Just Passing Through...

Introduction

2011-09-19T13:30:00.006-05:00

This blog was set up as a place to put my thoughts for others to access, some of which were written long before the Internet. To browse around it, please see the "Labels" section to the left. Its contents include the following:

Most posts from 1970 through the '80s consist of prose, poetry and songs from high school and college years, in the approximate order they were written, from a turbulent adolescence to finding meaning in life.
Everything posted as 1990 was actually written during and shortly after my Masters studies at UC Davis and kept in a journal titled "Coral and Pearls - A Collection of Essays". Many were heavily influenced by side research into the Anisa Model of education, as some will easily recognize.
Posts from 1991 forward are mostly adapted from letters written to family and friends, several on Baha'i topics.
Around 2005 my writing started to center more on my "Culture of Peace" project, starting with "Rethinking Social Science". You can find an overview of how it has unfolded in My Fight for Peace and a summary of the project in Moving from a Culture of Conflict to a Culture of Peace.

I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I have enjoyed writing it. Please keep in mind that no matter how convinced I may sound of my ideas at any given period, I am fully aware that this is merely the best I was able to come up with at that time, and either already think differently or expect to at some point. If not, I will have stagnated in my search. Perhaps it will be your comments that will bring about that change, so please feel free to question, challenge and propose new approaches!

For a completely different selection of posts in Spanish, see my blog in Spanish.

Survival of the Fittest

2011-06-30T18:50:00.000-05:00

In his mid-19^thcentury study on the Origin of the Species, Charles Darwin proposed thatorganisms having certain features were more likely to survive and reproducethan others, and that eventually this resulted in the ‘natural selection’ ofthose hereditary traits and their generalization in that species. Shortlythereafter, Herbert Spencer suggested that this process progressed through the‘survival of the fittest’ in the struggle for life.

Despite Darwin’sobjections, these concepts were applied to human society under the name of‘Social Darwinism’, which proposed that the processes of ‘natural selection’and ‘survival of the fittest’ would have favored the most aggressive, violent,ambitious, and greedy individuals and groups, resulting over time in thepredominance of these features among human beings. This evokesimages of brutish cavemen clobbering each other with clubs, with the winnerbecoming the chief of the tribe and carrying away the women to produce morebelligerent cavemen to continue the fight, until these characteristics becamedeeply engrained in ‘human nature’.

However, numerousanthropological studies have shown the contrary. It is our capacity for cooperation that has enabled human life tocontinue, as only through mutual assistance has it been possible to overcomehunger and the rigors of nature. In fact,in most societies studied, those endowed with greater ability forreconciliation and unification have ascended to positions of authority. In contrast, the most conflictive were oftenproscribed and even expelled from the community in order to avoid theirdivisive, harmful influence. Where theywere able to take power, the result was often ruinous – the downfall of socialorder.

Therefore, if ‘natural selection’ didapply to human society – which has been strongly questioned – it would havefavored those who contributed most to the harmony, tranquility and wellbeing ofthe whole. As Ashley Montagu said: “Without cooperation among its members, nogroup can survive. Humansociety has prevailed because of its members’ ability to cooperate, which hasmade that survival possible.”[1]

Actually, the term ‘survival of thefittest’ does not refer to the strongest and most aggressive, as many believe,but to the ability to adapt to the demands of the environment. Charles Darwin is attributed withsaying: “It is not the strongest of thespecies that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the most responsive tochange.” It is increasingly clear thatselfishness, conflict and aggression no longer serve the interests of humanity– if indeed they ever did –, but rather cooperation and mutual support. We readin the Seville Statement on Violence:

“It is scientifically incorrect to saythat in the course of human evolution there has been a selection for aggressivebehavior more than for other kinds of behavior. In all well-studied species,status within the group is achieved by the ability to cooperate and to fulfillsocial functions relevant to the structure of that group.”[2]

Consequently, thereis no longer any reason to believe that conflict, aggression and selfishnessplayed a role in the survival of the human species, nor that they prevailed inour evolution. Just as the ability to cooperate and help each otherhas been necessary in order to reach this point in history, the future ofhumanity will also depend on the prevalence of these characteristics, bothindividually and collectively.

Notes:

[1]AshleyMontagu, in Roger T. Johnson et al., Cooperationin Learning: Ignored but Powerful. Lyceum5, 1982, p. 1.

[2]UNESCO, SevilleStatement on Violence, written and signed by 20 Nobel prize winners for theInternational Year of Peace in Seville, Spain, on May 16, 1986.

Worldviews and human potential for change

2011-01-04T20:55:00.003-05:00

Several course participants have gone out and talked to people about their views on human potential for sociocultural change towards a culture of peace, which has been a very enriching exercise.

Some have said that God created us as rational animals –by nature greedy and selfish– so that we can defend ourselves against those who, because of the same characteristics, would put our interests in danger. This seems like a contradiction, because if God had created all humans generous and kind, there would be no-one to defend ourselves against!

Others have said that even love is for our own self-benefit. This echoes something that Eric Fromm said in “The Art of Loving", that when we are morally immature we love others because we need them, and when we mature morally we need others because we love them.

Another idea is that we can enjoy others’ successes as long as they do not interfere with our own. This is a common theory that breaks down in the case of our inner circle family and close friends, for whom we are often willing to make tremendous self-sacrifices. Most social scientists believe that our sense of identity is determined by our interests. For example, the common interests of the taxi drivers in a city give them a sense of common identity. Michael Karlberg, however, suggests that our perception of what our interests are may be determined by our sense of identity. If we identify WITH others, we come to perceive that their interests are the same as ours. If this is true, then that explains why we can promote the interests of others as if they were our own. It also opens the door to the possibility of developing a sense of common identity among segments of society that were formerly believed to have opposing interests, thereby uniting apparently divergent interests as one and the same. How does this relate to the principal of the oneness of humanity?

Some think that a world of peace would be entirely free from pain and sorrow. This reflects the notion of peace as a state of final perfection, and not as an on-going process. It is especially found to be true of a certain Western Christian worldview that sees everything in terms of absolutes: black and white, true and false, good and evil.

Then there are the fatalistic worldviews, including the “original sin” doctrine by which “evil” is not something that we can overcome through effort, but can only come from above through individual “salvation” and the descent of God's Kingdom from heaven, which shares similarities with the Muslim belief in the coming of a world savior in the form of the “Imam-e-Zaman” to fix the world for us.

These ideas can free us from blame for the way the world is, on the one hand, and from responsibility for changing it, on the other. They leave us with the “soft” morality of making life more bearable for others through small acts of charity and kindness, as a religious duty. However, these acts are not expected to achieve any fundamental changes in the structure of society, but only relieve some of the suffering caused by those structures.

There is also a group that believes that human beings are not selfish by nature, but that socialization and education lead us to think about our own self benefit. This is similar to Rousseau and Pestalozzi’s formula that man is created good but that society corrupts him. Perhaps one difference, in this case, would be the idea that peace and unity are achievable through appropriate education, whereas Rousseau and Pestalozzi thought that human goodness would bubble up naturally if children received as little interference from adults as possible.

In this vein, it is important not to confuse the Bahá'í concept of a double human nature with the old body / soul dichotomy of having an animal nature that is bad and a spiritual nature that is good. According to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, it is the human spirit itself that has a double nature, because it is simultaneously drawn towards the “world” (meaning all things that separate us from God) and towards perfection (approaching God).

Justice, unity and peace are dynamic processes in which we will always be moving from less to more, will always have new problems to solve, will always have to struggle with the “insistent self” or ego, and will never be entirely free from pain and sorrow. In such a world, justice, unity and peace would not eliminate all difficulties forever, but will make is possible to deal with issues that currently are not even tractable.

Then there is the group that believes that we will not “necessarily” achieve justice, unity and peace, but only through hard work, self-sacrifice and controlling our animal nature and instincts. In its "Promise of World Peace", the Universal House of Justice says that we will inevitably reach it, but that it is up to us to decide whether we will do it proactively through conscious choice or only as a last-ditch effort after “unimaginable horrors” have occurred.

The urgency of training agents of social change is precisely to lessen and shorten the suffering that humankind will need to undergo before it chooses justice, unity and peace, even if only in its own self-interest! That is why arising to serve the transformation of both individuals and society is the only truly “moral position” that a fully aware person can take at this critical juncture in human history. Any lesser position –avoiding vices, being nice to others, etc.– falls far short of the magnitude of what is morally demanded of us today.

There also arose mention of Conspiracy Theory, according to which powerful economic and political interest groups are colluding against the unsuspecting masses of both East and West, which has been and continues to be cause for much speculation. Noam Chomski is one author of note in this regard. In “Beyond the Culture of Contest”, Karlberg opines that when people work under the same basic assumptions, they do not have to conspire in order to act in unison, because how we think determines how we act, and if we all have a similar worldview or paradigm we will act similarly.

Be this as it may, more important than the Conspiracy Theory itself is the associated attitude of being victims of an external power or authority. This tendency to blame others for our own problems sounds like nonconformity on the surface, but is actually a way to conform without appearing to do so. It is a tricky self-delusion designed to free ourselves from the moral responsibility to make the tremendous efforts needed to achieve real change. It is just another mental model that we knit for ourselves in order to live a tranquil life while the world around us is steeped in misery and falling apart at the seams.

Today’s youth have been trained to believe that they cannot bring about any changes in the world, and that trying to do so is useless. The “moral position” mentioned above, then, requires helping them overcome this self-defeating attitude, become more fully cognizant of the “power of agency” that each individual and group truly has, and then exploit that awareness through concrete actions that address real, identifiable priorities. Luckily, it would seem that younger generation are less fatalistic and are also willing to challenge their mental models more easily.

Moving beyond pessimism

2011-01-04T20:28:00.003-05:00

It seems that more and more religious people are seeking intensely for answers to the serious social ailments of today's world, from philosophical, scientific, social, and political perspectives, not just religious ones. Their willingness to be true to this search, although it may cause them pain and suffering, contrasts sharply with the new-age brand of “feel-good spirituality” that is so prevalent today. It reflects an awareness that true spiritual development can be an anguishing, painful process, including ambiguity, stress, frustration, anger, separation from loved ones, difficulty to understand and forgive, etc. After all, it is not how we FEEL that determines our level of spirituality, but rather to what extent our ACTIONS are sincerely consistent with the best fruits of our search, wherever it has lead us so far in our lives.

In the world around them, they see class conflicts, hegemony, manipulation, monopolies, imperialism, cultural degradation, unjust invasions, and exploitative, cruel and neglectful relationships. These social ills may be due in part to the destructive attitudes of certain individuals, but they also –especially– reflect deep flaws in the way present-day society is structured. Their realization of this echoes Bahá’u’lláh's lament that “the signs of impending convulsions and chaos can now be discerned, inasmuch as the prevailing order appears to be lamentably defective,” already in the mid-19th century –some 150 years ago– how much more today!

These ills will not be best served by thickening the walls of nationalism, but rather through the establishment of a world-wide federation of nations, complete with legislative, executive and judicial powers. However, I do agree that Marx, and subsequent authors who followed his basic framework, have developed useful models that can help us better understand the dynamics of the “prevailing order” and why it is currently falling into “convulsions and chaos”. In addition to Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony, which our text mentions in passing, there are other fine notions such as dependency theory and its core – periphery relationships.

Of course, like all models and categories of analysis, these are imperfect simplifications of a highly complex world, and have relative degrees of explanatory value. However, we cannot easily brush them aside just because we do not like the lamp from which their light shines! Rather, we need to strive to understand their underlying concepts and assumptions, reinterpret them in the light of a mutualistic worldview, and seek out their implications for our overriding goal of contributing to the construction of a new world civilization.

They can fully relate to those who respond with feelings of frustration and anger. When we were children, we saw those around us as acting out of good faith, with our best interests at heart. As we grow up, we tended to cling to this image, because it made us feel comfortable and made the world a more livable place. However, for many a time comes when that illusion is shattered into a thousand pieces, and they begin to see the world as a dangerous place full of people seeking to take unfair advantage of them. It hurts to be deprived of the childish faith in that idyllic world and be thrown into such an unjust, insecure, fearful place. Fear engenders anger, which leads to frustration and hopelessness. This fear, anger, frustration, and despair are like holes in our souls through which our creative energies leak out uselessly and are lost forever.

The Bahá'í writings speak of two kinds of purity: one due to immaturity and the other achieved through maturation. In order to go from one to the other, one must know impurity, struggle with it and overcome it. Similarly, a positive outlook on life can be a result of immaturity or maturity. In order to go from one to the other we must know what it means to have a negative outlook on life, struggle with it and overcome it. As we continue maturing beyond the initial disappointment, we begin to discover and treasure small but significant signs of true hope for the world and its inhabitants. As we continue on this path, we will eventually find in our hearts the desire to dedicate our time and energy to fanning those tiny sparks of hope into a flame, cultivating those seeds of goodness until they grow and bear fruit.

More and more people share the hope to overcome this dilemma and achieve higher goals. We can reach that stage of service, first through a process of questioning traditional mental models and replacing them with a new conceptual framework, and then by acquiring the capabilities needed to put it into practice. May we then find it in ourselves to arise with determination to channel our leaking energies towards concrete lines of action that will contribute – in a large or small way – to building the new world that millions of people just like us are freely expending their energies and very lives to achieve.

More than the sum

2011-01-04T20:17:00.003-05:00

One common mistake that should be avoided when discussing social topics is the assumption that society is no more than a collection of individuals and that, therefore, the features of society will reflect individual characteristics and vice-versa.

This type of reductionism leads to the fallacy of composition, by which we assume that something is true of the whole because it is true of some part of the whole, and the fallacy of division by which we assume that something that is true of a thing must also be true of all or some of its parts.

In fact, however, a society is more than the sum of its individual members. This is expressed in the Baha'i principles of the underlying organic unity of mankind, seeing the world as a human body, unity in diversity, etc. It is also seen in the fact that our bodies change their cells every 7 years and yet we age and die, although each individual cell may be young and healthy.

Similarly, society changes its members every 70 years, and yet can maintain the same characteristics for centuries, and then can experience dramatic, profound transformations, almost overnight, although it still has all of the same members as the day before, and none of them underwent major changes in their character.

What has changed in these cases is not the nature of the individual members themselves, but rather the nature of the relationships among them. Likewise, once those relationships have become structured into formal institutions, the individual character of the members can change without significantly modifying the basic character of society.

This is an important point to understand, as it is the underlying reason why it is essential to work simultaneously for both individual transformation AND social transformation in order to achieve a true, lasting impact in any efforts for social change.

Long- versus short-term pragmatism

2011-01-04T17:52:00.005-05:00

Short-term, concrete or material development actions are often called pragmatic, while long-term, human development approaches with less certain outcomes are often characterized as Utopian or unrealistic. However, this way of thinking hides a subtle trap that we should be wary of, as these concepts may just represent the difference between acting with a long-term versus short-term vision of the future.

Pragmatism is defined in philosophy as the doctrine by which practical consequences are the criteria of knowledge, meaning and value. That is, a proposition is only considered true and good if it works satisfactorily. However, do those “consequences” have to appear on the short term to be considered “practical”? What if what “works” on the short term actually ends up worsening things on the long term? Would it still be pragmatic?

For example, Marxism offered a very practical, realistic, but long-term proposal based on scientific analyses of historical dynamics and where they were leading us, and what needed to be done here and now to change them. It only started to be called Utopian when proven ineffectual more than seven decades into the experiment. In contrast, it is all too easy to see liberal Western political and economic systems and worldviews as pragmatic and realistic, because their deep flaws have not yet been widely accepted. Nevertheless, they are also breaking up and showing their inability to achieve the vision of the future that inspired them. There is no reason to believe that the time will not come when they, too, will be recognized as having been ideologically-based, ineffectual Utopias.

Therefore, if pragmatism means short-sightedness, and Utopianism means working with a long-term vision, then one might be convinced to prefer the latter. The only true question would be what that vision should be and how to go about building it. The centuries-long task of building a new world civilization requires practical action here and now: travelling the visionary path with practical feet. And this is precisely what is asked of agents of change who work towards that new civilization. This is a moral stance, because it requires them to center their lives on something beyond themselves - on the community at large.

Today's brand of authoritarian leadership, which often includes the pain of severe punishments, leads to fear, which leads to hatred, which leads to anger, which leads to thoughts of destroying what caused the pain in the first place. However, this action itself causes more pain, which leads to more fear, hatred, anger, and destruction. Thus, violence engenders violence, in a vicious circle by which the same attitudes are reproduced and reinforced in each generation. Our task as agents of sociocultural change is to break that cycle, first in our own lives, and then to help others to achieve the same.

The easier destructive route is proposed by some as more “pragmatic” than the longer constructive approach. However, the question arises as to whether actions that seek shorter-term results –whatever they may be– can really be considered as necessarily more “pragmatic” than actions that have longer-term results (and that may also require accepting that their fruits will only be seen on the longer term). This has often been the case with acts of violence, killing people and blowing up buildings, which are a good example of why the “pragmatic = short-term” equation does not work. Can we say that the farmer who eats his seeds to satisfy today’s hunger is more “pragmatic” than the farmer who buries that food in the ground with the uncertain hope that someday it will grow and multiply?

Let's go back to leadership for another example. The reason dominant styles of leadership are so popular is precisely because they achieve easy results on the short term. However, their long-term effects are disastrous! Who, then, is more pragmatic? The authoritarian, paternalistic, know-it-all, or manipulative leaders who "get the job done" quickly, even if by doing so they disempower their group members? Or the leaders who patiently empower people so that they will be more effective for the rest of their lives? As Steven Covey says, when working with things you can be efficient, but when dealing with people you can only hope to be effective.

