An Authentic Summary of the Baha\'i Faith

 

That scary-looking fellow is the founder of the Baha\'i Faith, who they call \"Baha\'u\'llah.\" He gave himself the name. It means \"The Glory of God.\"

It\'s work to pronounce it correctly, and \"bu-HOO-luh\" will do. The Baha\'i leadership successfully hid this photo from its members for around 150 years. Then along came the internet.

He was a member of an Islamic sect in the 1800s known as the \"Babis\" led by a charismatic, rapturous, Sufi-oriented mystic called \"The Bab\" who wrote plans for a 2,000-year Babi dynasty. Based on photographs of Baha\'u\'llah and some of his sons he appears to have had dwarfism. (See one of his sons, below left.) It is strange that nothing has ever been written in the Baha\'i literature about his or his sons\' unusually small stature even though physical characteristics of other Baha\'i figures are sometimes mentioned in their literature. But he turned out to be a dwarf with a fiery and princely attitude. As we shall see, I think Baha\'u\'llah had a Napoleon complex to beat the band...

The Babis ended up in armed battle with the Persian authorities, at one point holed up in a fort at Tabriz for months. They tried to kill the Shah. The king finally had the Bab shot. The Babis then scattered. 

The Bab had appointed the spiritual, gentle Mirza Yahya as his successor (search \"Mirza Yahya\" online) calling him \"Dawn of Eternity.\" (Sometimes rendered as \"Everlasting Dawn.\" See him lower down in the left column at age 80.) The Bab had great affection for this young follower and considered him to be one who deeply grasped his (the Bab\'s) revelation. Mirza Yahya seemed to be a gentle soul by all reports, highly religious in the Babi way, and inclined to seclusion. By now he had seen many of his fellow Babis put to death, often in horrible ways. When Mirza Yahya was given the weight of leadership for a highly controversial sect -- one hunted by all the forces of the Shah -- he was only nineteen years old. 

The fellow at the top of this page, Mirza Husayn Ali, was a high-status follower of the Bab who\'s daddy had been the Vizier or overseer for the household of an Imam and governor, so he was like a royal insider.   Importantly, he was the  half-brother of the Bab-appointed Everlasting Dawn. 

Mirza Husayn Ali was 13 years older than the newly anointed Dawn of Eternity, and had been his brother\'s tutor. In those times an older brother was a natural, lifelong authority over a younger brother. And there was typically competition and some animosity between half-brothers in polygamous Muslim society. Even in monogamous Gentile, post-patriarchal society we observe that older brothers typically do not respect their younger brothers and do not wish to be subservient to them. It likely annoyed Husayn Ali that his younger half-brother had acquired his lofty station in the movement he was a part of. But obviously having his half-brother as leader of the spectacular movement obviously raised his own status, and he used it to his advantage during tumultuous times. (I have seen, and more than once, the phenomenon of a male taking on guru status, with a wife or family member rendering him a guru\'s respect in front of others while not really buying it personally, only paying obeisance because the elevation of her husband elevates her. This is all humanly understandable.) But Yahya\'s appointment to lead the movement was, in the end, a terrible test for Husayn Ali.

The movement was in disarray after the Shah shot the Bab, and Mirza Yahya was more of a mystic than an organizer. Thinking that his half-brother was doing a desultory job of leading the movement he cared about, the fierce Mirza Husayn Ali began challenging the authority of Everlasting Dawn for leadership. The Bab had prophesied about \"Him Whom God will Make Manifest,\" a future divine manifestation understood to be far in the future, likely two thousand years away based on the Bab\'s statements. 

