email: Sen.McGlinn@RL.RuLimburg.NL
6214 PL Maastricht, the Netherlands
***
When, however, thou dost contemplate the innermost essence of things,
and the individuality of each,
thou wilt behold the signs of thy Lord's mercy . . ."
------------------------------------------------------------------------



From derekmc@ix.netcom.comFri Apr 5 17:07:10 1996
Date: Fri, 5 Apr 1996 12:23:35 -0800
From: DEREK COCKSHUT
To: talisman@indiana.edu
Subject: Fwd: Moral consistency

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To: talisman@indiana.edu
From: sscholl@jeffnet.org (White Cloud Press)
Subject: Moral consistency
Sender: owner-talisman@indiana.edu
Precedence: bulk
My dear Steve
Are you saying, as well,the Universal House of Justice lacks moral
consistency and therefore under certain circumstances is acting
immorally?
Kindest Regards
Derek Cockshut

..................................................................


Dear Friends,

I share John Dale's concerns regarding moral consistency in terms of
the
denial on the part of the current Baha'i administration to women to
serve
on all Baha'i elected bodies.

From nineteen@onramp.netFri Apr 5 17:07:52 1996
Date: Fri, 5 Apr 96 14:21:28 -0500
From: "Richard C. Logan"
To: TLCULHANE@aol.com, Talisman
Subject: Re: notes on Faith and Modernity

Terry writes:

> These issues are also important to me because the get at our self-
>understanding as a religious community. There is in popular Bahai culture a
>sense that Bahai institutions are governing bodies in a civil sense. I shared
>this assumption for a good deal of my Bahai life .I no longer do . It is tied
>to a pre- modern sense of "exceptionalism and triumphalism". This view simply
>becomes one of a number of competing views in the world and replays an age
>old religious dilemna magnified by the communications and transportation
>revolutions of modernity. We are now aware that such exceptionalist cliams
>are commonplace among human beings and their religious communities. I
>understand the reluctance to let go of this notion. What it could it mean to
>be human if "we" were not somehow special ? Where does al the meaning go if
>"we" are not the leaven to raise the whole and destined to become the whole?
> I believe the answer lies somewhere in the direction of shedding
>exceptionalism for universalism.
>
> As I have mentioned before I now understand Baha u llah's messianic
>claims as validating the "revelatory status of all religions, truly
>validating them, and removing the basis for conflict and hatred; not as
>claiming some "exceptional" status for himself or those who come to accept
>his vision. It seems to me the continued attempt to justify this
>exceptionalism is a carryover of the same attitude which has crippled
>religion in the past and inadvertantly contributed to the ascendency of
>secularism.

I too, like Terry, was educated a Catholic; and the karmic imprint of
that environment and culture along with such an education can be very
strong upon an individual. It is the parent culture of post-ancient
western civilization. For many of us the experience was something akin
to child abuse. Although I only have warm feelings for those dedicated
folks.

Many Baha'is I know are ex-catholics. Several students from my Parochial
Grammar School became Baha'is and dear Terry is very much reminicient of
the young gentlemen I went to school with. All my closest friends
including myself were finally ejected from Salesian High School (the
administering order founded by Saint Don Bosco) for radicalism.

Although I agree with some of the formulation; and any deep thinking
Baha'i must come to grips with the fallacy of competetiveness amongst
beliefs--as the only actual religion is that of being human. Thus
ascertaining the true meaning of that; THE MANNER IN WHICH ONE
ESTABLISHES A BALANCE OF PARADOXICAL ELEMENTS AS ASPECTS OF THE
PERCEPTIVE PRISM OF THE RATIONAL SOUL is a lifetime of refinement and
adjustment.

Other portions of the argument seem to depend on the idea that we can
identify or draw a parallels between some teaching or binding statements
of the Faith with a bygone and darksome period of the Catholic church
(medieval); and with ridicule, dismiss such things as unfortunate
superstition. As was said:

> The argument is one
>Bahais make constantly w