Dealing with Criticism

2011-01-04T17:43:00.003-05:00

The issue of how to deal with criticism from the recipients of a service – educational or otherwise – is an important one that should not be taken lightly. We need try to understand where that criticism comes from in order to address it properly, and not just accept it as an inevitable test of our personal egos. A few examples of causes and approaches might be:

1. In the best of cases, criticism may be well-founded and require serious attention in order to solve the problems identified by those who complain. Of course, we would all like for others to come to us directly and present any problems in a positive, constructive way, but this is seldom the case. Few are trained in methods of constructive criticism (nobody is born knowing), and many feel impotent vis-à-vis the system and doubt that their voices will be heard, that they will be taken into account seriously and that they can influence any change. So instead of being proactive and supporting the authorities in their efforts to identify potential issues and solve them, they limit themselves to criticizing and complaining, often to the wrong people who lack decision-making authority.

To deal with this while avoiding the need for personal transformation, many organizations install “Suggestion Boxes” where their employees can place anonymous notes to their superiors. Establishments such as hotels continually ask customers for feedback, both to improve their service and keep them from complaining to others and tainting their image. The Bahá'í Administrative System is unique in this respect, because it includes built-in feedback mechanisms such as consultations during 19-Day Feasts, District / National / International Conventions, the entire apparatus of the Institution of the Counselors, and the fact that anyone can write a letter to or request consultation with any Bahá'í institution. The friends are not only allowed but encouraged to give their input to improve the way we work, in a joint learning process. However, this system requires personal transformation to acquire the necessary concepts, skills, attitudes and qualities to make it work, such as learning the deceptively simple art of Bahá'í consultation.

So in projects and organizations, it is important to think about how to implement these different approaches to achieve the kind of positive feedback and input that is needed.

2. In some cases complaints may be part of an organizational culture of criticizing the system, which began for historical reasons that few remember, and is just being reproduced by each new group of beneficiaries who blindly follow the example of the older ones. This was the case, for example, in a local high school that started out with a very relaxed discipline and got more and more strict as the years went by, which bothered the students. This can be addressed by talking to the students about their concerns and suggestions, but also presents an opportunity to work with them on certain spiritual qualities and moral attitudes such as tolerance, overlooking the faults of others, concentrating on our own faults, using the power of appreciation and encouragement, etc.

3. In other cases, criticism may be an indirect way of achieving some other goal. It may be used as a substitute for participating constructively and actively, in which case we need to encourage proactivity. For example, in a school parents will complain about everything as a means of feeling that they are somehow involved in their children’s education. When this happened in one school, the director made it a requirement for a member of each child’s immediate family to spend one morning or afternoon per quarter serving as the teacher’s assistant. As soon as they began to feel truly involved, the complaining stopped and the director started receiving more useful feedback.

4. For some people, complaining and criticizing acts as an emotional compensation for their own feelings of low self-esteem and lack of self worth. By attacking an authority, they feel that they place themselves at the same level of that authority, which makes them feel important and powerful. A good way to address this issue is by talking and acting in such a sincerely humble and supportive way that will demonstrate that they do not need that kind of behavior in order to talk to each other on the same level, by showing your respect for their dignity as human beings of equal value, which will strengthen their self esteem.

5. Finally, the criticism may be part of a broader culture of attacking anyone who may be seen as having a position of authority. According to Dr. Moojan Momen, this is very much the case in the Iranian culture, for example, which over its long history of subjection to oppressive foreign rule, has developed an attitude of passive (and sometimes not-so-passive) resistance to any top-down authority. Dr. Momen claims that because of this, in Iranian culture, authority is largely gained by increasing personal prestige, from the bottom up, and not so much through direct designation from above. He explains that this is how Iran’s unique Shi’i system works, with religious authorities rising up gradually through the accrual of prestige, rather than being designated by a higher authority as in the Catholic Church, for example.

This “moral” authority apparently is often achieved by seeking power without appearing to do so, feigning humility to mask one’s inner pride, making sure that one’s good deeds are noted by others, seeming to serve others while in fact serving oneself through such dominant styles of leadership as know-it-all and paternalism, and the ‘territorialism’ of making sure that others do not invade one’s sphere of influence. In this type of system, the best way to weaken such positions of authority to achieve some personal gain is often not through formal channels or democratic electoral procedures, but rather through personal and public criticism and attacks (verbal or otherwise).

Needless to say, these things are not limited to Iranian culture by any means, but are some of the many tricks that the "insistent self" plays on the hearts and minds of people around the world. Each agent of social change is best positioned to know to what extent this is true in his or her own environment, and in what direction it is evolving, as cultures are quite fluid and are continually changing. To the extent that it is the case, any sociocultural intervention in this regard will require facilitating a process of profound questioning of deeply-rooted mental models, which may be strongly reinforced by tradition and may take a lot of work to overcome, and replacing them with new conceptual frameworks and related capabilities.

Academia as an Institutionalization of Adversarialism

2011-01-04T17:28:00.003-05:00

How did education become the institutionalization of adversarialism in many parts of the world? Some scholars trace its roots as far back as the oppositional dualisms of the Semitic and Zoroastrian cultures, but more recently to the ancient Greeks, who thought in binary terms of polar opposites. Each aspect of life, from sports to war, from politics to economics, was characterized by the struggle between antagonistic forces. There was no idea of win-win, but rather every victory necessarily required someone’s defeat. At the center of the political and economic life of the polis or Greek city was the agora – at once a political forum, public market and meeting place, where citizens gathered to debate politics, haggle over prices and argue about philosophy. The very name agora means contest or struggle, which says much about its purpose and the Greek worldview.

Within this context, Sophists were the masters of persuasive technique and rhetorical argument. From their efforts in both philosophy and politics arose a method of formal logic based on oppositional models for the generation of knowledge, first systematized and published by Aristotle. All-male academies were established where these methods were taught and used as essential tools of intellectual work. Here, young men were trained to become the builders of the Greek Empire`s political, economic and military systems, thereby reproducing and strengthening the foundations of a culture of contest, dispute and adversarialism from one generation to the next.

This is the culture that was eventually handed down to Christian Europe through the Roman civilization, whose ascendancy was also based on political, economic and military power. When the Roman Empire weakened, Southern Europe was invaded and plundered by the Goths, Visigoths and other barbaric tribes of Northern Europe that had not been vanquished by the Romans. All of this provided abundant historical material to produce the adversarial worldview that became the predominant influence in most aspects of Western society and culture.

Medieval Europe’s educational approach was modeled after the Greek academies, first in the all-male monasteries, then in the “cathedral schools” from the 9th century AD, next in the ecclesiastic schools from the 12th century AD, and finally in secular schools strategically sponsored by aristocrats from the 17th century AD on. Karlberg [2004:58-62] provides an excellent summary of authors such as Noble [1992], Moulton [1983] and Ong [1974, 1981], who studied these successive institutions in depth and found them to be highly adversarial in many ways through the late 19th century.

These authors describe them as masculine, even misogynistic schools, where women were perceived as worldly and sinful, to be avoided in order to preserve the purity of both body and soul. They had a highly militaristic culture, with rigid discipline and war-like regimes. Students saw themselves as ‘warriors’ in training to fight battles, both spiritual (as missionaries) and physical (crusades and inquisitions). In some universities, classes were divided into ‘nations’ and fought ritualized armed battles between them. Sometimes these ‘soldiers’ went out into the neighboring communities at night to terrorize the local population, especially the women. There was a ritual enmity between professors and students, adversarial methods of teaching and evaluation, and frequent physical punishments. The primary teaching and research methods consisted of academic disputes and intellectual contests, such that those subjects that were best suited to this approach were favored over others.

For almost 2000 years, these breeding grounds of adversarialism trained each successive generation of leaders who wrote ‘world history’, designed the institutions and practices that became today’s adversarial social structures, and developed the diverse scientific disciplines of the West, all of which coincided in portraying the world through the dark glasses of adversarialism. Even today, the predominant epistemological model in the West is one that perceives the generation of knowledge as a contest between competing ideas.

Beginning in the 15th century, the European conquest and colonization of most of the world made it possible for this culture of contest to become firmly implanted in all of the colonies, not only in the form of structures of governance, but also in educational systems. During this time, the theoretical underpinnings of adversarial thought were strengthened through the notions we studied in Units 3 and 4. Even after their liberation from colonist rule, in their process of ‘modernization’, virtually all newly independent nation-states have chosen to style their social structures –including educational ones– after adversarial Western models. This is how the culture of contest was promoted and reproduced throughout the world and became the predominant model for many educational institutions, especially colleges and universities.

In promoting a culture of peace in the world, one essential starting place is to transform educational structures from breeding grounds of adversarialism to seedbeds of mutualism. Not only should students explore mutualistic contents using independent investigation of truth, but educational methods should be based on approaches such as consultation. In doing so, we should be careful not to let the culture of adversarialism taint our understanding of the mutualistic principles on which these approaches are based. Take the quote “The shining spark of truth cometh forth only after the clash of differing opinions,” for example. We need to avoid the tendency to see such concepts through filters inherited from the culture of contest, according to which this “clash” would refer to a collision of personalities instead of an encounter of ideas, or to dialectical dynamics of opposition instead of dialogical relations of complementarity.

This difference can be illustrated using an analogy from the natural sciences. According to Newtonian physics, when atoms bumped against each other, the influence of those with the greatest mass and momentum prevailed over the others, much like what happens in an adversarial debate. However, in today’s accelerators, when subatomic particles collide (see image), the sum of their collective mass, energy and momentum produces a burst of new particles that are quite different from the original ones –some stable and enduring and others unstable and fleeting– which reflects the creative power of bringing together a diversity of ideas through consultation.

Building a new paradigm of mutualistic education will take profound transformations, not only in educational practices and institutions as such, but also in each individual educator.

References:

Karlberg, Michael: “Beyond the Culture of Contest – From Adversarialism to Mutualism in an Age of Interdependence”. Oxford: George Ronald Publisher, 2004.

Moulton, Janice. ‘A Paradigm of Philosophy: The Adversary Method’, in Sandra Hardin and Merril Hintikka (eds.), Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, Boston: Kluwer Boston, 1983.

Noble, David. A World without Women: The Clerical Christian Culture of Western Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Ong, Walter J. ‘Agonistic Structures in Academia: Past to Present’, Interchange: Journal of Education, Vol. 5 (1974), pp. 1-12.

Ong, Walter J. “Fighting for Life – Contest, Sexuality and Consciousness”. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981.

Civil Disobedience and the Bahá'í Faith

2011-01-04T16:36:00.001-05:00

Civil disobedience has proven to be a very effective tool for socio-structural change under situations of institutionalized oppression, provided you can achieve the appropriate psycho-cultural transformation in a large enough group of people to carry it out. However, it is a tool that the Bahá’í Community has chosen not to use, because it requires intentionally disobeying the government, which is against Bahá’í law, and would be so damaging to the Bahá’í Cause as to make its other important work much less effectual.

This Bahá’í law includes the caveat to obey every “just government”, which has lead some to believe that civil disobedience is an option. However, as I understand it, no individuals are authorized to decide for themselves what constitutes an “unjust government." Only a supra-national authority with legislative, executive and judicial powers could do this legitimately, and this does not exist yet. Once a world federation of nations is established, if a national government disobeys the international law, then all people are called upon by Bahá’u’lláh to resist it.

In this case then, to disobey the unjust command of a national government would be to obey the just command of the world government, making it lawful. In summary, civil disobedience is only allowed by Bahá’í law when practiced against a lower legal authority who has disobeyed a higher legal authority. Until this situation exists in the world, civil disobedience is not an option for Bahá’ís.

Therefore, we need to find other means to achieve our purposes, which I believe are latently contained in the Writings, although we may not have realized their full potential yet. Our goal should be to identify them and begin to build them into a structured practices that can be tested out, learned from and then replicated in other places. For instance, how would one go about institutionalizing the idea of opposing hatred with love and a thought of war with a stronger thought of peace?

Bahá'í Strategies for Social Change

2011-01-04T16:11:00.002-05:00

One of the things that have kept many sincere, enthusiastic people from achieving greater, more lasting changes faster is a tendency to jump right from the perceived problems to the imagined answers, without first stopping to try and really understand the problem first. This can result in treating mere symptoms as if they were root causes, and applying simple palliative remedies as if they could cure the origins of the diseases. If you develop an itchy rash all over your body, which would be the better doctor, the one who prescribed a soothing ointment to put on each red spot, or the one who looked deeper and diagnosed that a liver disorder was causing it (which the medicated ointment would have aggravated) and cured you of that?

Of course, there is always the danger of analyzing or studying issues ad nauseum, without doing anything concrete about them. However, but as the liver example illustrates, there is an even greater danger in not stopping to think before acting. Let’s suppose that Martin Luther King and his supporters had limited themselves to identifying and responding to individual acts of injustice. They would have expended enormous amounts of time, energy and resources, and would have ended up merely fanning the flames of racial animosity, thereby worsening the problem instead of improving it. By looking deeper to the common source of those individual problems, they were able to achieve fundamental changes in the legal and political structures of American society that were causing them. Perhaps the very root of that disease lies even deeper, as it has still not been solved entirely, but the case of the Civil Rights Movement is still a good example of the value of stopping to think more deeply first.

1. Getting to the Roots

It is important to respond to the immediate needs of those around us. However, once again, we should not let such palliative actions distract us from the socio-structural causes of those needs, or lead us to believe that by performing them we have done all that we can or should do. Otherwise, to the extent that we limit our actions to individuals’ immediate problems, we might be unwittingly helping to legitimize the very status quo that causes those problems in the first place. Authors like Noam Chomsky (see “Manufacturing Consent”) suggest that the great economic and political powers that benefit the most from the status quo are actively encouraging people to concentrate on individuals’ immediate problems in order to distract them from studying and attacking those structural root causes.

Let us take another analogy to illustrate this. Imagine that the world’s current political and economic order is an huge machine that provides enormous privileges, wealth and power to its handful of owners, and affords an empty “living” to those serving the machine, but dashes the hopes and destroys the lives of the great masses of humanity. Most people are taught from childhood that the machine is a permanent, unchangeable aspect of the world, and that the most they can ever hope to achieve is to pick up the broken pieces of the lives it destroys. So they busy themselves with that overwhelming “work at hand”, and ignore the why and how those lives are being destroyed in the first place. If anyone pauses to study the machine and think about how to stop it or change its functioning into something more benevolent, they are accused of idle philosophizing, utopian thought, and not worrying about the real needs of those around them. As said before, some authors actually maintain that these ideas are being fed to the public on purpose in order to perpetuate the hegemony of the status quo.

The result of all this is with what Alfie Kohn calls “the entrenched reluctance of Americans to consider structural explanations for problems”. He says, “We prefer to hold individuals responsible for whatever happens or, at the most, to find a convenient proximate cause. Rarely are events understood in their historical or economic or social context” (see his book “No Contest – The Case against Competition”). There seems to be a deep-rooted belief that if we could just solve each individual’s problems, we would have the kind of world we hope for. However, it doesn’t work that way, because there are “systemic” problems that transcend the individual ones. Most of the individuals serving the status quo machine are kind, loving, generous human beings who have little or no idea what the machine they serve is doing to others, and bitterly deplore the suffering they see around them. To use another analogy, if a tree is starting to lean towards your roof and is threatening to fall on top of it, it would make no sense to try and cure each individual cell in that tree, thinking that this will solve the problem. You need to think of the overall structure of the tree and how to stop it from leaning.

2. Example: Social and Economic Development

A case in point. Originally, most “international development agencies” started out working under an “aid” or “welfare” mentality, which consists of simply giving impoverished individuals (usually children) material things (food, clothing, books, etc.) under the simplistic assumption that the cause of poverty is merely the lack of those things. Gradually they have learned that you can best help an individual child by giving things to its family (employment, housing, lighting, improved stoves, etc.), then that families were best helped by giving things to their communities (roads, water and sanitation, schools and hospitals, etc.), and now that community problems are best solved by correcting structural inequalities at a national and even international level (social, economic and political arrangements, etc.).

These agencies are also learning that by providing individuals, families and communities with “assistentialism” or direct “welfare” type assistance, the hidden message being received is that this aid is given by their “rich neighbors” because they are unable to help themselves. This type of “paternalism” (doing for others what they can do for themselves) confirms and deepens their feelings of impotence, which only worsens the problem. For more on this, please see two other posts in this same blog, on “Wealth and Poverty” (the history of “development”) and “Overcoming Paternalism” (reflections on our learning process).

One excellent program that offers one alternative to this type of “development” is the so-called “Rural University” run by a Bahá'í-inspired Colombian foundation called FUNDAEC. It provides rural youth with higher education using a method called the Tutorial Learning System (SAT from the Spanish “Sistema de Aprendizaje Tutorial”). Instead of having to attend expensive city colleges that train them for city jobs, it provides them with knowledge and skills that will be useful in their home communities. The curriculum is built around their own research of their communities’ needs and aspirations. Through cooperative learning and periodic visits from their tutors, they study subjects that they then apply directly to solving the needs and achieving the visions of their communities. It is tremendously empowering and has achieved magnificent results throughout Colombia and other countries where it has been implemented.