Mirza Husayn had apparently experienced a kundalini awakening during his imprisonment, probably due to the devotional attitude and the Sufi-esque chanting that was part of Babi life. (He reported a few phenomena associated with kundalini later in his writings -- sleeplessness, head flows, etc.) This gave him the impression that he was a prophet. In any case whether for the practical purpose of providing better leadership for the scattered movement, or a naive belief that he his spiritual experiences made him an avatar -- Mirza Husayn began saying \'I\'m the promised one.\' 

Being steeped in the portentious \"voice\" associated with Mohammed and Muslim religious writings, he was easily able to start writing a good jag of \"revelations,\" basically grandiose pronouncements about himself. These simple men tended to compete with each other over the idea of who could write, and whose verbiage was more impressive, and Baha\'u\'llah said his fulminating \"verses\" were so astounding that it proved he was the Promised One. Two samples from his brief \"Most Holy Book\":

\"By God he is certainly in the lowest hell-fire! Say: O assembly of the learned, do you not hear the scratching of my Most High Pen?\"

\"Say: O liar, by God, what thou hast is husks. We have left it for you as bones are left for the dogs. By God, the Truth, if one were to wash the feet of everybody in the world and worship God in thickets and in green valleys, on mountains, hill-tops, and summits, and at every stone, and tree, and clod, and yet the fragrance of My good pleasure be not diffused from him, he would never be accepted. This is what the Master of Mankind has ruled.\"
Al-Kitab Al-Aqdas, \"The Most Holy Book,\" Elder & Miller, 1961

Some stuff, huh? In both of the above verses Baha is, it is believed, haranguing his hapless half-brother, the Bab\'s appointee Mirza Yahya. Older brother calls him a \"liar\" and compares him to a dog. The \"Say\" business is Baha\'u\'llah syncing up with the Koran.

Muslim tradition has it that Mohammed had an angel standing over his shoulder dictating what to say -- \"Say [this]!\" -- and that Mohammed simply wrote what he was told. It is not likely that Baha\'u\'llah was hearing a voice telling him what to say, and Baha never claimed that was the case unlike Mohammed who did say it was. Apparently Baha\'u\'llah\'s \"Say!\" was just a cheeky bit of theater. But it helped give his \"verses\" storied atmosphere for any Babis inclined to consider him as their divine prophet. In the second quotation Baha\'u\'llah is saying that Mirza Yahya\'s divine knowledge is like \"husks\" and dog bones compared to his. (Truth be told, the writings of Mirza Yahya are every bit as mystically fantastical as those of Baha\'u\'llah -- and a good sight more pleasant not-to-mention beautiful.) Baha\'u\'llah ends with a poetic meander that trashes and makes worthless anything a man might do -- even worship of God -- if not done in his graces, and with his \"good pleasure.\" 

So you can see that Baha wrote mighty impressive verses indeed. Baha\'is state that we here in the west just can\'t see it; that Mirza Husayn used really clever rhymes and mathematically interesting sentence construction. In any case, as the new claimant to avatarhood he began to crank out a blue streak of mighty verses to prove himself avatar.

At this new claim those standing with the new would-be boss fought with the Babis over who was the true leader. There were murders of varied variety. Sort of like a crime family the Babis from the start -- and Baha\'u\'llah was an early leader in the movement -- were highly creative in murder. An inconvenient Babi was thrown in the river to drown by the Baha\'is. In one anecdote related by Wilson (1905) one of the wives of the Mirza Yahya, Rukayya, after deserting her husband, had to break up household again after Baha\'is murdered the followers of \"Dawn\" who she was living with. But the higher-ups preferred poisonings. It is said that Babis tried to poison Mirza Husayn, and his people tried to poison Babis. In one rather funny account, \"Glory\" at his dinner table tried to poison his little half-brother when \"Dawn\" was visiting Glory\'s home. One side of a dish had been poisoned, not the other. When Dawn took no interest in the plate offered by Glory, Glory tried to allay any fears by eating some from the unpoisoned side. But the dish had sat there long enough that the poison had suffused slightly to Baha\'is side, and Glory ended up becoming immediately violently ill. This is the Babi and 3rd-party account. The Baha\'is, of course, claim it was little brother trying to poison big brother. However, the event took place in Glory\'s house, and the dish was prepared by Baha\'s  harem. (\'Abdu\'l-Baha, son of Glory, was also suspected of using poison when the competitor for the woman he\'d long sought died of strange causes eight months after marrying her. Then \'Adbu\'l-Baha immediately wed her.) Whatever the Babi-Baha\'i cloak-and-dagger details during this period, tensions and competition of leadership ratcheted up between the mystic and the glaring and imp-like older brother thus that Husayn and Mirza Yahya had to watch what they ate.