3. Bahá'í Strategies for Social Change

The over-riding purpose of the Bahá’í community is to contribute to the building of a new world civilization, which some religions would call “building the kingdom of God on earth”. Towards that end, three of its main ‘lines of action’, so to speak, are community building, social action, and participating in the discourses of society. Each of these line of action builds upon the previous one, and culminate in what some Christian groups call “witnessing” or “being a living witness” to the fact that a different way of life is indeed possible.

• Community Building

The first line of action is called “community building”, which entails finding people who accept and commit to the Bahá’í Faith, empowering them (spiritually and otherwise) for service through the Ruhi Institute and other means, and developing the administrative arrangements needed to organize and orient that service. In this way, over its 166-year history, the worldwide Bahá’í community has grown to some 6 million members from about 2,100 indigenous tribes, races and ethnic groups, organized in approximately 100,000 local communities in virtually every country and territory of the world, with its literature translated into more than 800 languages. The Bahá'í concept of “community” is not as geographically-centered as for other groups. In fact, the Bahá'í Faith has been listed by the Encyclopedia Britannica Yearbook as the second most widespread religion in the world (in terms of geographic reach) after Christianity as a whole.

• Social Action

A second line of action is called “social action”, which is basically putting those communities and their “human resources” at the service of the needs of the world. This can include anything from very simple, short-term activities like tree-planting by children, to more complex, on-going socioeconomic development projects such as radios, schools, hospitals, etc., using trained professionals. The Bahá’í community currently has several thousand fixed-term activities and some 600 ongoing projects. The earthquakes in Haiti and Chile offer examples of how this can work. The Bahá’í communities in those countries go out and identify the needs of their neighbors, taking advantage on their local knowledge of the area. They then notify the Bahá’í World Center of the resources needed to meet those needs (which actually come from the entire Bahá’í world), and then administer those resources in such a way as to ensure that they have the greatest possible impact. This locally-based approach avoids the problems that many international agencies have had in making sure their resources reach those who really need them the most. However, where there is no Bahá'í community or it is not strong enough to undertake such a project, funds may be channeled through such agencies.

• Participating in Discourse

A third line of action is called “participating in the prevalent discourses of society”, which is basically sharing with the greater public the lessons learned from the “community building” and “social action” efforts, in an attempt to influence the way rest of the world thinks, talks and acts about the world’s pressing problems. This sharing includes what Bahá'ís perceive as being the root causes of those problems, what their general approach to them is, what they have tried to do about them in daily practice, what results they have obtained using different approaches (both successes and failures), and what lessons they have learned from all of this that might be of value to others. This of course requires that Bahá'ís view their own efforts both humbly and objectively, and with a learning attitude. They also invite others to study their efforts from the outside, somewhat like a real-life laboratory.

There are several elements in this third line of action. Some are carried out through the United Nations offices in New York, Geneva and Brussels under the name of “Bahá'í International Community” (BIC), with consultative status before the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and the UN Children’s Fund (UNESCO), and regular participation in conferences, congresses and seminars concerned with the socio-economic life of our planet. You can find many BIC statements and reports in the Internet here. There are also several Bahá’í Studies Associations around the world that seek to apply the Bahá'í teachings to the concerns of the world, and the “Institute for Studies in Global Prosperity” (ISGP), which trains college students to orient their careers towards service to humanity. Another element is the quarterly newsletter “One Country”, sent out regularly to leaders of thought and action all over the world.

Of course, these are not the only lines of action that the Bahá'í community uses in its work around the world, but they suffice to convey an idea of the overall approach that is used towards the building of a new world civilization.

The surprising truth about what motivates us

2010-05-28T00:03:00.000-05:00

The Empathic Civilisation

2010-05-27T09:22:00.002-05:00

Women in Islam

2009-12-26T07:06:00.000-05:00

This post contains my contributions to a discussion sparked by a recent mass mail “Joys of Muslim Women” by Nonie Darwish. In it, she accuses the Muslim faith of being the source for infant marriage, sexual slavery, forced weddings and no woman-initiated divorce, defenselessness against rape, honor killing, wife beating, polygamy, etc.

Aside from publicizing an author and her books and lectures, this looks like mere anti-Islamic propaganda, as unjust as gathering the worst examples of the way men treat women throughout the Christian world, and claiming that they reliably represent what Jesus and Christianity stand for. Obviously, the only true authority on what any revealed religion teaches is its holy book, which in the case of the Koran says "Treat your women well and be kind to them, for they are your partners and committed helpers."

True, this may not be the way women are treated in some Moslem households, as there are many men who call themselves Muslims but do not treat women as Muhammad taught, just as there are many men who call themselves Christians but do not treat women as Christ taught. Think of all the child molestation, incest, rape, wife-battering, fornication, infidelity, divorce, adultery, and other injustices that occur on a daily basis in the Christian world, and are even the norm in some Christian populations. Is Jesus and His Teachings the cause for this? No more than Muhammad and His Teachings are the cause of those things in the Islamic world.

If any of you are truly interested in what Muhammad taught about women, as opposed to how some who claim to be Muslims behave, there are many good sites on the Internet. One is http://www.uga.edu/islam/Islamwomen.html, a good academic source from the University of Georgia, which starts out by saying quite rightly:

“The issue of women in Islam is highly controversial. Any materials on this subject, whether in print or online, should be used with caution because of the lack of objectivity. While it is generally agreed that the rights granted to women in the Qur'an and by the prophet Muhammad were a vast improvement in comparison to the situation of women in Arabia prior to the advent of Islam, after the Prophet's death the condition of women in Islam began to decline and revert back to pre-Islamic norms.”

Examples of Moslem-operated sites are http://www.islamfortoday.com/women.htm and http://www.womeninislam.org/. These are just three of the interesting links I found by typing “Women in Islam” in Google. But beware! There are also many anti-Islamic sites whose only purpose is to misrepresent other people’s religion and thereby gain more support for their own world view.

Personally, I have found that Muhammad’s teachings about women and men’s treatment of them are much more progressive in relation to the customs prevailing in the wider society during His lifetime than Christ’s teachings on women were in relation to the customs prevailing during His. I have also found that many quotes from both are taken out of context to prove questionable points, and others ignored entirely when not supporting people’s preferred ideas.

For example, if the New Testament were followed to the letter, women would have to wear scarves on their heads, obey their husbands without questioning, never seek a divorce under any circumstances, and refrain from speaking in public meetings (according to Paul, at least). Christ, as you know, says very little directly about the matter, according to Biblical cannon. Some of the Bible quotes supporting this are below, from the King James Version:

WOMAN SUBMIT TO MAN: “...the head of the woman is the man… forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman; but the woman is of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man” (Corinthians 11:3,7-9). “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church; and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.” (Ephesians 5:22-24). “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord.” (Colossians 3:18). “Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands… Even as Sara obeyed Abraham, calling him Lord…” (1 Peter 3:1,6).

NO DIVORCE: “The Pharisees also came unto him, tempting him, and saying unto him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause? And he answered and said unto them……they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. They say unto him, Why did Moses then command to give a writing of divorcement, and to put her away? He saith unto them, Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so. And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery; and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery.” (Mathew 19:3-9)

WOMEN KEEP SILENT: “Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. And if they will learn any them, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.” (Corinthians 14:34-35). “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. …I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.” (1 Timothy 2:11-14).

WEAR VEIL OR SHAVE HEAD: “...every woman that prayeth or prophesieth [teaches] with her head uncovered dishonoreth her head; for that is even as if she were shaven. For if the woman be not covered, let her also be shorn; but if it be a shame for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her be covered... ” (Cor. 11:5-6)

For centuries, quotes such as these were interpreted in such a way as to keep women under complete subjugation by Christian men, and even to justify acts of violence against them. My point is that just as some Muslims have interpreted the Koran to suit their fancy, some Christians have done the same with the Bible. It’s a pot and kettle situation, a mote and beam dilemma. Unjust practices against women are no more Christian than they are Muslim. In both cases, they are merely the outcome of our human ability to distort and twist God’s teachings into compliance with our petty wills, instead of molding and disciplining our individual and collective lives into compliance with His will.

I have shared these Bible quotes, not to say that Jesus actually meant His followers to act in this way, but to show how they have been taken out of context over the centuries to justify all kinds of abuses against women by the Christian world, addressing one aspect of a teaching while ignoring the rest.

Violence in Islam

2009-12-26T07:05:00.002-05:00

It is a common misconception in the West that Islam promotes violence. On this basis, false accusations are repeated ad nauseum as if they became truer the more they are repeated. I would like to try and help set the record straight, having spent some time studying the Islamic teachings and history with much interest. Since the Koran was revealed little by little over the course of many years, in response to specific situations as they arose, it is important give the background for any quotes from the Koran, in order to avoid taking them out of their historical context. For example:

Most references to punishments in the Koran have to do with the Time of the End, and are similar to the Jewish and Christian teachings about Hell in the afterlife. Others refer to actual physical punishments that Muhammad, as the Governor of Medina, was obliged to inflict upon people for various crimes like causing the death of many inhabitants (especially the majority Jews and Christians) through acts of outright betrayal. Not to punish those crimes would have been an invitation to anarchy and chaos, and they have also been punished in Christian countries by Christian rulers for 2000 years.

Other references to violence are summons to protect Medina against attack, especially by the unbelievers of Mecca (all of the believers had moved to Medina and elsewhere because they had been persecuted to the death in Mecca). Muhammad’s followers were peace-loving, kind and benevolent, so there are quotes in the Koran saying that despite this they had a duty to defend the city. However, a strict code of conduct was established, which included prohibitions against fighting without being attacked, harming civilians or their possessions, etc.

This code was later followed by the most part during Islam’s campaigns of liberating the surrounding city-states from the oppressive governments that ruled them, and replacing these tyrants with a just, peaceful, progressive form of government. They invented the siege as a peaceful alternative for forcing these tyrants to step down --a sort of coup-de-etat from the outside-- used where diplomatic measures were unsuccessful. Only when attacks were launched from these cities did they defend themselves.

Their peoples were not obliged to change religions, but protected and their religions honored. This is what serious historical studies have determined. The rest, the lies told about Islam since Christian leaders began to rally support for the Crusades, actually describe contemporary Europe, not the Islam of that time. It was only after seeing the horrors of the Crusades that some Muslims unfortunately began overstepping the bounds of the strict Koranic rules of engagement and seeking retribution in their anger.

Before seeing the mote in the eye of Muslims, let us not forget the nightmarish horrors that also committed throughout Christian history and wrongly justified through the use of Biblical quotations: its imposition throughout the Roman Empire by the sword and fire; the bloody Crusades and Inquisition; the conquest, forced conversion and exploitation by Christian Europe of most of the world; slave trade and slave use and abuse; the blessing of weapons and soldiers through countless battles; more recently, unqualified support for an economic system that allows billions around the world and at home to die of hunger and disease while others amass such fortunes as allow them to single-handedly determine the fate of those hapless masses; and now an upwelling of hatred against the followers of Islam (present reader excepted, I trust).

My point is that these things are no more Christian than terrorism is Muslim. In both cases, they are merely the outcome of man's ability to proudly distort and twist God’s teachings into compliance with our petty wills, instead of humbly molding and disciplining our individual and collective lives into compliance with His will.

On Men and Animals

2009-09-07T22:15:00.003-05:00

The following is my answer to a response received to an earlier post titled "Diamonds in the Rough"

Dear A... Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I appreciate your recognition that there are relative cultures of peace in the world (such as the Scandinavian), that we have as much capacity for good as we have for evil, and your confidence that we can change. I would be interested in knowing how you think that change might be achieved. On the other hand, I am concerned at your apparent acceptance of the myth according to which man is by nature conflictual and aggressive, and that a universal consensus toward peace and harmony is necessarily ‘Utopian’. Also, I do not believe that our cultural, social and religious differences are what need to be overcome, but rather our attitude towards those differences, which leads us to see them as threats instead of opportunities and wealth (see my earlier post on Why Politics & Religion make Good Table Topics).

I could not help noticing that you called this dialogue a “debate”, an unfortunate term that tends to infect the tone of a discussion. A dialogue is a joint search for truth, while a debate is a struggle to win over an opponent. In a dialogue, people suspend judgment, listen carefully to each other and try to learn from each other, while people come into debates with a position to defend, and listen only for points to be refuted. I discuss this difference at greater length in my post on “God vs. Science”, and a great book on the subject is "The Argument Culture -- Moving from Debate to Dialogue" by Deborah Tannen (New York: Random House Inc., 1998).

Whether you choose debate or dialogue as your preferred approach, there are certain things that can only get you into trouble. One is trying to blithely sweep aside entire libraries of research and analyses, which lay the foundations for various well-established disciplines, by using sweeping statements like “the data is skew(er)ed”. Of course, all data --scientific or otherwise-- is necessarily skewed, partly because even the best models are by nature only limited representations of reality, not reality itself, and partly because observation changes behavior, as the ‘new physics’ has clearly shown. So skewering aside, the fact that people’s behavior is highly influenced by their sense of identity (and that the former can be modified by altering the latter) is the basis for a broad range of important fields, from discourse analysis and social psychology to advertising and propaganda.

Another stumbling block that you may want to avoid is the reductionist fallacy, which can be described as trying to explain phenomena of a higher order using theories or models that were developed to explain phenomena of a lower order. For example, if there actually were any research showing that plums do not change their nature by calling them apples (which I doubt exist), this data would only apply to the vegetable kingdom, which has shown no signs of understanding human language, and not to humans, who have.

A further example of the reductionist fallacy is calling man an animal, which is analytically about as useful as calling an animal a plant or calling a plant a mineral, especially for the sciences you mention: history, sociology and psychology. Of course, each higher order encompasses the lower orders and therefore CAN be studied from that perspective, but if statements like “a plant is a mineral”, or "an animal is a plant", or “man is an animal” mean that they are ONLY that, then you risk losing sight of some of their most important aspects, which are what make them very different from those lower orders of existence.

Actually, I was surprised that you would support such a pseudo-scientific claim, given your earlier support of Christianity, since most Christians seem to interpret the Bible as supporting a view of humans as (actually or potentially) spiritual beings. It makes me wonder when people seem willing to put aside such basic religious tenets in favor of ‘bad science’, while adhering adamantly to questionable man-made dogmas (‘fallen nature’, etc.) in the face of reinterpretations based on more solid theology, such as the ones put forward in the site I referred you to, called “Christianity Renewed”.

Be that as it may, and spirituality aside, the mere fact that humans are singularly capable of forming and applying abstract concepts (such as individual and collective identities) makes studying this aspect of humanity useful, to say the least. To refute this, one would have to demonstrate some sign of such abstraction in animals, which of course is absent, following a basic scientific principle that all effects have causes and all causes have effects.

Another problem with defining man as an animal is the way that animals themselves are popularly characterized, which usually involves descriptions of innate penchants for violence, aggression, self-centeredness, competition, merely material motivations, etc., which in turn is used to justify the military industrial complex, today’s distorted version of capitalism, and world dominance by small elites, as well as “genocide, colonialism, and suppression of the weak”. You can see more on this in my blog post titled “On Human Nature”.

This view of human nature is often argued using allegedly scientific bases, so I find it useful to refer people to the five propositions of the “Seville Statement on Violence”, drawn up during the International Year of Peace by a large group of Nobel award recipients, anthropologists, psychiatrists, economists, biologist, ethnologists, and other scientists from all over the world. The Seville Statement establishes that:

(1) It is scientifically incorrect to say that we have inherited a tendency to make war from our animal ancestors. Although fighting occurs widely throughout animal species, only a few cases of destructive intra-species fighting between organized groups have ever been reported among naturally living species, and none of these involve the use of tools designed to be weapons. Normal predatory feeding upon other species cannot be equated with intra-species violence. Warfare is a peculiarly human phenomenon and does not occur in other animals.

The fact that warfare has changed so radically over time indicates that it is a product of culture. Its biological connection is primarily through language, which makes possible the coordination of groups, the transmission of technology, and the use of tools. War is biologically possible, but it is not inevitable, as evidenced by its variation in occurrence and nature over time and space. There are cultures that have not engaged in war for centuries, and there are cultures that have engaged in war frequently at some times and not at others.

(2) It is scientifically incorrect to say that war or any other violent behavior is genetically programmed into our human nature. While genes are involved at all levels of nervous system function, they provide a developmental potential that can be actualized only in conjunction with the ecological and social environment. While individuals vary in their predispositions to be affected by their experience, it is the interaction between their genetic endowment and conditions of nurturance that determines their personalities. Except for rare pathologies, genes do not produce individuals necessarily predisposed to violence. Neither do they determine the opposite. While genes are co-involved in establishing our behavioral capacities, they do not by themselves specify the outcome.

(3) It is scientifically incorrect to say that in the course of human evolution there has been a selection for aggressive behavior more than for other kinds of behavior. In all well-studied species, status within the group is achieved by the ability to cooperate and to fulfill social functions relevant to the structure of that group. 'Dominance' involves social bindings and affiliations; it is not simply a matter of the possession and use of superior physical power, although it does involve aggressive behaviors. Where genetic selection for aggressive behavior has been artificially induced in animals, it has rapidly succeeded in producing hyper-aggressive individuals. This indicates that aggression was not maximally selected under natural conditions. When such experimentally created hyper-aggressive animals are present in a social group, they either disrupt its social structure or are driven out. Violence is neither in our evolutionary legacy nor in our genes.