But Baha\'s grandiose statements about himself  continually outdid anything Everlasting Dawn was willing to write, and these \"verses\" impressed Mirza Husayn\'s partisans muchly. Wilson (Baha\'ism and Its Claims, 1905) comments on a poem written about Baha by a follower:

\"The Temple of God\'s glory is none other than Baha;
If one seeks God, let him seek Him in Baha.
Thou art the King of the Realm of the everlasting,
Thou art the Manifestation of the essence of the Lord of Glory,
The Creator of Creation.\"

Wilson comments:

\"Such are some of the \"great swelling words\" with which his followers exalt Baha. Yet when we examine his life we find nothing to justify such extravagance. He was simply a man of like passions as others. It may seem invidious to refer to scandalous stories of Baha\'s youth in Tehran. But does not truth demand that it be stated that his reputation in Persia is sullied by definite accusations of vice and immorality? I have heard such narratives with statements of the time, place, and associates who were partakers of his guilt. His family in riper years exhibits no higher example than a bigamous household. According to the narrative of Abdul Baha in the \"Traveler\'s Narrative,\" he planned in duplicity to reach the headship of the Babis; for while purposing all the while to set forth a claim for himself, he put forward his half-brother, Subh-i-Azal, as the successor of the Bab -- to protect himself and to insure his own safety during times of danger, He outwardly supported Azal for many years, while secretly planning to supplant him. While acting as Azal\'s trusted minister, he was drawing the people to himself. We pass over the attempts of these brothers to poison each other.\"

Everywhere these remnants of the Babi movement went they brought trouble. Thus governments cooperated to isolate them by moving them around like a difficult prisoner in the State Penn, trying to keep the Baha\'is separated from the Babis. This worked in Mirza Husayn\'s favor: He started to cultivate his own following in the \"prison city of Acca.\" Baha\'u\'llah had no known skill, profession, or work. Mirza Husayn\'s daddy had been a Vizier before the Shah chased them out of Persia. Having good family connections an an income from Persia, he began to get influence in the city as a new leader for the Babis. He even had a welfare payment coming to him from the governor of Acca. Who knows how.

Though steadily bemoaning his status as a prisoner in Acca, using it to make dramatic 3rd-person wailings about \"This Prisoner,\" Baha\'u\'llah seemed to live pretty well. He seemed to have connections, and even had a pension from the governor. There is no record of what his income may have been from family connections back in Persia, but he was clearly set. For he would have immediately begun to receive a monthly (every 19 days) income from any Babi who took his side and became a \"Baha\'i.\" Babis had always tithed, giving 19 percent of their income to the Bab. (About 20 percent!) You can understand the stakes, then when it comes to \"Who\'s the Avatar\" back in these lands. Big money was involved. 

After a disease outbreak a lot of people cleared out of the area. His able son \'Adbu\'l-Baha -- the tall one --  swung a deal to live in a very fancy place, a large and stately mansion abandoned by a pasha and his family. This was the beginning of great things for the diminutive new \"manifestation.\"

He used his residence in the mansion to boost his nimbus as a Divine Personage. The kingly digs served all the more to draw Babis to his side. After all, he had the mansion, it must be a sign of God. Around this time, likely as a theme to go along with the mansion and color-match to his glorious surroundings for effect, he openly began calling himself \"The Glory of God\" (Baha\'u\'llah). He changed the movement\'s name to \"Baha\'i\" (after himself) instead of \"Bab\'i. (\'of the Bab\').

He finally stripped the Bab\'s appointee Mirza Yahya of many followers, which meant that soon he was getting the serious income (tithe) from former Babis and Baha\'is, that is to say, a substantial income that used to go to Mirza Yahya. There in his posh digs the stern-faced, \"Worship My Beauty\" midget began to interact with curious westerners and, looking westward, honing his message based on the wide-eyed hipsters he was meeting.

In the earlier transitions of leadership there was bloodshed and murder. But at every stage in the religion\'s development there was conflict. Appropriately, their World Center is now located in a genocidal state that was created by violence and still carries out ethnic cleansing against the natives.

Each leader\'s death resulted in confusion and division. Thus its first 150 years produced more major controversies -- and even sects -- than other religions. (See Sects of the Baha\'is.)Baha\'is early on had terms for various kinds of apostates and black sheep: Covenant Breaker, Enemy of the Faith, etc. Conflict over leadership was so rife that \'Abdu\'l-Baha, the successor and son of Baha, excommunicated most members of his own family and shunned them as Covenant Breakers. 

They\'re still producing fresh crops of Covenant Breakers still today! That is appropriate, since Baha\'u\'llah rejected the rightly appointed successor to the Bab, he was a Covenant Breaker himself. The religion was moved forward only by Covenant-breaking since then.

Baha\'u\'llah\'s religious project, presented in his \"Book of Laws\" (Kitab-i-Aqdas) is like a strain of Islam -- with the harshness characteristic of Islam --along with major helpings of mysticism characteristic of Sufism. This includes his command to chant a mantra daily (\"Allah\'u\'abha\"). Women must say a certain chant during their periods. Men are required to keep short hair but can have more than one wife. \"Glory\" was a Persian prince. He gives instructions about falcon hunting, tells his followers to \"wear sable,\" silk and squirrel skin. There are dowry laws for marriage. He stressed devotion to God (himself), calling himself the \"Blessed Beauty\" and many other superlative terms. As in Islam, obedience was highly emphasized. In a sense, the religion revealed in the Kitab-i-Aqdas looks like any religion you\'d be able to construct from any Islamic Religion Toy Construction Kit, and it really boils down mostly to a message of \"I\'m the promised one, not that guy; you worship me, not that guy.\"

Like most amateur philosophers (including my mother), Baha\'u\'llah uttered a few universalist statements. Not any more, or any better, than the average mystic. But these morphed into Baha\'i bromides like \"mankind is one\" and \"all religions are one\" which were brought forward as the prime Baha\'i message. In religious annals there was nothing new about these ideas. The essential oneness of all external religions was enunciated by the rishis of India thousands of years ago in the Upanishads far more elaborately and profoundly than anything Baha\'u\'llah wrote. And of course, the brotherhood of man is a perennial platitude across philosophers, mystics and avatars. In reality, Baha\'u\'llah had advised his followers to \'consort with the followers of all religions in a spirit of friendliness\' for good and practical reasons: The Baha\'is and Bab\'is had been at war with each other, and it placed him and his movement into trouble with their host governments.

It developed that those westerners first attracted to the movement, mostly out of London and New York, were Marxist type progressives. As many Marxist ideas eventually spread through the west under the influence of Jewish media ownership, a more moderate type, the intellectual progressive, became the main fodder for Baha\'i recruitment. To attract these over-influenced progressives the Baha\'is created a \"Ten Basic Principles\" list that bore no real resemblance to the content of their scriptures. (Hire ten scholars to survey Baha\'i scriptures and offer up \"Ten Basic Principles\" -- they\'d never come up with the list that Baha\'i promoters use.) 

As Baha\'i promoters shaped their talking points to appeal to cultural progressives, a difference developed between the Baha\'i sales package and the founding literature, particularly the \"Most Holy book\" or \"Book of Laws.\" Its content was increasingly alien, an unwelcome stranger to the developing program. To deal with this problem the leadership simply suppressed it. They effectively hid the text from western eyes for 120 years, telling the believers \"It\'s not been translated yet\" so as to assure continued recruitment of the naive. Only recently have American Baha\'is been able to read it. (And now it\'s contents get regularly mooted, explained away, or annulled by the Baha\'i explainers.) This suppression of their central scripture played a critical role in enabling the religion\'s teachings to diverge greatly from its original nature.

Was the Baha\'i Faith a Feminist Movement in the Beginning?