(4) It is scientifically incorrect to say that humans have a 'violent brain'. While we do have the neural apparatus to act violently, it is not automatically activated by internal or external stimuli. Like higher primates and unlike other animals, our higher neural processes filter such stimuli before they can be acted upon. How we act is shaped by how we have been conditioned and socialized. There is nothing in our neurophysiology that compels us to react violently.

(5) It is scientifically incorrect to say that war is caused by 'instinct' or any single motivation. The emergence of modern warfare has been a journey from the primacy of emotional and motivational factors, sometimes called 'instincts', to the primacy of cognitive factors. Modern war involves institutional use of personal characteristics such as obedience, suggestibility, and idealism, social skills such as language, and rational considerations such as cost-calculation, planning, and information processing. The technology of modern war has exaggerated traits associated with violence both in the training of actual combatants and in the preparation of support for war in the general population. As a result of this exaggeration, such traits are often mistaken to be the causes rather than the consequences of the process.

The Seville Statement on Violence concludes that biology does not condemn humanity to war, and that humanity can be freed from the bondage of biological pessimism and empowered with confidence to undertake the transformational tasks needed in the years to come. Although these tasks are mainly institutional and collective, they also rest upon the consciousness of individual participants for whom pessimism and optimism are crucial factors. Just as 'wars begin in the minds of men', peace also begins in our minds. The same species who invented war is capable of inventing peace. The responsibility lies with each of us.

So I would encourage you join me and many other peace activists in studying and promulgating the many scientific evidences that belie and refute the prevailing myth that human beings are inherently egotistic and aggressive, instead of supporting it. A good starting place might be Michael Karlberg’s “Beyond the Culture of Contest”. In this way you would be helping to overcome historical conceptual errors that are currently among the greatest obstacles to achieving a world of peace and harmony.

Diamonds in the Rough

2009-04-27T12:37:00.005-05:00

An uncomely middle-aged woman with a squeaky voice and clumsy manners, who has spent the past several years at home taking care of her elderly mother, steps on stage and states in no uncertain terms that her dream is to become a world-famous professional singer, which brings on sneers and snickers from both crowd and organizers. The music starts, and in less than 10 seconds the entire auditorium roars with a standing ovation. In a matter of days, her video on YouTube electrifies the world, with a record-breaking 100+ million hits and growing.

What has happened here? Susan Boyle not only sang beautifully. She single-handedly weakened the foundations of a massive structure, greater and more terrible than the Berlin wall. She questioned the commercial image of a successful person --one who fits the materialistic mold of the beautiful, rich and famous—which leaves the great masses of humanity out in the cold. She told all of us that although “life has killed the dream I dreamed”, although we may not seem like much on the outside, we are all diamonds in the rough, waiting for a chance to show the precious jewels hidden deep inside.

Perhaps all that is lacking for us to reveal those gems is for us to believe in our true inner potential. This is a belief that consumerism has all but destroyed in an attempt to convince us that our worth is measured by the stuff we have acquired, and not by who or what we are. While Susan Boyle has learned to pass beyond that awful, poisonous lie, little Connie Talbot hasn’t had time enough to learn it yet. So small and frail, with her missing front teeth and impish giggle, and yet when the music plays the angels start to sing!

When Connie says that she loves singing more than anything else in the world, that being on stage is a dream come true, that she doesn’t want it to end, and that if little birds fly can beyond the rainbow, then why not me, she is exemplifying an attitude that we could all have if we only gave ourselves permission to do so, one that somewhere along the way many of us seem to have lost. In the midst of the worst economic crisis the world has seen, Susan and Connie have stood up and brought humanity renewed hope in the future, and faith in itself.

I believe that what applies to Susan and Connie also applies to humanity as a whole. If believing in ourselves is essential on an individual level, it is even more so on the collective plane. When people are told often enough that they ARE a certain way, they tend to BECOME that way, and this applies to both individuals and to entire nations. A case in point:

For decades, we have been told by philosophy and the arts, by science and religion, by politicians and the mass media, that human beings are naturally aggressive, egotistical, violent, greedy, warlike creatures, that it is in our genes, in our collective conscience, in our very souls. As a society we have accepted this view so fully that we have come to believe that this innate nature makes it impossible for humanity to achieve a world in which justice, unity and peace prevail.

We have built all of our institution around this conflictive view of the world --political, economic, educational, religious, agricultural, etc.-- which has brought us to the world-wide crisis --political, economic, educational, religious, agricultural, etc.-- we are in now. However, If anyone offers a solution that does not take into account this supposed “human nature”, they are laughed down as utopians, dreamers, unrealistic, so our flawed institutions remain intact.

Many authors from different disciplines have shown this belief about human nature to be untrue, but it still permeates society so thoroughly that those voices go almost unheard in the din. And yet, many of us believe that until we are able to accept the fact that as a species we have the capacity for true empathy, caring, generosity, and cooperation, we will never be able to prevent the kinds of conflicts and crises we have brought upon ourselves over the past decades, and to achieve the kind of world that we all would like to live in or leave for our grandchildren.

May we, as a human race, find the path to show that behind all our present weakness and ugliness, there lies the capacity for unsuspected beauty, goodness and light.

Moving from the Culture of Conflict to a Culture of Peace

2008-12-10T13:15:00.008-05:00

Below is the English translation of an outline for the student manual I am preparing for graduate-level courses to be offered in Spanish. To see the background of how I came to develop this proposal, see My Fight for Peace.

1. Conflict as a Cultural and Hegemonic Construct:

Postulates that violence and conflict are no more natural to human beings and their society than are compassion and cooperation, and that their apparent ‘naturalness’ is because they are part of a cultural construct that is prevalent in today’s world. Proposes that this view of humanity came to be put forward as part of the myth developed to justify the European conquest and colonization of the rest of the world. Analyzes its modern–day reproduction as a hegemonic imaginary, those who stand to gain and lose, how it is propagated, and whether or not one could speak of a conspiracy. Finally, explores a number of mechanisms to exchange that culture of conflict and ‘agonism’ for a culture of peace and mutualism.

2. Agonistic Theories regarding Human Beings and their Society:

Poses the potential role of science in justifying, legitimizing and reinforcing cultural hegemonies. Critically reviews some historical ‘epistemological loans’ from physics, biology, genetics, and logic, which have served to strengthen the myth of violence and conflict as endemic to human beings and their society, followed by the implications of their more recent developments as supportive of a culture of peace. Then deconstructs certain traditional theories from the social and human sciences that have served to naturalize and essentialize an agonistic culture, and looks at some alternative proposals. Finally explores the possibility of peace activism among scientists in diverse fields.

3. Socio–cultural Elements that Institutionalize the Culture of Agonism:

Postulates that the institutions that structure today’s society were built on the foundations of agonistic assumptions, which is neither natural nor unchangeable, as is commonly believed. One key assumption is seen the definition of power as something that is wielded ‘over and against’ others, and alternative concepts of power as a force for building a culture of peace are explored. Next, critically reviews some of the modern–day institutions that give expression to the culture of violence and conflict and at once reproduce it by serving as models of its foundational principles in action. Finally, explores some alternative configurations that have been proposed to replace them in an attempt to build a culture of peace and mutuality.

4. Psycho–cultural Factors that Express and Reproduce the Culture of Conflict:

Critically analyzes some of the psycho–cultural factors that reproduce –and are reproduced by– the culture of agonism, including elements of early upraising at home and the subsequent process of socialization and acculturation. Explores psychological phenomena such as projection versus empathy, identity formation as a differentiation against –versus identification with– an ‘other’, developing and surpassing di¬chotomist thinking, particularly the insider–outsider dichotomy, prejudice and stereotypes. Concludes that there is a ‘psychopathology of the norm’ –diseases of the spirit that are so common in today’s agonistic culture that they have become ‘normalized’, requiring an intensive reeducation in order to correct them.

5. Review of Alternative Referents and Implications for a Theory of Mutualism:

Seeks to answer the question “Where is there any society based on mutualism and cooperation?” This is done from a perspective of pre–industrial cultures, modern nations, intentional communities, alternative institutions, social movements, parallel subcultures, and daily anonymous heroism. Reviews in some detail certain samples of these different types of referents, emphasizing that they need not be perfect to serve as alternative models, and ends by asking whether or not conflict and competition would have any appropriate place in a culture of peace.

6. Role of Utopia in Forming New Imaginaries on which to Build a Culture of Peace:

Reviews the process that lead the Western world from the utopophilia of the Nineteenth Century to the utopophobia of the Twentieth Century, and explores the vital role that utopia plays in empowering socio-cultural change. Proposes a typology of utopias using the opposite pairs method, and reviews various alternative utopias in the search for alternative futures that meet the criteria for a ‘corporate vision’ of planetary dimensions.

Available Bibliography:

Anello, Eloy y Hernández, Juanita. “Liderazgo Moral” y “Participación Comunitaria”. Santa Cruz, Bolivia: Universidad Núr, 1993.

Araujo, María Caridad: “Entropía y procesos productivos: una aplicación a la economía ecuatoriana”. Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala, 1998.

Ball, Philip: “Critical Mass - How one thing leads to another”. Nueva York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004.

Barker, Joel: “Paradigmas - El Negocio de Descubrir el Futuro”. Bogotá: McGraw Hill, 1995, p. 35.

Baum, Patricia. La Comuna, una Alternativa a la Familia. Madrid: Ediciones Guadarrama, 1975.

Boulding, Elise: “Cultures of Peace - The Hidden Side of History”. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000.

Bushrui, Suheil. “Derechos Humanos - Fundamentos Espirituales”. Barcelona: Arca Editorial, 2004.

Capra, Fritjof. “The Tao of Physics”. Nueva York: Bantam Books, 5ª ed. 1980.

Capra, Fritjof. “The Turning Point - Science, Society and the Rising Culture”. Nueva York: Simon & Schuster, 1982.

Capra, Fritjof. “The Web of Life - A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems”. Nueva York: Anchor Books, 1996.

Casa Universal de Justicia, “La Promesa de Paz Mundial”, Octubre 1985. Declaración dirigida “a los pueblos del mundo” con ocasión del Año Internacional de la Paz.

Cerbino, Mauro (ed.): Violencia en los Medios de Comunicación - generación noticiosa y percepción ciudadana. Quito: FLACSO, 2005.

Comunidad Internacional Bahá'í: “Prosperidad Mundial”, declaración presentada ante la Cumbre Mundial de Desarrollo Social en Copenhagen en 1995.

Diamond, Jared. “Guns, Germs and Steel - The Fates of Human Societies”. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997.

Ducat, Stephen. The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004.

Fellman, Gordon: “Rambo and the Dalai Lama – The Compulsion to Win and its Threat to Human Survival”. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998.

Frankl, Victor E.: “Man’s Search for Meaning, an Introduction to Logotherapy” (título original: “From Death-Camp to Existentialism”, Nueva York: Beacon Press, 1959)

Fromm, Erich. Marx's Concept of Man. New York; Frederick Ungar Publishing, 28th Ed.,1980.

Giraldo, Javier. “Juegos Cooperativos – Jugar para que Todos Ganen. Barcelona: Editorial Océano, 2005.

Hatcher, William: “Minimalismo”. Hong Kong: Juxta Publishing Ltd., 2004, p. 79.

Huddleston, John. “The Search for a Just Society”. Oxford: George Ronald, 1989.

Karlberg, Michael: “Beyond the Culture of Contest – From Adversarialism to Mutualism in an Age of Interdependence”. Oxford: George Ronald Publisher, 2004.

Kohn, Alfie: “No Contest – The Case against Competition. Why we Lose in our Race to Win”. Nueva York: Houghton Mifflin, 1992.

Laszlo, Ervin, “The Systems View of the World - A Holistic Vision for our Time”. Nueva Jersey: Hampton Press, Inc., 4ª impresión 2002.

Lerche, Charles O, editor. “Healing the Body Politic”. Oxford: George Ronald, 2004.

Lewontin, R.C., et al.: “Not in our genes - Biology, Ideology and Human Nature”. Nueva York: Pantheon, 1984.

Lewontin, R.C: “Biology as Ideology - The Doctrine of DNA”. Nueva York: Harper-Collins Publishers, Inc., 1991.

Lopera, Jaime. El Lado Humano del Conflicto. Bogota: Intermedio Editores, 2006.

Lorenz, Konrad. “On Aggression”. Nueva York: Bantam Book, 15ª impresión, 1977.

Mansbridge, Jane J. “Beyond Adversary Democracy”. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Mansbridge, Jane J, editora. “Beyond Self Interest”. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Mihajlo Mesarovic / Eduardo Pestel. Mankind at the Turning Point – The Second Report to the Club of Rome. New York: New American Library, 1974.

Ong, Walter J. “Fighting for Life – Contest, Sexuality and Consciousness”. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981.

Perkins, John. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2004.

Robalino, Magaly; Villarruel, Marco; Isch, Edgar. “Mujeres Invisibles: un estudio del sexismo en la docencia y en los textos escolares ecuatorianos. Quito: DINAMU – UNICEF, 1992.

Ross, Marc Howard. The Culture of Conflict: Interpretations and Interests in Comparative Perspective. Londres: Yale University Press, 1993.

Schelling, Tomas and Halperin, Morton. “Strategy and Arms Control”. New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1961.

Segerstrale, Ullica. “Defenders of the Truth - The Sociology Debate”. Oxford: University Press, 2000.

Shiva, Vandana. “Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability and Peace”. Cambridge: South End Press, 2005.

Storer, John H. “Man in the Web of Life”. Nueva York: Signet, 1968

Tannen, Deborah. The Argument Culture – Moving from Debate to Dialogue. Nueva York: Random House Inc., 1998.

Thomas, Lewis. “The Lives of a Cell - Notes of a Biology Watcher”. Nueva York: Bantam Books, 7ª edic., 1975.

Toynbee, Arnold. Change and Habit – the Challenge of our Time. New York: Oneworld Publications, 1992.

Suggestions and donations to enrich this bibliography are very welcome, as books are hard to come by and expensive in Ecuador.

My Fight for Peace

2008-12-09T22:20:00.001-05:00

“Peace hath higher tests of man-
hood than battle ever knew.”
(John Greenleaf Whittier)

Few have the foresight to see more than a few weeks or months into the future. But glancing back over one's shoulder at the road already traveled, it becomes clear that there has in fact been a process, and patterns emerge that begin to make sense of all the hustle and bustle of daily life. This experience can be a bitter-sweet one, because alongside the delight at finding progress and achievements, there is the dismay at seeing so much time wasted and so many opportunities lost. The latter, however, I will spare my reader, for it is the former that give us vision and hope for the next stages of the journey.

What follows, then, is a sort of narrative curriculum vitae that outlines what I feel has prepared me most for what I have come to discover as my overriding passion and central mission in life: to promote a new culture of peace and mutuality, and to refute the theories and beliefs that support the present mainstream culture of conflict and adversarialism. This overview is written in an attempt to explore for myself and suggest for others what the next steps in this process might be.

Back to the roots

My mother and father -he a teacher and she a social worker- set the stage for me in both word and deed. Their greatest sacrifice for peace must have been when my father freely chose a prison sentence over supporting the war effort, thus missing the birth of his first child. After studying Cooperativism under Morris Mitchell, they went on to co-found the pacifist Macedonia Cooperative Community.1 With time they discovered that community cannot be based solely on economic principles, but must have a spiritual grounding.2 The ensuing search lead them and many other Macedonians to join the Bruderhof, a Christian community based on the writings of Jacob Hutter (1500-1536) and the conviction that private property is anathema to living the Sermon on the Mount.3

That is how, in the late 50's, I came to be born in Loma Hoby, one of three Bruderhof communities nestled deep in the Paraguayan Chaco, where my parents had gone to serve.4 Back in the USA by the time I was three, we lived outside of the Bruderhof for several years due to both a leadership crisis and my father's inner struggles.5 Still, my five siblings and I were raised in the community spirit of pacifism, service to others, voluntary poverty, no television, movies or commercial radio, and lots and lots of singing, songs that alone conveyed an inner message of love and joy.

Formative years

Growing up in the 60's was a time of activism in the peace movement, including everything from participating in demonstrations against the war at a nearby Air Force base to exploring varied aspects of pacifism and peaceful lifestyles. Our daily bread was authors like King, Ghandi and Thoreau: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” It was during this period that my father's active support of the Civil Rights Movement almost got him killed. One of the most stimulating and inspiring influences of this time, however, came from my active participation in many of the extracurricular activities at the Wilmington Quaker Community College, right across the street from our home. By high school I was already writing for the school journal about my values and against what I perceived to be the ills of contemporary society.6

It was during my early adolescence that I began investigating the Bahá'í Faith, which was particularly attractive to me due to its teachings on universal peace, the oneness of humankind, the elimination of all forms of prejudice, the essential unity of all religions, and the independent search for truth.7 The latter two were entirely unacceptable to the Bruderhof, and this eventually lead to my abandoning that life at age 15 and beginning my active participation as a member of the Bahá'í World Community.

Pioneering to Ecuador

Not content with mere membership, as soon as I graduated from high school I volunteered as a Bahá'í 'pioneer' to Ecuador. There I spent one and a half years doing awareness-building and training, mostly among marginal urban and rural communities throughout the country, on such issues as universal basic education, gender equality, freedom from substance use, work in a spirit of service, collective decision-making, community building, alternative organizational approaches, and others. It was this experience that inspired me to seek a career in education, and over the following five years I continued with that work on a part-time basis while completing my undergraduate studies at the Catholic university, which culminated in my being certified as a high-school teacher and guidance counselor.