In the religion\'s early development in the west, Baha\'u\'llah\'s successor, son \'Abdu\'l-Baha, came to the Communist hotbed of New York City. There he encountered Suffragettes. (Feminism is one of the planks of Communism for the weakening of the family.) He developed an approach to these Marxist women by emphasizing \"equality of men and women\" as a religious teaching, though this is little-present in the founding scriptures. Samuel Graham Wilson in \"Baha\'is And It\'s Claims\" (1915)comments on the complete lack of any feminist teaching in the entire body of Baha\'i scriptures:

\"Examination of the chief books, the \"Kitab-ul-Akdas,\" the \"Ikan\" and the \"Surat-ul-Haykal\" disclose no such teaching. Neither the 155 paragraphs of the \"Hidden Words,\" nor the \" Seven Valleys\" have any such delectable thoughts for Oriental women. Neither the six \"Ornaments\" of the faith nor the four \"Rays,\" nor the nine \"Effulgences,\" nor the eleven \"Leaves of the Words of Paradise,\" nor the nine precepts of the \"Tablet of the World,\" nor the fifteen \"Glad Tidings \"--though they announce many blessings, from freedom to cut the beard as you please to constitutional monarchy as the best form of government--give the teaching of the equality of woman with man. Neither Mirza Abul Fazl in his \"Baha’i Proofs,\" representing the new Bahais of Abdul Baha, nor Doctor Kheiralla in his ponderous volume on Beha Ullah, representing the old Behais, in this bitter and rancorous schism; nor Myron Phelps in his \"Life of Abbas Effendi,\" nor Professor Browne of Cambridge University in his learned and impartial investigations regarding the religion makes the statement that Baha Ullah teaches the equality of man and woman. On the contrary, investigation confirmed my previous conviction that the position of woman under Baha’i laws and customs is inferior to that she holds in Western lands and that her lot is far lass desirable and less blest than in Christian civilization. I reached the conclusion that this doctrine as enunciated by the \"Interpreter\" is a late addition to Bahaism, intended to attract the attention and tickle the ears of audiences in Europe and America.\"

\"Equality of men and women\" was never a teaching of Baha\'u\'llah. \'Adbu\'l-Baha created it after consorting with curious leftist women of New York City.

In Baha\'i scripture women are barred from membership on the Baha\'i Faith\'s highest body, the \"Universal House of Justice\" in Israel. One Baha\'i law states that a husband should send his wife home (and pay for her expenses) if they fight while traveling. The entire Baha\'i \"Book of Laws\" (Kitab-i-Aqdas) is clearly addressed to men. This is obvious, for example, in Baha\'u\'llah\'s dictums regarding marriage. In that instruction (below) two wives is assumed as normative; 3 or more wives receives a \"warning\" but it\'s not actually forbidden. Baha\'u\'llah often referred to women as \"handmaidens.\" This is his simple statement in the Baha\'i \"Book of Laws\" (Most Holy Book):

\"God has ordained marriage for you. Beware lest you go beyond two, and whoever is satisfied with one of the handmaidens, his soul is at rest and so is hers, and one does no harm in taking a virgin into his service.\" 
Al-Kitab Al-Aqdas, Translation of  Earl Elder and William Miller, Royal Asiatic Society, 1961

Note that he merely warns \"Beware\" as in \"Be careful!\" It\'s a warning that any man who\'s had more than one wife might give to a man considering it, and probably good advice. \"Beware lest  you go beyond two\" -- literally means: \"Be cautious or you\'ll end up with more than two.\" Then it merely praises the fellow satisfied with one-wife and opines that it\'s likely to yield more peace. (Not necessarily true.) Baha\'u\'llah had no problem articulating unambiguous don\'ts and \"do nots\" elsewhere in his text. Remember he was speaking to supporters who had 2-and-more wives, and he himself is reported to have had at least three by the time he wrote this. And this somehow was massaged into a Feminist religion?

The Kitab-i-Aqdas has been especially problematic for Baha\'i promoters. On one hand Baha\'is touted the Kitab -i-Aqdas as mankind\'s new, flawless message for our \"new age,\" one uncorrupted by translations or time. On the other hand, it contained things strangely at odds with the \"Baha\'i Faith\" being constructed by Baha\'i marketers. So to keep the religion from dying off in the west, the Baha\'i promoters needed to corrupt the text themselves.