Master in Education

Feeling that my studies up to that point had been aimed at maintaining the status quo, which I believed education should help question and change, I returned to the USA for three years to complete a master's degree in education from the University of California at Davis. There I sought to study as broad a range of educational subjects as possible, and continued to speak and act on matters aimed to promote human understanding. My thesis was the result of an intense inquiry, far beyond my regular courses, into our nature as human beings and the consequential purpose of our education.8

Upon my return to Ecuador, I taught at the Education Department of the Catholic University, directed its Centro de Asesoramiento Psico-Pedagógico, and collaborated with the Salesian publishing company "Editorial Don Bosco" as a high school textbook writer and editor, where I concentrated on eliminating adversarial content and replacing it with mutualistic messages.9 I also helped establish a new private school, Santana, and as its first headmaster introduced several elements aimed to promote a culture of peace among students, teachers and parents, as I later continued to do as a teacher trainer and consultant for other schools.

Service on Bahá'í Institutions

On a volunteer basis, I founded the "Centro de Estudios Bahá'ís" for the purpose of documenting, studying and disseminating Bahá'í approaches to contemporary social issues such as human rights, equality of men and women, elimination of the extremes of wealth and poverty, international peace, religious unity, etc. I also edited and wrote for the Study Center's annual publication "Reflexiones", spoke at public meetings on several of the topics that were researched, and organized national forums on subjects relating primarily to education and peace.

I have had the opportunity to serve as a member of several local, regional and national Bahá'í institutions over the years. One of the most challenging and rewarding was my appointment to the Auxiliary Board of the Continental Counselors, which primarily entailed training local agents of change and empowering them to arise in service to their communities. Finally, I was elected to my present post as a member of the Bahá'í National Assembly of Ecuador, which steers the development of local communities, directs the activities of regional institutions, and oversees the management of their various educational institutions and socioeconomic development projects throughout the country.

Social and Economic Development

It was during this period that my wife Monica and I had our two children, Ahmad Alejandro and Jesahel Layli. The economic instability of Ecuador, coupled with the financial pressures of raising a family, forced me to seek more lucrative pursuits, which is how I ended up working primarily as a translator/interpreter for the next twenty years. This change of occupation, however, had the unexpected effect of galvanizing my commitment to promoting a culture of peace, as it put me into direct contact with the fascinating - albeit controversial - world of social and economic development, identified by UNESCO as one of the crucial elements of a culture of peace.

Of particular importance in this process was my work with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and its sister UN agencies; international financial institutions such as the World Bank, IMF, IADB, and their various projects; the Organization of American States (OAS) and several of its agencies and programs; the Ecuadorian presidency and different ministries of its cabinet; international development agencies such as World Vision, C.A.R.E., and Foster Parents Plan International; and a long list of local non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

In an attempt to get a better grip on the theory, practice and perspectives of development, especially its social aspects, I enrolled in the post-graduate "Programa Latinoamericano de Desarrollo Social (PRODES)", offered by the Núr University of Santa Cruz, Bolivia in a university center near Cali, Colombia.10 There I explored the relationships between development and education, health, gender, culture, science, religion, leadership, administration, economics, and environment.

I found that social and economic development was to the community what education was to the individual, provided that both were understood correctly, and that both were powerful instruments (for better or for worse) of sociocultural change. This program enabled me to offer development consultancy and training to organizations, and better serve the institutions of which I was a member.

Moral Leadership

This contact with the Núr University took me to Bolivia and Honduras to study its magnificent "Moral Leadership" program designed to train educators as effective change agents in the communities where they work. Its twelve modules challenge inherited mental models and build new conceptual frameworks of moral leadership, a learning approach to development, community participation, training adult learners, team building, participatory action research, strategic planning for development, project design & management, and evaluation for collective learning.

Back in Ecuador, I initially organized a year-long training program in a couple of regional centers for seventy-five leaders, preparing them both to implement Moral Leadership in their own activities and to replicate the program among diverse sectors of society, including educators, parents, children & youth, businesses, NGOs, local governments, etc. I then worked alongside some of those participants as instructors for a masters program implemented by the Núr University and financed by the World Bank, which trained 1000 educators in ten centers throughout Ecuador using the same materials plus four modules on empowerment through education.

ANISA and beyond

In order to carry on this work after the masters program concluded, I co-founded the "Agencia Nacional de Intervención Social mediante el Aprendizaje (ANISA)" with some of its most outstanding collaborators. ANISA offered moral leadership training for empowerment through education and development, primarily for educational institutions, NGOs, municipal governments, and business enterprises, using material compiled from PRODES, Moral Leadership, and other sources. I also assisted in the establishment of its sister organization, ANISA-Colombia, with similar aims and activities.

It was around this time that, in an effort to share the struggle for a culture peace with the family, I supported my wife, Monica, in her interest in taking a master's degree in Systemic Family Therapy and exercising that profession. Together we enrolled our children in the "Colegio Integral Internacional de Educación Holística para la Paz",11 the only Ecuadorian school cited by UNESCO as participating in its goal of education for a culture of peace. We also secured opportunities for them to receive extracurricular training in community service activities and leadership roles and to participate in programs involving them in service projects. The entire family also completed the tutorial training offered by the Ruhi Institute and began taking responsibility for replicating its different programs.

FLACSO and frustration

During International Peace Year, I participated actively in a campaign to present the Bahá'í statement “The Promise of World Peace” to authorities at all levels and the public at large.12 I had especially been intrigued by its observation that “so much have aggression and conflict come to characterize our social, economic and religious systems, that many have succumbed to the view that such behavior is intrinsic to human nature and therefore ineradicable.” It claimed that “uncritical assent is given to the proposition that human beings are incorrigibly selfish and aggressive and thus incapable of erecting a social system at once progressive and peaceful, dynamic and harmonious.” Overcoming this barrier to peace would demand a “reassessment of the assumptions upon which the commonly held view of mankind's historical predicament is based,” which is in reality a “distortion of the human spirit”, thus enabling “all people to set in motion constructive social forces which, because they are consistent with human nature, will encourage harmony and co-operation instead of war and conflict.”

Throughout my subsequent training and consultancy endeavors, I repeatedly came across this same obstacle. Every discussion of world unity, justice and peace, was invariably countered by at least one participant who claimed that these aims were impossible or utopian on the grounds that human nature is selfish and aggressive, conflict is endemic to society, there always have been and always will be wars, man is the wolf of man, the law of the jungle is survival of the fittest, social dialectics and social entropy, homo economicus and self interest, politics defined as power struggle, and so on and so forth. I came to realize that there is no greater hindrance to building a united, just, peaceful world than the belief that it is not possible based on such notions regarding the nature of humanity and its society.

Seeking to understand the theoretical underpinnings of these claims and identify any research that might help me to refute them, I enrolled in the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO).13 There, however, I was frustrated at finding only vehement support for those views, disparagement at any suggestion that things might be otherwise, and no knowledge of any alternative studies. We were living in a cruel world, that's the way it always had been and always would be, and instead of wishing it were different, we would be best advised to learn how to cope and make the most of it, or better yet learn how it works and make it work to our advantage. Social scientists were not to be activists for any cause, but rather limit themselves to 'objectively' providing the tools necessary for policymakers to do their jobs, for better or for worse.

The Culture of Contest

That is when I stumbled across Michael Karlberg's wonderful book titled "Beyond the Culture of Contest - from Adversarialism to Mutualism in an Age of Interdependence".14 Soon my frustration turned to amazement as those locked doors flew wide open and I began eagerly importing and reading the works referenced in Karlberg's generous bibliography. I began to see the deep flaws that persist in the massive body of traditional, mainstream human and social theory that currently supports and promotes the culture of contest or adversarialism, and how it is gradually being replaced by a new body of research that suggests alternative ways of looking at and restructuring society towards a culture of peace or mutuality.

With a thrill of discovery, I felt that I was witnessing the unfolding of a veritable scientific revolution or paradigm shift (if these terms can be applied at all to the human/social sciences), of which the Latin American academia and general public appeared utterly oblivious. I began speaking throughout Ecuador whenever possible at universities, NGOs, and public forums such as Quito's renowned cultural emporium, the "CafeLibro",15 in an attempt to promote an awareness of the overall features of this revolution. The response has been amazing. People have come up afterwards and thanked me for validating through science what they always suspected to be true but never dared to admit for fear of ridicule. Others said they felt a new freedom to even consider that there might be other ways of thinking and doing things.

Fundación Horizonte

As a result of this experience, I became convinced that the time was ripe for significant change in Latin America towards a culture of peace, mutualism and cooperation. I decided that broadly disseminating this new body of research among both the academia and the general public would be a strategic way to get the snowball rolling. Vague statements of lofty ideals and good intentions have been expressed for centuries, but achieved limited change in the foundational structure of society. The 21st century demands clear, reasoned, scientific evidence before committing to such a profound transformation of thought and action. Failure to act now could very well delay processes of change that are desperately needed throughout Latin America or, worse yet, might leave the door open to extremist ideologies that would only serve to exacerbate the present situation.

I approached different organizations with these ideas, upon which Fundación Horizonte offered to make "Cultura de Paz" one of their core programs.16 Our preliminary lines of action included gathering a collection of works (mostly in English), making translations and original essays available in Spanish, and networking with other researchers, projects and resources. ANISA-Colombia provided space and assistance to develop a forum on the Web, and the Universidad Técnica de Ambato agreed to sponsor a pilot Certificate Program to train college professors as agents of change towards a culture of peace.

Once this initial groundwork has been laid, we foresee expanding our scope of action, further systematizing in Spanish the corpus of work already done in different disciplines, and making it available to students, teachers and researchers. The initial Certificate Program needs to grow into a Specialization and then a Masters Program. This would establish a firm foundation upon which to promote original research into the needs and possibilities for sociocultural change towards a more mutualistic society. Such work should especially benefit from Participatory Action Research (PAR), in order to build that new culture from the bottom up and the inside out. Combining research and consultancy through PAR would enable immediate implementation of findings among NGODs, school systems, governmental and international organizations, and others. We need to continue studying the available material and documenting it in Spanish, mostly through reviews and summaries, but also as direct translations where deemed most appropriate, to be able to answer questions such as these:

How can we understand today's adversarialism as a cultural construct, and what is needed to change it?
How and why did this culture come about, to what extent can it be defined as a hegemony, who are its beneficiaries, and who pays the price?
What popular beliefs and scientific theories feed the current myths underpinning the culture of violence, and how can they be deconstructed and replaced with alternative beliefs and theories?
How is the culture of conflict reflected in and reproduced through the sociostructural and psychocultural elements of the modern world, and what proposals exist to replace them?
What referents are available of alternative sociocultural constructs, whether among preindustrial societies, intentional communities, social movements, parallel subcultures, and the mass phenomenon of everyday, anonymous heroism?
What are the historical reasons for our current disenchantment with utopia, what alternative futures are being proposed, how to decide which are feasible, and how to recover humanity's courage to dream and ability work towards a common vision?
What can be done here and now, at each level of society, to build a new culture of mutualism, cooperation and peace, and how can we as agents of change in all walks of life promote this?

In closing

The exercise of looking back over my life, at the different paths that have lead me to this point, has strengthened my resolve to continue struggling in the direction described above. Any comments and suggestions that might help in moving towards this goal will be most welcome.

Notes

1. Orser, W. Edward, Searching for a Viable Alternative - The Macedonia Cooperative Community, 1937-58. New York: Burt Franklin & Co., 1981.

2. Newton, David R., "The Macedonia Community," Politics (Winter 1948): 27-30.

3. Arnold, Emmy, Torches Together: The story of the Bruderhof Communities - their life together, sharing all things in common. New York: Plough Publishing House, 2nd edition, reprinted in 1991.

4. Wagoner, Bob & Shirley, Community in Paraguay - A Visit to the Bruderhof. Pennsylvania: Plough Publishing House, 1991.

5. Mow, Merril, Torches Rekindled - the Bruderhof's Struggle for Renewal. New York: Plough Publishing House, 1989.

6. Newton, Peter, "The Eagle," "Where has all the freedom gone?", "The Blue Ridge Mountains." Artes, Vol. 8, Spring 1972, pp. 1, 21, 29.

7. Hatcher, William S. and Martin, J. Douglas, The Baha'i Faith: The Emerging Global Religion. San Francisco: Harper & Row Publishers, 1984.

8. Newton, Peter, "In Search of Purpose in Education: Implications of the Bahá'í Writings", unpublished M.A. thesis, University of California, Davis, 1985.

9. See, for example, L.N.S. English Method Books 4, 5 and 6. Ecuador: Edibosco, 1989.

10. See http://www.nur.edu/50821/wp_m00c0.asp.

11. See http://www.vidaintegral.org/home/contenidos.php?id=42&identificaArticulo=26.

12. See http://bahai-library.org/published.uhj/world.peace.html.

13. See http://www.flacso.org.ec/.

14. Karlberg, Michael, Beyond the Culture of Contest - from Adversarialism to Mutualism in an Age of Interdependence. Oxford: George Ronald, 2004.

15. See http://www.cafelibro.com/.

16. See http://www.fundacionhorizonte.com/es/fundacion.htm. At this writing the Web site required a major overhaul and was still lacking information on the "Cultura de Paz" program.

Why Politics & Religion Make Good Table Topics

2008-10-10T12:57:00.005-05:00

Popular wisdom has it that politics and religion should not be discussed at the table, and some extend this to other times and places, too. The reason given is that they tend to be too controversial for situations that call for composure and pleasantries. Of course, the subjects that usually take their place –notably sports and economics– are at least as contentious as politics and religion, and have taken at least as many lives.

Be that as it may, what is important to realize is that rule in question appeared for historical reasons that are gradually disappearing, leaving politics and religion as prime topics for many social situations, as I hope this article will show. The process by which this change is occurring can be divided into three stages, which have to do with our understanding and practice of the interplay between uniformity and diversity, between unity and division.

1. Unity in Uniformity

During the first stage, unity depended on maintaining uniformity, and social coherence was preserved by forcibly removing diversity and promoting or imposing uniformity. Politics and religion were dictated by civilian and religious powers, and up until a century or two ago, people did not choose their own religions, much less their political leanings. They had to accept those of their king or emperor, and those who refused to do so risked losing their livelihoods, or even their lives.

In the West, for example, Christianity was imposed throughout fourth-century Rome by fire and sword, followed by ‘holy wars’ against neighboring ‘infidels’, the burning of books that did not agree with official doctrine, the use of torture to test the faith of new converts, and public execution of those found guilty of heresy. Medieval kings were at once the legislative, executive and judicial branches all in one, the sole owners of all things and persons within their kingdoms, and dispensed death to all who spoke out or acted against their will.

Therefore, to discuss either religion or politics at the table or elsewhere was not only pointless but dangerous, as prudence dictated concurrence with the status quo of the official position, or the risk of being denounced –even by friends and family– and publicly executed.

2. Division in Diversity

This situation was gradually turned around by a plethora of historic events such as the European Renaissance, the Cartesian Revolution, the invention of the printing press and mass availability of reading material, the rise of an educated middle class, the French Revolution, the liberalization and democratization of governments, the loss of political power by the church, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and so on. Even in science, the authority of objectivist positivism was put to doubt by subjectivist postmodernism.

Suddenly, everyone was entitled not only to have and state their own opinions, but also to attack that of others –whether friends and family, or the official position of the Church and State. The tonic became division in diversity, as our differences increasingly pulled us apart. When these diverse elements were brought too close, there was always a risk of uncomfortable confrontation or even violent clashes.

Of course, unity in uniformity persisted in in-group situations, as people tended to aggregate around common ideals and lifestyles. This helped avoid situations of conflict while enabling self-validation among peers. People were apt to shun those different from themselves and to steer clear of potentially controversial topics to avoid possible –almost inevitable– clashes.

Politics became all but a battle ground. In its primitive form, democracy was merely representative, consisting mostly of voting for nominees. In this early form of democracy, politics was defined as a power struggle among vested-interest groups called political parties. The topics of political debate became so and polarized that people felt obliged to take a position in one of two opposing extremes.

Their mutually-exclusive arguments were presented as complete packages, so one could not simply pick and choose the best elements from each side of an issue. In any case, politicians ended up making most significant decisions, limiting the usefulness of discussing politics to one’s choice of candidates.

During this stage, religion also swung from one extreme to its exact opposite. From being an almost entirely state-determined, social phenomenon, it turned into a mostly individualistic affair. It was no longer anyone else’s business what others believed in.

Therefore, inquiries as to their belief systems were taken by many as unwelcome intromissions or meddling into something so private and intimate that it could justify the harshest of responses. Likewise, any offer to explain one’s own faith was often taken as an unwarranted imposition, proselytizing, or pushing one’s religion on others.

Under such an arrangement, there was also little or no point in talking about either politics or religion, as among those who thought alike there was not much to add to any discussion, and among diverse thinkers it was deemed impolite to raise potentially controversial topics.

3. Unity in Diversity

All of this is beginning to change, however, as a new culture of peace gains momentum in the world. Both politics and religion are undergoing profound changes in people’s conception of their purpose and roles in society and in their practice of those roles.

Politics is being seen more and more as the science and art of achieving long-term wellbeing for all, through consensus-building processes and win–win solutions that benefit society as a single, unified, albeit richly diverse system to which all sectors are essential contributors.

In such a system, the win-lose power struggles of traditional party politics are actually anathema to the best interests of the body politic and therefore, according to our definition, actually anti-political. In a culture of peace, then, ‘discussing politics’ at the table is a marvelous way to further the essential process of seeking innovative win-win solutions to common issues.

Our perception of religion’s role in society is also changing. Instead of a cause of division and strife, religion is increasingly being seen as a force for much-needed social change and unification. Ecumenical and inter-faith movements and activities are proliferating as religious organizations join hands to fight poverty, protect the environment, and address many other social issues.

Growing numbers of people of all religions or no religion are studying the various holy books making up humanity’s spiritual heritage. A broad array of autochthonous belief systems are being explored through both ‘etic’ and ‘enic’ studies aimed to deepen both insiders’ and outsiders’ understanding of their essential verities.

Followers of the different world religions are joining with co-religionists of their various denominations to identify commonalities, question the significance of their differences, and learn how to work together for common goals, sharing temples and even some services.

Grassroots inter-faith prayer meetings and improvised devotional spaces are springing up in thousands of neighborhoods around the globe. Base communities and study circles for the joint discussion of how to apply religious teachings to the social and spiritual needs of humanity are replacing the vertical authority of traditional priest-centered sermon approaches.

The growing recognition that God is one and the same for all religions, no matter the name, concept or form of worship, gives all faiths the same center and focal point. More and more people realize that there are valuable life lessons to be learned from all faiths.

In such an environment, discussing religion is an essential part of each person’s own spiritual enrichment and of society’s overall coming together as a whole, both of which have always been considered central aims of religion in the first place.

4. Conclusions

The watchword is now unity in diversity. Unity is no longer seen as uniformity, but a recognition of the organic oneness of diverse elements. Likewise, diversity is no longer viewed as a cause of division, but rather what enriches our unity.

This principle is being found to apply to all aspects of life. The dynamics of a market are not detracted from but strengthened by diversifying its products and services. An ecosystem is no less an organic unit because of its biodiversity. The human body is the most highly diverse unitary organism on the planet, but nonetheless its health depends on the harmonious functioning of all its cells, tissues, organs, and systems.

Likewise, our political and spiritual life is not imperiled but can only be enriched by dialogue, at once frank and courteous, courageous and careful, to which all can contribute and from which each can glean food for thought and action as needed at every step of the way.

As we overcome the false dichotomies inherited from former stages, the divorce between unity and diversity can now finally be reconciled. And as we bridge age-old rifts, we can open unsuspected doors to mutual understanding that will greatly enrich the subject matter of today’s table talk.

Reflections on 9/11

2008-09-11T14:04:00.001-05:00

So much has been said and left unsaid during this commemoration of 9/11. I guess my take is that I would like to see a lot less licking and re-licking of our OWN wounds, as if to keep them open, raw and hurting just enough to spur us on to commit only God knows what NEW horrors, supposedly justified by the remembrance of how much WE were made to suffer.

In exchange, I would like to see a lot more remembrance of the cruelties we have ALREADY caused to so many other countries and peoples of the world, true REMORSE for those acts of commission and omission, and discussion of how to ensure that our country will STOP using such horrors to promote limited economic ends under the guise of “defending freedom and democracy”, atoned for merely by throwing pennies at them.

Let us stop lending ourselves unthinkingly to further campaigns aimed to inflame our base passions, distract us from the real issues, confuse vice with virtue, and make us believe that truths are lies and lies are truths. Let us wake up from our dream of SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS, America, realize that our national behavior so far has been more of a PROBLEM than the solution, and go about making a profound, long-lasting CHANGE (which will take much, much more than a vote, by the way).

Thinking for Oneself

2008-08-17T20:37:00.000-05:00

Due to my tendency to cite other authors whose ideas I appreciate, I am sometimes cautioned to be careful of buying into someone else's opinion of things without investigating it personally. This is actually an important yet little-known principle of many religions. In the New Testament we read: “But do not trust any and every spirit, my friends. Test the spirits, to see whether they are from God...” (1 John 4:1), and “Prove all things and hold fast to that which is good.” (1 Thessalonians 5:19-21).

The same principle is found in Islam, which advises to seek knowledge throughout the world, even as far as China, and says that “if a wicked person brings you news, first investigate, lest you commit an injustice towards some people, out of ignorance, then become sorry and remorseful for what you have done.” (Koran 46:6)

Likewise, the Bahá'í Faith says, “The best beloved of all things in my sight is justice... By its aid you will see with your own eyes and not through the eyes of others, and will know of your own knowledge and not through the knowledge of your neighbor.” (Bahá’u’lláh, Hidden Words) and also, “Being one, truth cannot be divided, and the differences that appear to exist ... only result from attachment to prejudice. If only men would search out truth, they would find themselves united.” (‘Abdu’l-Bahá: Paris Talks).

These teachings are not just happy thoughts. They have meant the difference between life and death for many millions. For example, how crucial the Christian teaching of not trusting but testing the spirits is at the present time, when a tiny but very powerful minority that is benefiting from the war in Iraq is doing everything in its power to mislead American Christians into supporting the war effort (both politically and bodily) under the guileful guise of “supporting our troops” - a very Christian thing to do, after all!

History has shown that, given a well-crafted message and a sufficiently submissive people, even those who claim to be pacifists and follow the Prince of Peace can be tricked into supporting the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Conquest, or even the American Oil Wars! “Let us then test these spirits, friends, and find them lacking; for they are serving but their own selfish interests”.

Gender and Peace

2008-08-17T20:31:00.000-05:00

What is the relationship between the equality of men and women and the achievement of a culture of peace? I believe that one aspect of it is the fact that women have historically already developed a culture of peace from which men must learn, and on which basis we could redesign our structures of violence.

Historically, practical considerations have caused gender differentiation of roles by which men have gravitated more towards the 'public sphere' and women have gravitated more towards the 'private sphere'. In these different scopes of action, men have developed certain typical behaviors and women others, which have crystallized into our gender identities: what it means to be a man or a woman.

Garnering from several authors, I have come up with a list of qualities traditionally assigned to males, who have been seen as being more conflictive, confrontational, competitive, impulsive, aggressive, physically strong, tool-oriented, invasive, conquering, logical, linear, analytical, intellectual, data-oriented, hard, insensitive, hiding feelings, justice-centered, rigid, greedy, and avaricious.

The qualities traditionally assigned to women are harmony, conciliation, collaboration, reflection, tenderness, moral strength, word-oriented, consolidating, preserving, cultivating, intuitive, creative, affective, understanding-oriented, soft, sensitive, expressing feelings, mercy-centered, compassionate, generous, and charitable.

Over time, these 'masculine qualities' came to characterize the public sphere (politics, lawmaking, economics, etc.), while the 'feminine qualities' shaped the private sphere (homemaking, child rearing, networking, etc.). These two spheres and their traditional occupants became differentiated as two very different cultural configurations: public-private, male-female (Mars-Venus?).

While the masculine qualities were useful in the public sphere for a time, they are now causing more harm than good and need to be at least balanced by the feminine qualities. This requires that men reassess what it means to be masculine and acquire ‘new’ qualities from the female camp, and that women enter the public sphere without thereby losing the private-sphere culture.

As for intra-family violence, it is often caused by males reaffirming their masculine identity out of fear of giving way to the temptation of sinking comfortably into the female culture of the private sphere, while females resist giving up their feminine identity by standing up to abuse and refusing to allow the family ‘homeostasis’ to settle into violent patterns.

My thought on this subject was heavily influenced by the book I got you by Michael Karlberg (Beyond the Culture of Contest), especially the section that starts on page 85. You might also want to take a look at some of the other parts listed under ‘women’ in the index, page 265).

I am very wary of theories that place the cause of human behavior outside of our unassisted control. They tend to ‘essentialize’ human nature as a single package and then root it in biological and other deterministic sources. They also have the negative effect (intentional or otherwise) of perpetuating the status quo by ‘naturalizing’ cultural constructs, i.e., telling us that we act the way we have been socialized into acting because it is in our nature to act that way.

Studies of past and present cultures all over the world show a broad array of behavior patterns, most of which are actually much more peaceful than the common Western view of human nature would have it, including male-female relations (see Marc Howard Ross, “The Culture of Conflict”).

The only thing our biology does is give us the tools or resources needed to act in whatever way we decide to, and that those decisions are influenced but not determined by our cultures. Testosterone and estrogen may also predispose us to different muscle mass and activity levels, but what we do with it is up to us.

We are not genetically programmed to act in any given ways; our genes only give us the makeup needed to act as we decide to (see “Not in our Genes” [thick] or “Biology as Ideology” [thin] by Richard Lewontin).

Relational Violence?

2008-08-13T22:12:00.001-05:00

With the recent anniversary of my father's passing, I was reflecting on his last few years of love and service, versus how he had left my mother in the Brüderhof after their youngest child left for college. Now that my wife and I are facing the imminent possibility of an empty nest and perhaps of leaving it ourselves, it dawned on me that one could also say that it was Mom who left Dad by not fulfilling her 'Christian duty' to follow her husband wherever he went.

That got me to thinking about how and why the Brüderhof could allow so many families to be torn apart in the name of God, as I also experienced personally. Coincidentally, today I received the following analysis of some possible Biblical interpretations in support of this attitude, written to Bruderhof@yahoogroups.com by Melchior J. Fros. I do not necessarily agree with everything it says nor the spirit behind it, but find it an interesting reflection on a shared problem. Here is the essence of it:

"The elder, his father and other elders instituted the insidious 'back off from your biological family' doctrine, even when it implied distancing from one's spouse (as was threatened/recommended to my parents, who were almost separated and sent to separate communities because 'they were too attached to each other'!!).

"I am surprised that more parents ...especially mothers... don't act in outrage towards these 'separations,' just as tormenting as the movie 'Sophie's Choice'... In my opinion, the core problem that has plagued the Bruderhof throughout its history is their practice of what I call *relational violence*. Though they may have *perfected the art*, its roots lie in ancient Judaism and biblical Christianity, as I will try to demonstrate.

"There is an apparent thread of *relational violence* embedded in the stories of the Old and New Testaments. One significant example is the story of Abram's "sending away" his slave woman, Haggar, and her son Ishmael, to what Abram knew would be almost certain death. Earlier, with the permission of his barren wife, Abram had engaged in a sexual relation with Haggar, who had given birth to Ishmael.

"Subsequently a son, Isaac, was born to the Centenarian and his wife, Sarai. Eventually jealousy spurred Sarai (henceforth to be called Sarah) to encourage her husband to "get rid" of the slave woman and her son. God told Abraham to go ahead; that he would bless both sons. Much later in the story Abraham is tested once more: Will he submit ALL he holds dear to his God by sacrificially killing his son?

"Centuries later, Jesus warned that those who cling to family are not worthy of his name. He gathered to himself a group of followers who left their jobs, their parents, wives and children. He said he had not come to bring relational peace, but the sword of relational division: father against son, mother against daughter...

"Many Christians have been embarrassed by these stories and attempted to soften them. But the Bruderhof has gone further and suggested that marriage and children and family, indeed all human bonds, MUST ALWAYS submit to a primary commitment to the Brotherhood. Here, I suggest, lies the heart of the problem that has caused great suffering.”

I have often wondered what could bring Bruderhofers to reject their own family in favor of the community, and do so in the name of One who taught selfless love and self-sacrifice for others. This taking family so lightly is very foreign to most cultures, but apparently quite common in others, especially in areas of the world that historically were predominantly of one of the Protestant branches of Christianity.

The Bahá'í teachings are very clear about the importance of promoting family unity, as an essential factor in achieving the greater unity of humankind. Parents are given a serious mandate to raise and educate their children as best they can. Children are exhorted to honor, obey and serve their parents as a way of honoring, obeying and serving God. Fiancées seek their parents’ consent to marry, in order to strengthen the bonds between their two families. Chastity before marriage and fidelity within it are prescribed, and every effort is made to prevent divorce.

On the other hand, though, children cannot merely inherit their parents’ belief system, nor can spouses impose their faith on each other. Furthermore, many Bahá'í families consider it a source of honor and blessing to sacrifice their cherished closeness in order for a member to travel far away in service to the Cause. But even in this case, it is the family as a unit that makes this sacrifice willingly as a collective service to a larger social unit.

God and the Geese - Part II

2008-07-07T10:09:00.004-05:00

Recently a mass forward called "God and the Geese" has been doing the rounds (see "Part I" below), which offers an interesting analogy of a Christian belief. However, feeling that something was lacking in the story, I wrote a "Part II" to it as follows:

The geese stayed in the warm, dry barn until Winter had passed, and the farmer (for that is what he was) fed them and cared for their every need. When they finally took flight, he shouted after them, "I will be waiting here for you next Winter!" but then chuckled to himself, saying "as if they could understand my words!"

But the geese did not forget the farmer, his goose and the barn, which grew more wonderful in their minds every time they remembered them. And when the goslings hatched, their parents told them marvelous stories about the 'Glorious Gander' and his 'Heavenly Haven'. The young ones yearned to see such wonders for themselves, and were assured that come Winter, they too might find them.

And sure enough, that Winter the now-grown goslings got stranded in a snow storm and lost their way in the dark. And once again the farmer opened the barn doors and took out his goose to show the gaggle the way in. But this time, the goslings were not as easily convinced as the others had been.

"How can this shabby old barn be the 'Heavenly Haven' of our bedtime stories? --they asked each other-- "And how can this scruffy little graylag be the 'Glorious Gander' our parents spoke of so reverently? This is a just trick to deceive us and lead us further astray, or maybe even to trap and devour us!"

And so some of them started to beat upon the goose with their wings, whereupon he insisted that he was the same one that had led their parents to safety, and was there to save them, too. However, this only infuriated them further, and they scratched at him with their feet and picked at him with their bills until he bled.

Seeing his self-sacrifice, some of the gaggle realized that what he had said was true, that he had indeed guided them out of the storm, and that they didn't need a wondrous palace in order to survive the Winter, but that the barn was just right for them. The others tried in vain to convince them otherwise, and then left in disgust, flew out into the stormy night, and perished.

The geese that had stayed flew back home that Spring to nest and teach their goslings all about the 'Glorious Gander' and his 'Heavenly Haven'. And so the story repeated itself. Winter after Winter, the farmer's goose led the gaggle into the barn. Year after year, some of the geese turned against him and were lost in the storm, while the rest remained snug and safe in the barn.

The farmer wondered about this strange behavior. What could cause these geese to act so foolishly against their own wellbeing? Then he realized that it was more important for them to feel secure in the belief that what they thought they knew was true, than to find out what was really happening and be truly safe. Suddenly it dawned upon him that this was what had been dividing the followers of the different world religions.

In every new age, when humanity had lost its way, God had sent a Messenger to guide humankind to safety, and every time, the followers of the former Messengers had persecuted the new ones. To this very day, the devotees of these different Messengers of God were fighting amongst themselves over which had been true and which had been false.

The farmer once again fell to his knees and prayed, this time asking God to teach him to love all of His Messengers and learn from their teachings, to help him spread this new realization of the oneness of God and of his Messengers and thereby bring conciliation and peace among their followers, and most of all to help him find and recognize His new Messenger for this age, regardless of his outward appearance or the conditions of his 'barn', and to arise and follow him with all his heart.

"For other geese have I that are not of this gaggle. Them too must I bring, and they will hear my call. And there will be one skein, and one gander." (John 10:16)

God and the Geese – Part I

There was once a man who didn't believe in God, and he didn't hesitate to let others know how he felt about religion and religious holidays. His wife, however, did believe, and she raised their children to also have faith in God and Jesus, despite his disparaging comments.

One snowy Eve, his wife was taking their children to service in the farm community in which they lived. They were to talk about Jesus' birth.. She asked him to come, but he refused. 'That story is nonsense!' he said. 'Why would God lower Himself to come to Earth as a man? That's ridiculous!' So she and the children left, and he stayed home.

A while later, the winds grew stronger and the snow turned into a blizzard. As the man looked out the window, all he saw was a blinding snowstorm. He sat down to relax before the fire for the evening. Then he heard a loud thump. Something had hit the window. He looked out, but couldn't see more than a few feet. When the snow let up a little, he ventured outside to see what could have been beating on his window.

In the field near his house he saw a flock of wild geese. Apparently they had been flying south for the winter when they got caught in the snowstorm and couldn't go on. They were lost and stranded on his farm, with no food or shelter. They just flapped their wings and flew around the field in low circles, blindly and aimlessly. A couple of them had flown into his window, it seemed.

The man felt sorry for the geese and wanted to help them. The barn would be a great place for them to stay, he thought. It's warm and safe; surely they could spend the night and wait out the storm. So he walked over to the barn and opened the doors wide, then watched and waited, hoping they would notice the open barn and go inside.

But the geese just fluttered around aimlessly and didn't seem to notice the barn or realize what it could mean for them. The man tried to get their attention, but that just seemed to scare them, and they moved further away. He went into the house and came with some bread, broke it up, and made a bread crumb trail leading to the barn. They still didn't catch on.

Now he was getting frustrated. He got behind them and tried to shoo them toward the barn, but they only got more scared and scattered in every direction except toward the barn. Nothing he did could get them to go into the barn where they would be warm and safe.

'Why don't t hey follow me?!' he exclaimed. 'Can't they see this is the only place where they can survive the storm?' He thought for a moment and realized that they just wouldn't follow a human. 'If only I were a goose, then I could save them,' he said out loud.

Then he had an idea. He went into barn, got one of his own geese, and carried it in his arms as he circled around behind the flock of wild geese. He then released it. His goose flew through the flock and straight into the barn -- and one-by-one, the other geese followed it to safety.