But the first strategy, which they pursued for 120 years, was to simply suppress the text and keep it away from western eyes for well over a century. The standard line was, \"It\'s not been translated yet.\" (As if all possible Arab translators had died.) Yet its contents began to leak out, especially in a sop thrown to the believers in the form of a \"Synopsis and Codification.\" In that \"Synopsis,\" in the footnotes and \"explanatory\" paragraphs, the Baha\'i Administration began to do their intellectual gymnastics to explain away and nullify the content of their Holy Book. 

One early gambit was to say that a polygamy allowance, though apparently present in Baha\'u\'llah\'s sacred text, \'couldn\'t be so\' because the Baha\'i Faith emphasized justice. Justice couldn\'t obtain if a man could have more than one wife, etc. (Is there ever perfect justice in any family?) When the Baha\'is finally released the contents of the Kitab-i-Aqdas the verse above was translated in clever ways to make it sound as if polygamy was being forbidden. (See: \"The Miller-Elder Translation of the Baha\'i Book of Laws\" for comparative translation commentary.)

The Baha\'is are chronically riven with controversy as the ostensible \"equality of the sexes\" jams up against realities like females barred from the UH and the Most Holy Book\'s apparent allowance of polygamy for men. The answer is that the Baha\'i Faith, at it\'s foundation, was never feminist nor did it it teach \"equality of the sexes\" per se. There is no explicit feminist teaching contained in the Baha\'i Faith\'s three important scriptures, much less any radical ones. These are The Kitab-i-Aqdas, the Hidden Words, and the Kitab-i-Iqan. Certainly the phrase \"equality of men and women\" does not occur in any of these foundational texts, nor any similar phrase.

The original Baha\'i Faith is as patriarchal as Islam; as patriarchal as its founders. Feminism -- a version much tamer than what the founders could have conceived of -- was added later. This was apparently because some of the westerners first attracted to it, charmed by \'Adbu\'l-Baha and charming to him and having money, were feminists. \'Adbu\'l-Baha was a practical man. (He made deals with the British government during WWII and functioned as a spy for them.) What would you do if you had a few suffragettes willing to be your foot soldiers?

Though Baha\'u\'llah considered it virtuous for a man to \"satisfy himself\" with one wife but assumed 2  as normative, as the Alpha Male of his milieu it seems he had at least 4 wives. Two were early reported by the traveling English orientalist E.G. Browne, Nawwab and Mahd-i-\'Ulya. (Mahd-i-\'Ulya was his cousin.) \"It has been stated by other authorities who were in a position to know\" (Kitab-i-Aqdas, Elder/Miller, p. 41) that Baha\'u\'llah married a 3rd wife in 1867, Gohar, who bore him a daughter named Faruqiyya, then a 4th wife in old age, Jamaliyya who was the niece of one of his favorite followers. It is said that all wives survived him, thus Baha\'u\'llah himself had at least 4 wives. (And six children.) 

The most that can be said is that Baha\'u\'llah moderated the Islamic rules regarding women a bit, such as freeing Baha\'i women of the requirement to wear a veil, something that was radical for the time. There is no question that the highly patriarchal and traditional founders of the Baha\'i Faith would have been appalled to see the state of society today, the collapse of sexual identity and sexual roles, and the destruction of the family wrought by radical feminism. They would have wanted no part of it. 

But \'Adbu\'l-Baha\'s strategy was canny and paid off: The Baha\'i Faith basically got established in the west through the interest of suffragettes and feminist women. Wilson remarks:

\"Of the two or three thousand Americans who are following the cult of Bahaism, most are women. Concerning this Abdul Baha says in a tablet: \"Today the women of the West lead the men in the service of the cause (Bahaism) and loosen their tongues in eloquent lectures.\" [1][2] Hence it is timely to consider the teaching and practice of Baha Ullah with regard to women. The editor adds, \"Nine-tenths of the active workers in the cause are women.\"