He stood silently for a moment as the words he had spoken a few minutes earlier replayed in his mind: 'If only I were a goose, then I could save them!' Then he thought about what he had said to his wife earlier. 'Why would God want to be like us? That's ridiculous!'

Suddenly it all made sense. That is what God had done. We were like the geese--blind, lost, perishing. God had His Son become like us so He could show us the way and save us.

As the winds and blinding snow died down, his soul became quiet and pondered this wonderful thought. Suddenly he understood why Christ had come. Years of doubt and disbelief vanished with the passing storm. He fell to his knees in the snow, and prayed his first prayer: 'Thank You, God, for coming in human form to get me out of the storm!'

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him; and He will direct your path." (Proverbs 3:5-6)

The Minister's Guts

2008-06-08T23:13:00.000-05:00

Recently another mass forward came around called "This Minister had Guts" (see below). The following are some reactions to it:

I often wonder about the true motives behind pieces like the Minister's guts. "Guts" is a common word in the military. It means being able to suck it up whenever you are attacked by your peers, superiors, or 'the enemy'. It also means having the will to attack your peers, superiors, or 'the enemy'. OK, well, he was a military officer, as was made clear in his 'credentials' from the beginning. But then again, why has supporting the military become so intimately linked with religion in American mass messages ever since 9/11?

And why are so many politically-slanted (mostly Right-wing) messages getting mixed up with God, prayer and being a good Christian? Who is behind all of this and why? Is religion once again being used as a Trojan horse to infiltrate hegemonic messages into the citadels of the American peoples' hearts? Why those messages in particular, and not others? Who is really being served by them?

For example, we all know that the lottery is the least of the many ways in which the poor have been subsidizing the rich, both at home and (especially) abroad. Why not talk about that for a change? Also, who in their right mind would want to keep having poverty associated with laziness after so many years? Maybe someone who would be ill served by having the people know that poverty is created by the very economic system that is making that lazy someone richer and the poor poorer? One would think we would have understood that one by now, being one of the most highly educated countries in the world!

And why is the Minister's entire list of sins limited to what happens inside the borders of the US of A? Why wasn't he talking about the far worse crimes against humanity that 'we the people' have committed and continue to commit abroad, whether directly through our daily choices, indirectly through the government that 'represents' us, or even more indirectly through other governments or, if they are not for sale, then through insurgent groups? (Has anyone read "Confessions of an Economic Hitman? Ohmygosh!) When are we going to 'fess up to those sins, like the last Pope did, and start working to reverse them?

Maybe the other senators did not walk out just because the Minister was praying (what else did they expect when they invited him?), but in protest against the political positions that were being sold under the guise of prayer. Maybe they were fed up with having their religiosity constantly equated with the same hegemonic, partisan, sectarian, divisive, adversarial, nationalistic, warlike sentiments that much of the country seems to be swallowing hook, line and sinker.

*****

This Minister Had Guts

Joe Wright is a former B 36 and B 52 Radar Operator, 28th Bomb Wing atRapid City,SD. After retirement from the Air Force, he became a minister.

It seems prayer still upsets some people. Please read....

When Minister Joe Wright was asked to open the new session of the Kansas Senate, everyone was expecting the usual generalities, but this is what they heard:

"Heavenly Father,
We come before you today
To ask your forgiveness and
To seek your direction and guidance.

We know Your Word says,
'Woe to those who call evil good'
But that is exactly what we have done.

We have lost our spiritual equilibrium
And reversed our values.

We have exploited the poor and
Called it the lottery.

We have rewarded laziness
And called it welfare.

We have killed our unborn
And called it choice.

We have shot abortionists
And called it justifiable.

We have neglected to discipline
Our children and called it
Building self esteem

We have abused power
And called it politics.

We have coveted our neighbor's
Possessions and called it ambition.

We have polluted the air
With profanity and
Pornography and called it
Freedom of speech and expression.

We have ridiculed the time
Honored values of our
Forefathers and called it enlightenment.

Search us, Oh, God,
And know our hearts today;

Cleanse us from every sin
And set us free...

Amen!"

The response was immediate. A number of legislators walked out during the prayer in protest.

In 6 short weeks, Central Christian Church, where Rev. Wright is Pastor, logged more than 5,000 phone calls with only 47 of those calls responding negatively. The church is now receiving international requests for copies of this prayer from India, Africa and Korea.

Commentator Paul Harvey aired this prayer on his radio program 'The Rest of the Story,' and received a larger response to this program than any other he has ever aired.

With the Lord's help, may this prayer sweep over our Nation and wholeheartedly become our desire so that we again can be called 'one nation under God.'

If possible, please pass this prayer on to your friends 'If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything.' Think about this: If you forward this prayer to everyone on your list, in less than 30 days it would be heard by the world.

How many people will not receive this prayer... Do you have the guts to pass it on?

God vs. Science?

2008-06-01T23:08:00.007-05:00

I was recently sent an interesting piece on "God vs. Science" (see below), a fictional dialog that is actually quite interesting once you get past the absurd dichotomy suggested by the title “God vs. Science”, an untenable proposition from both a theological and a scientific standpoint.

Theologically, God could not be against science because if He created the world and is thereby reflected in the world, and if science is the study of that world, then science might be described the study of God as reflected in the world. (Consider Bahá'u'lláh’s statement that "Nature is God's will and its expression in and through the contingent world").

Likewise, science cannot be ‘against’ God for at least one of the following two reasons. First, if science were defined by its OBJECT of study and that object were necessarily tangible (a common misconception), then God would be outside of its scope of inquiry (along with most of what it currently does cover, like gravity, evolution or thought), and science would have nothing to say about the matter, much less against it, unless you hold that science’s lack of tools to study something proves its non-existence, which is outrageously reductionist.

Second, if science is defined rather by its METHOD of study, then there is no reason inquiries into God should be less inaccessible to that method than gravity, evolution or thought. This was masterfully demonstrated by the late William Hatcher, notably in his book on “Minimalism”, for those interested in pursuing this fascinating topic further (you can download it for free at this link).

But I also found the dialog deeply disturbing, not because of the actual content of the arguments offered by either side, which were good, but rather because of the adversarial way in which they were presented. Not only are God and science pitted against each other, but the professor proceeds as if he were a litigation attorney, establishing the plaintiff and defendant (God vs. Science), using courtroom theatrics, belittling his students, and leaving them speechless, squirming, voices cracking. This goes on until one of the students is able to turn the tables and cause the same responses in the professor, who finally sits down in defeat. And through all this, a “good semester” is understood to be full of adversarial-style debating, side-taking and verbal fencing matches.

This propensity for thinking in polar opposites and treating inquiry as a power struggle, which is very common in Western academia, unfortunately tends to obscure more than it illuminates. First of all, participants in this sort of battle of the wits simply do not listen to each other. Both sides center their full attention on maximizing the weight of their own arguments and minimizing those of the other, instead of having a mutually-enriching give and take.

This creates a downward spiral of non-communication, because the more we feel misunderstood, the more we try to explain ourselves, the more we are perceived as pushing our ideas on others, the more they increase their resistance to what we are saying, the more they stop listening to and trying to understand us. The outcome is that both parties feel like the other is trying to impose things on them and not really trying to comprehend what they are saying.

When we go into a discussion assuming that ‘we’ are right and ‘they’ are wrong, as soon as anyone has been conveniently categorized as a member of the other camp, there is little to learn from them and much to teach them. A case in point is the fact that for years the Bahá'í belief that evil has no objective existence but is the absence of good (see below) has met resistance from Christians. Now that the idea comes from Christian quarters in the form of the “God vs. Science” piece, it is eagerly sent around the world by other Christians as if it came right out of the Bible.

The adversarial approach tends to assume a PRESET position of ‘truth’ based on what we would like to think we know and what we fear having torn down, instead of taking a LEARNING stance of ‘search’ based on the humble recognition of how little we really do know and how much would like to discover (the mark of a true scientist, philosopher and/or believer).

In the God vs. Science debate, for example, if instead of starting a power struggle the professor had taken a learning stance, he could have started out by making a list of arguments for and against the existence of God, asked whether anyone had any others to add, and then invited a critical analysis of each one, with a view to enriching the thinking of all, himself included.

My son had a troubling experience with the adversarial approach when he was a child. Unbeknownst to us, his school was promoting the use of debates as a teaching tool, and had chosen racism as one of the topics. Since nobody else wanted to argue in favor of such an unpopular belief (it lost its status as a ‘science’ following WWII and since then took on the alias of 'xenophobia'), my son finally accepted, not without some reluctance.

Being a brilliant child, he won the debate against a good friend of his. He came home perturbed and asked through streaming tears how it was possible for such a falsehood to win a debate. He had been raised in the tradition of Bahá'í “consultation”, which is based on principles of non-adversarial dialog whose purpose is a sincere search for truth.

In the Bahá'í approach, one listens attentively to others, in an earnest attempt to learn as much as possible from them, and in turn tries to contribute frankly but courteously whatever might be constructive to the dialog. It is a win-win situation. In contrast, the goal of debate is to overly emphasize the weaknesses of each other’s points, in order to discredit them, and exaggerate the strenghts of one's position in order to 'win' the argument. In the end, both lose the opportunity to gain something useful from the other, and society as a whole loses through the corrosive influence of adversarial relations.

Both approaches develop intellectual capacity and skills, but they have profound differences. Consultation illuminates the issue at hand while preserving the unity of the group, which is essential to joint action. Debate, on the other hand, clouds the issue in the dust of rhetoric and divides participants against each other, creating and deepening rivalries, and making joint action far less likely. As Alfie Kohn says in “No Contest - The Case Against Competition: why we lose in our race to win”

“The practical emphasis in debate is on tying logical knots, sounding persuasive… The point is not to arrive at a fuller understanding of the question at hand or to form genuine convictions. . . [A] premium is placed on not having any; believing in something could interfere with one’s ability to win on both sides of the issue. This arrangement is usually defended on the grounds that it forces participants to see both points of view, but it does so in a way that promotes a kind of cynical relativism: no position is better than any other since any position can be successfully defended.”

I guess that for me the most disturbing thing about the “God vs. Science” piece was to see ‘religion’, which is supposed to be a force for social cohesion, using adversarialism to further a position, especially one like the existence of God. This probably should not come as a surprise, however, as the modern-day Western university and --hence-- scientific tradition grew out of the all-male, often misogynistic Catholic monasteries and cathedral schools of medieval Europe.

These schools were characterized by rigorous discipline (beatings and adversarial methods of teaching and testing) and a militaristic culture with a highly martial subject matter. Students saw themselves as ‘warriors’ in training for spiritual missions or even physical battle against ‘heretics’ and ‘heathens’. It was precisely this seedbed that gave way to the adversarial epistemology, teaching methods and ritualized enmity among teachers and students that characterize today’s academia, as illustrated by “God vs. Science”.

Of course, one cannot ignore the tremendous contributions that these institutions have made to scientific advancement, which some say are DUE to their adversarial tradition, and others say were DESPITE it. But at what cost? It sustains unnecessarily prolonged and costly debates over issues that many years later are finally resolved as not having been contradictory after all but rather complementary (like the nature vs. nurture and the wave vs. particle debates).

What is worse, while clouding the matters discussed, these debates often distract attention from many of the underlying issues, which are often far more important than those receiving the most attention. It is like so many physicians arguing over how to abate the symptoms while the patient dies of an undiagnosed disease.

Worse yet, the debate culture discourages the contributions of less aggressively-minded thinkers from all cultures and walks of life, and those who prefer to avoid an environment of adversarialism. This tends to privilege mainstream male scholars, forcing women and other ‘minority’ groups to either slip queitly into the sidelines or replicate the dominant male culture in order to ‘survive’ in a dog-eat-dog style academia. As a result, severe limits are placed on the diversity of perspectives available to address the critical issues facing the survival of the entire human race at this vital turning point in history.

That this outcome is not due to an adversarial human nature is evident, among other things, in the fact that it is not common to all or even most cultures, but has historical roots. It is purportedly a heritage of the ancient Greeks, whose tools of formal logic and rhetoric were wielded like weapons in the “agora” during intellectual contests aimed to defeat an opponent as surely as an athlete in the gymnasium or a soldier on the battlefield.

Interestingly, the very word “agora” derives from the Greek “agon”, meaning contest, which has given rise to terms such as “agonistic” (characterized by contest or struggle) and “antagonism” (acting in opposition or hostility). Even the word “argument”, originally meaning a set of logical propositions, has come to be associated with an adversarial discussion.

Sophists --itinerant philosophers-- such as Protagoras developed this art to such a point that they claimed that even the weakest side of any argument could prevail if its defender used the right rhetorical tools. This is disturbing, because it means not only that the search for truth becomes a battleground of the wits, but also that it no longer matters who is right or wrong, but who has mastered the best weapons. Even today we find this approach cultivated in society, from school debates to court rooms, from family relations to party politics.

In sum, the adversarial approach has been found to have deleterious effects on scientific inquiry, on religion’s ability to unite, and on society in general. It has been shown not to be part and parcel of human nature but a culturally-learned attitude and behavior. There are other alternatives available, which are much more effective in achieving real progress.

So if we truly want to foster a new culture of peace and mutualism in the world, then it would stand to reason that these alternatives should be promoted and developed, and that we would stand to gain from cultivating in ourselves and others more mutualistic attitudes and practices.

ANNEX I:
GOD VS. SCIENCE

A science professor begins his school year with a lecture to the students, "Let me explain the problem science has with religion." The atheist professor of philosophy pauses before his class and then asks one of his new students to stand.
"You're a Christian, aren't you, son?"
"Yes sir," the student says.
"So you believe in God?"
"Absolutely."

"Is God good?"
"Sure! God's good."
"Is God all-powerful? Can God do anything?"
"Yes."
"Are you good or evil?"
"The Bible says I'm evil."

The professor grins knowingly. "Aha! The Bible!" He considers for a moment. "Here's one for you. Let's say there's a sick person over here and you can cure him. You can do it. Would you help him? Would you try?"
"Yes sir, I would."
"So you're good...!"
"I wouldn't say that."
"But why not say that? You'd help a sick and maimed person if you could. Most of us would if we could. But God doesn't."

The student does not answer, so the professor continues. "He doesn't, does he? My brother was a Christian who died of cancer, even though he prayed to Jesus to heal him. How is this Jesus good? Hmmm? Can you answer that one?" The student remains silent. "No, you can't, can you?" the professor says. He takes a sip of water from a glass on his desk to give the student time to relax.

"Let's start again, young fella. Is God good?"
"Er...yes," the student says.
"Is Satan good?"
The student doesn't hesitate on this one. "No."
"Then where does Satan come from?"
The student falters. "From God"
"That's right. God made Satan, didn't he? Tell me, son. Is there evil in this world?"
"Yes, sir."
"Evil's everywhere, isn't it? And God did make everything, correct?"
"Yes."
"So who created evil?" The professor continued, "If God created everything, then God created evil, since evil exists, and according to the principle that our works define who we are, then God is evil." Again, the student has no answer.

"Is there sickness? Immorality? Hatred? Ugliness? All these terrible things, do they exist in this world?"
The student squirms on his feet. "Yes."
"So who created them?"
The student does not answer again, so the professor repeats his question. "Who created them?" There is still no answer. Suddenly the lecturer breaks away to pace in front of the classroom. The class is mesmerized. "Tell me," he continues onto another student. "Do you believe in Jesus Christ, son?"
The student's voice betrays him and cracks. "Yes, professor, I do."

The old man stops pacing. "Science says you have five senses you use to identify and observe the world around you. Have you ever seen Jesus?"
"No sir. I've never seen Him."
"Then tell us if you've ever heard your Jesus?"
"No, sir, I have not."
"Have you ever felt your Jesus, tasted your Jesus or smelt your Jesus? Have you ever had any sensory perception of Jesus Christ, or God for that matter?"
"No, sir, I'm afraid I haven't."
"Yet you still believe in him?"
"Yes."

"According to the rules of empirical, testable, demonstrable protocol, science says your God doesn't exist. What do you say to that, son?"
"Nothing," the student replies. "I only have my faith."
"Yes, faith," the professor repeats. "And that is the problem science has with God. There is no evidence, only faith."

The student stands quietly for a moment, before asking a question of His own. "Professor, is there such thing as heat?"
"Yes," the professor replies. "There's heat."
"And is there such a thing as cold?"
"Yes, son, there's cold too."
"No sir, there isn't."

The professor turns to face the student, obviously interested. The room suddenly becomes very quiet. The student begins to explain. "You can have lots of heat, even more heat, super-heat, mega-heat, unlimited heat, white heat, a little heat or no heat, but we don't have anything called 'cold'. We can hit up to 458 degrees below zero, which is no heat, but we can't go any further after that. There is no such thing as cold; otherwise we would be able to go colder than the lowest -458 degrees."

"Every body or object is susceptible to study when it has or transmits energy, and heat is what makes a body or matter have or transmit energy. Absolute zero (-458 F) is the total absence of heat. You see, sir, cold is only a word we use to describe the absence of heat. We cannot measure cold. Heat we can measure in thermal units because heat is energy. Cold is not the opposite of heat, sir, just the absence of it." Silence across the room. A pen drops somewhere in the classroom, sounding like a hammer.