By now the mystical, spiritual, and austere teachings of the Baha\'i Faith have been largely supplanted by externalist and worldly Marxist goals like world government,  feminism, deracination, and elimination of nations. Baha\'u\'llah regularly dissed the world, calling it \"the world of dust.\" But like Marxism, the Baha\'i Faith became a world-focused religion. The founders had a negative view of science and technology (both the Bab and Baha\'u\'llah) and taught that science should be subject to religious values and not exceed them. But Baha\'is became technology-worshippers; science can do no wrong. (This is also a value of Marxism, which believes mankind\'s problems can be solved by materialistic science.) Compared to religions like Buddhism or Hinduism, the metaphysics of the Baha\'i Faith are very sketchy. Yet there is a strong Sufi-like element of mysticism. Notwithstanding that content the Baha\'i Faith became anti-mystical. The administration\'s attitude, and life in the ranks of the Baha\'is, demonstrates an aversion to the mystical. For example, the Baha\'is are given a mantra to say in their \"Book of Laws\" (as is common to the three other great world religions) but Baha\'is are uncomfortable with the word \"mantra\" and refuse to view it as such. This very easy-to-do practice, typical of Islam and mystical Sufism, was apparently considered \"too exotic\" by western Baha\'i promoters. Though easy to do, the western Baha\'is were not even asked to perform it for their first 120 years! This is because image and hope  of enrollment growth was always more important to the Baha\'i promoters than the real religion itself.

In Buddhism and Hinduism one \"saves himself\" here-now by encountering and merging with God within, which also alters the nature of the projected external world. They focus on freedom from a dualistic, ephemeral samsara. In Christianity, there is a focus on the afterlife. But in the Baha\'i Faith of today, the other-worldly and God-focused content of their own texts is abandoned for a wholly rational, materialistic focus and questionable worldly goals like deracination, race-mixing, salvation via technology, and one all-controlling world government. For this reason I say that the Baha\'i Faith is a Sufic movement that was hijacked by Marxist types as a vehicle for Marxist goals, manned and fueled largely by idealistic, well-meaning White people who have been afflicted with White-guilt syndrome.

The Baha\'i Faith was built substantially by Jews, and Whites with magnified ideas about a \"race problem.\" They flee to it as a way to \"be good\" and expiate falsely-induced \"White.\" \"Glory\" claimed he was \"the return of the promised one\" -- of \"all religions\" at once. The Canadian William Sears interpreted a few arcane Biblical factoids to to create a rather tenuous rationale for the idea that \'Glory\' was the Return of Christ.

Though non-scriptural, racial intermarriage (miscegenation) is now a tacit high sacrament for some Baha\'is, an extra measure to expiate White \'guilt\' and show they are true believers in the \"oneness of mankind\" ideal against all psychological naturalness or respect for nature and Time\'s heritage.

In a nutshell, the Baha\'i Faith started as a sect of Islam, became Sufism-writ-large under \"Glory,\" then was transformed into a materialistic and humanist program pursuing Communist goals and lacks the profound analysis of reality, or focus on inner development, characteristic of Buddhism and Hinduism while functioning as an affront to the traditionalism of Islam.

As a longtime student of religions and religious practices, my view is that the devotional content and attitudes in the Baha\'i writings are its best content and the best influence on its believers. In Hinduism/Yoga this is termed \"bhakti-yoga\" and is considered to be itself a religious technique. (And the best one.) The significant fact is that  Baha\'is do not even have a valuation for this fact and lack a lexicon for it. For example, the average Baha\'is would not be able to tell you that their religion is, at the textual level, heavily \"bhakti-oriented.\" This blindness and unawareness exists in the Baha\'i Faith because, notwithstanding their pretensions to unite all religions and show us their common ground, Baha\'is have little interest in learning about what the other religions teach.

Notwithstanding, the cultivation of devotional attitudes toward God is a valuable and positive aspect of membership in the religion; the very best aspect. Baha\'is should be discouraged from having race-mixing fetishes, encouraged to be loyal to their own families and ethnic people, learn that words like \"family\" and \"country\" actually mean something, and encouraged in their devotional attitude and love of the God found within. Perhaps then maybe they will end up doing less harm to the world. 

In fact, Baha\'is should finally take their \"Most Holy Book\" seriously, discover the good things that are in it, and give up their obsession with the world, worldly power, and give up their fetish for different colored human bodies.

-- J. Curtis Lee Mickunas

www.bahaiface.com