"What about darkness, professor. Is there such a thing as darkness?"
"Yes," the professor replies without hesitation. "What is night if it isn't darkness?"
"You're wrong again, sir. Darkness is not something; it is the absence of something. You can have low light, normal light, bright light, flashing light, but if you have no light constantly you have nothing and it's called darkness, isn't it? That's the meaning we use to define the word." "In reality, darkness isn't. If it were, you would be able to make darkness darker, wouldn't you?"

The professor begins to smile at the student in front of him. This will be a good semester. "So what point are you making, young man?"
"Yes, professor. My point is, your philosophical premise is flawed to start with, and so your conclusion must also be flawed."
The professor's face cannot hide his surprise this time. "Flawed? Can you explain how?"

"You are working on the premise of duality," the student explains. "You argue that there is life and then there's death; a good God and a bad God. You are viewing the concept of God as something finite, something we can measure. Sir, science can't even explain a thought. It uses electricity and magnetism, but has never seen, much less fully understood either one. To view death as the opposite of life is to be ignorant of the fact that death cannot exist as a substantive thing. Death is not the opposite of life, just the absence of it." "Now tell me, professor. Do you teach your students that they evolved from a monkey?"

"If you are referring to the natural evolutionary process, young man, yes, of course I do."
"Have you ever observed evolution with your own eyes, sir?"
The professor begins to shake his head, still smiling, as he realizes where the argument is going. A very good semester, indeed.

"Since no one has ever observed the process of evolution at work and cannot even prove that this process is an on-going endeavor, are you not teaching your opinion, sir? Are you now not a scientist, but a preacher?" The class is in uproar. The student remains silent until the commotion has subsided.

"To continue the point you were making earlier to the other student, let me give you an example of what I mean." The student looks around the room. "Is there anyone in the class who has ever seen the professor's brain?" The class breaks out into laughter. "Is there anyone here who has ever heard the professor's brain, felt the professor's brain, touched or smelt the professor's brain? No one appears to have done so. So, according to the established rules of empirical, stable, demonstrable protocol, science says that you have no brain, with all due respect, sir. So if science says you have no brain, how can we trust your lectures, sir?"

Now the room is silent. The professor just stares at the student, his face unreadable. Finally, after what seems an eternity, the old man answers. "I guess you'll have to take them on faith." "Now, you accept that there is faith, and, in fact, faith exists with life," the student continues. "Now, sir, is there such a thing as evil?" Now uncertain, the professor responds, "Of course, there is. We see it everyday. It is in the daily example of man's inhumanity to man. It is in the multitude of crime and violence everywhere in the world. These manifestations are nothing else but evil."

To this the student replied, "Evil does not exist sir, or at least it does not exist unto itself. Evil is simply the absence of God. It is just like darkness and cold, a word that man has created to describe the absence of God. God did not create evil. Evil is the result of what happens when man does not have God's love present in his heart. It's like the cold that comes when there is no heat or the darkness that comes when there is no light."

The professor sat down.

ANNEX II:
THE NONEXISTENCE OF EVIL

(A talk by ‘Abdu'l-Bahá, in “Some Answered Questions”, pp. 262-263)

“The true explanation of this subject is very difficult. Know that beings are of two kinds: material and spiritual, those perceptible to the senses and those intellectual.

“Things which are sensible are those which are perceived by the five exterior senses; thus those outward existences which the eyes see are called sensible. Intellectual things are those which have no outward existence but are conceptions of the mind. For example, mind itself is an intellectual thing which has no outward existence. All man's characteristics and qualities form an intellectual existence and are not sensible.

“Briefly, the intellectual realities, such as all the qualities and admirable perfections of man, are purely good, and exist. Evil is simply their nonexistence. So ignorance is the want of knowledge; error is the want of guidance; forgetfulness is the want of memory; stupidity is the want of good sense. All these things have no real existence.

“In the same way, the sensible realities are absolutely good, and evil is due to their nonexistence -- that is to say, blindness is the want of sight, deafness is the want of hearing, poverty is the want of wealth, illness is the want of health, death is the want of life, and weakness is the want of strength.

“Nevertheless a doubt occurs to the mind -- that is, scorpions and serpents are poisonous. Are they good or evil, for they are existing beings? Yes, a scorpion is evil in relation to man; a serpent is evil in relation to man; but in relation to themselves they are not evil, for their poison is their weapon, and by their sting they defend themselves. But as the elements of their poison do not agree with our elements -- that is to say, as there is antagonism between these different elements, therefore, this antagonism is evil; but in reality as regards themselves they are good.

“The epitome of this discourse is that it is possible that one thing in relation to another may be evil, and at the same time within the limits of its proper being it may not be evil. Then it is proved that there is no evil in existence; all that God created He created good. This evil is nothingness; so death is the absence of life. When man no longer receives life, he dies. Darkness is the absence of light: when there is no light, there is darkness. Light is an existing thing, but darkness is nonexistent. Wealth is an existing thing, but poverty is non-existing.

“Then it is evident that all evils return to nonexistence. Good exists; evil is nonexistent.”

Dining Bilingual in Baños

2007-12-25T00:00:00.006-05:00

Now that the holidays are here, remember that nothing quite beats the delights of eating out on the delicacies of "Baños de Ambato"!

You can start out with an aperitif of "it came boiled" (vino hervido), and an appetizer of "plugs" (tacos) filled with "verdures" (verduras). The soup dish could be a delicious "it cremates of funguses or asparaguses" (crema de hongos o asparagus).

For the entrée, try the delicious "trout to the steam" (trucha al vapor), "loin to the plate" (lomo a la plancha), "pigchop to the pinecone" (chuleta a la piña), or "chicken to the juice" (pollo al jugo), with side orders of "fried pope" (papa frita), "pottages" (menestras), and "moneyless mature" (plátano maduro).

If that doesn't do it for you, how about some "padded breast to the iron" (pechuga a la plancha), "language to the coal" (lengua a la brasa), or "head with gears" (res con guarniciones), with a side order of "popes to the fathom" (papas a la braza), "I marinate of garlic" (adobo de ajo), and "turnovers padded of cheese" (empanadas rellenas de queso).

Beverages will include "aromatic waters" (aguas aromáticas), "juice of default" (jugo de mora), or "gaseous tails" (colas gaseosas). To top it all off, how about some "prostrate" (postres), like "plums happens" (ciruelas pasas) or your favorite flavor of "icy" (helado) in an "it surrounds freeze" (copa helada).

But beware of scrutinizing the "menu to the letter" (menú a la carta) too closely, or you may come away with an acute case of linguistic indigestion or translator's trauma.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all "good provech"!

A Captivating Experience

2007-09-21T23:01:00.000-05:00

On Monday after work, I was driving through town as usual, going to pick up Mónica, while thinking about work done and left to do. Perhaps it was this reverie that kept me from seeing the motorcycle that was passing an approaching taxi at breakneck speed -- until it was too late. It hit my front bumper and careened off the street, while the agile driver leaped off into a full-body crash against two pedestrians.

As I parked the car, the taxi driver pulled up saying that it was the cyclist’s fault; that he was going too fast and had almost run into his taxi. I asked him to stay as a witness, but he refused. I walked around dazed -- in emotional shock -- watching as the standers-by shouted at the limping cyclist for his imprudence, one of them punching him in the face. Then came the crowds of onlookers, the police and ambulances. I was trying to phone Mónica, but with no luck. About that time, a policeman whisked me off to the patrol car. If I had known, and had my wits about me, I would have talked to the cyclist, agreed to settle things amicably, and avoided the interference of the police. That one little act would have avoided me most of what came next.

Once in the patrol car, I was able to reach Mónica and our lawyer friend Guillermo, who came and tried to help, but the police was determined to take me to the detention center. When both policemen got into the patrol car to drive off, what was to transpire could have be avoided by giving them a considerable sum of money. But I had no intention of rewarding the system for being corrupt, and even if I had, my wallet was empty! The police asked me for my statement, and I started to dictate it when it occurred to me that I should consult with a lawyer first. I asked if I had a right to remain silent, but they said it was just a personal explanation of what I saw. I insisted, and they begrudgingly told me my rights -- just like in the movies. At the police station, though, the traffic lawyer that Guillermo had called told me I should go ahead and give my statement.

He said I would be “kept in custody” until all the legal procedures were completed, and gave me a few pointers on how to behave in jail. After everyone left, I hung around watching TV, savoring the last minutes of freedom, until they said it was time for me to go inside. I was ushered into a long ward full of bunk beds, with a bath at either end and a mess area in one corner. As the door clanked shut behind me, a shout of “fresh meat!” brought many of the 40-some inmates crowding around, shouting obscenities and jeering. Although overcome by fear of what would happen next, I made a show of bravery, mustered up a smile, and began greeting and shaking the hands of those closest to me, in keeping with Ecuadorian custom, to which many responded in kind.

This little ritual was cut short by one of the largest men, carrying a long paddle, who said that before all else, I must have my bath. This was followed by more shouted obscenities and jeers. My mouth went dry at the thought of what this might entail and I balked, explaining that I had already bathed that morning and, besides, that I had no deodorant for afterwards. They were not to be convinced, however, and I was crowded into the bath, made to strip down to my tighty-whiteys, and pushed into the shower. The water was warm, but a few times they opened the door and doused me with cold water full of clothes detergent, saying “here’s your shampoo”. Each time I shouted “Acha-CHAY!” (Kichwa for “Brrr, that’s cold!”), which incited good-natured laughter among my tormentors.

After the shower, I was delighted to see as I dressed that nothing was missing. They explained that nobody would touch my things there, as they were all honorable citizens who had been arrested for traffic accidents and infringements. The bath was a custom to ensure hygiene and avoid unnecessary BO. I suspected it was also some kind of initiation rite -- a baptism of sorts to wash away the contamination of the outside world and enter a new life. Little did I know that the real initiation was yet to be.

As I emerged from the bath, several people came up to welcome me, explain the ropes and give me advice. There was a “caporal” (headman), affectionately called “El Capo”, who had been there longer than anyone else -- over four years -- for drunk driving that resulted in a death. It was he who ensured order, peace, security, and even hygiene in the ward, in part through the good offices of two brawny “deputies”, but mostly due to the respect and moral authority he had earned over the years. I was to pay a one-time quota of US$ 20.00 to help buy everything from food to cleaning supplies, as the police provided nothing. El Capo said that sometimes the police even asked the inmates for supplies when needed.

Someone shared a bag of potato chips and some yogurt with me, as I was questioned regarding the details of my arrest for the first of many times over the meals to come. Then El Capo showed me where to get a mattress and blanket (both old, thin and dirty), and a free space on the floor to put them. I lay down but did not sleep that night, as thoughts of what was, what was to be, and what could have been tormented me more than the flees and the hardness of my bed.

I may have dozed off briefly in the early morning, but by 6:00 I realized it was getting light and the ward was astir. My instinct told to arise and get ready for whatever awaited me, which I did as quickly as possible. Soon the guards came for roll call, for which we were herded into the visitors’ area and then called back in by name. Immediately afterwards, breakfast was served by the “cooks” on shift -- black coffee, cold cheese sandwich and a boiled egg. Then we were told to get everything off the floor for cleanup and to get ready for the daily assembly.

We formed an elongated circle around the dining area, with the newcomers grouped at one end. El Capo began by inviting those who were being released that day to give their farewell addresses. Then they were held piggy-back by one of the deputies and received one swift lick of the long paddle, leaving them in excruciating pain. El Capo then asked each person in the circle -- except for us rookies -- if there was anything that needed to be resolved. Most said no, but a few raised issues that were then thoroughly discussed and agreed upon, mostly having to do with obeying the rules, which were designed to ensure the hygiene and peaceful fellowship of the ward.

I was duly impressed, but my satisfaction was short-lived, as El Capo was announcing the next order of business -- to “welcome” the novices. Once more there arose an excited chatter of jeering and obscenities, and I tasted cotton again. Through the nauseous swell of anxiety that washed all color from my face, I prayed that, whatever happened, I would be protected from spiritual harm and would emerge with my soul intact -- i.e., without hardening my heart towards my fellow men or becoming cynical about the human condition.

One by one, we were given two chances to shout a greeting as loud as we could. If it was not loud enough (it never was), we would be given the dubious privilege of participating in a rite so debasing that it is not befitting to describe it here. Suffice it to say that it seemed designed to degrade everyone entering that little community down to the same level, no matter what their rank or station outside. This was followed by more shouting of an identity-stripping dialog between each greenhorn and the rest of the assembly: “My name is Peter” -- “It used to be!”, “I live in Sangolquí” -- “You used to!”, “I am a translator” -- “You used to be!”, “I am here because of an accident" -- "Incompetent bungler! Nincompoop!”, etc.

Later on, one of the inmates confessed that he had seen my great uneasiness during the initiation rite, had felt sorry for me and was embarrassed by the whole situation. He wanted me to know that it was all in jest and that I should not hold it against any of them. I responded that I believe human beings are potentially very noble beings, and that it was a pity that despite this we insist on continually demeaning both ourselves and others.

After the assembly it was cleanup time, and each person was assigned a duty -- to pick up trash, sweep, mop, dust, wash, sterilize, put in order, etc. -- all under the careful supervision of El Capo, his deputies and the long paddle. By the time we were through, the entire ward was sparkling clean and smelling fresh (which never lasted long), and we were allowed to take a much needed, but all-too-short rest.

Midday visiting hours came, and Mónica & Ahmad were there to see me -- what a sight for sore eyes! Ahmad had a tense look of concern on his face and Mónica was in tears. They had not slept the night before either, out of anguish over the whole situation. I did my best to console them, hide my own fears and assure them that everything would be fine. Soon we found we could rise above our grief by objectively discussing the work to be done. They had several long, hard days ahead of them -- lawyers, insurance, clinic, public offices, etc. -- to arrange everything.

Over the following days I was gratefully surprised at their strength and resourcefulness as they cut through miles of red tape and negotiated with lawyers, public ‘servants’, clinic staff, the motorcyclist, and his wife, all the while keeping me supplied with clean clothes, bedding, food, medicine, toiletries, reading & writing materials, etc. Ahmad, especially, showed qualities and capacities of clear-headedness, acute insight, human relations, mediation, and enthusiastic energy that Mónica and I had not fully seen or appreciated until then. He was a tremendous source of support and comfort to both of us.

Once the visitors had left, a first lunch shift sat at the tables and ate what had been brought to us. Each one gave the “cooks” part of the food -- not leftovers, but a soup, salad, sandwich, dessert, juice, or some sort. When the first shift had finished, the second shift sat down. These were the ones who had not been visited and/or had not received anything to eat. The “cooks” gave them what had been left by the others, supplemented by a pot of cooked rice and potatoes. This motivated me to always ask for more than I could eat, in order to have more for sharing, and to hand out or turn over all extras that visiting friends brought -- potato chips, candy, yogurt, etc.

The afternoon was free time, which I spent trying to pray, read, write in this journal, and study my musical Portuguese “lessons” despite the discordant racket of sundry radios, CD players, TVs, and DVD players, not to mention two rowdy card games going on at the same time! At mid-afternoon some of the inmates invited me to have coffee with them, so I contributed a package of biscuits I had received and we spent over an hour discussing life with a lawyer, a professor, a commercial engineer, and an economist, among others.

One guy had been waiting at a stoplight and was hit from the rear by a lady who paid her way out while he got put in the pokey. As if it were a crime to have an accident -- no matter whose fault it was! Another man had been parked in the street with some partners, celebrating a business deal with a bottle of whiskey, when a policeman arrested him for drunk driving. When he objected that he was not planning to drive, the cop said “How do I know that?" and then told him bluntly, in front of his friends, that for 500 dollars he would let him go free. When he told this “law officer” that he wouldn’t give him a red penny, he got a 3-week sentence. The man was determined to sue the officer out of the force once his term was up. Story after story was told of injustices and abuses of authority, all for the purpose of extorting as much money as possible out of the hapless citizens.

Before we knew it, it was the evening visiting time, which was always the most crowded. During that week, several friends and relatives called and visited, to share their consternation and encourage Mónica, Ahmad and me. They called to mind Bahá’u’lláh’s forty years of prison and exile, from the galling chains of the Black Pit in Tihrán to the agonies of the Most Great Prison in Akká, and I felt honored to taste a tiny drop from the ocean of suffering He had accepted to bear for love of humanity. They said they would pray for us. I said I was sure that God would never cause tribulations to befall any soul unless he wanted to exalt his station and buttress his heart, that it might not become inclined toward the vanities of this world. So I asked them to pray only that we might learn well the lessons for which we were placed in this predicament.

We came to the conclusion that one unexpected benefit of these difficulties was realizing how many people really cared for us and stood by us in so many ways. Even my dear little niece, Gabriela, wept when she heard the news, asking what I would eat, where I would sleep, what they would do to me. She was assured that all would be well, but insisted tearfully that the family should gather to pray for me. When they called me from Cuenca and it was her turn to talk, that sweet, innocent little voice, so full of tender concern and caring, touched my heart so deeply that I wept freely and could hardly speak.

One thing I realized is that no matter what happened inside the jail, those who really suffered the most were not the inmates, but their loved ones, looking in on them through the bars. As children we were taught to see imprisonment as one of the worst things that can happen to someone -- a punishment for terrible crimes --, graphically represented by the prisoner looking out through bars. When one lives it, though, one realizes that it is not so terrible after all. However, that image still haunts the minds and hearts of those who visit and brings tears to their eyes and a lump to their throats. With this in mind, I appealed to my ward-mates during one of the daily assemblies to be on their best behavior during visiting hours, in order to avoid fueling the apprehensions of family and friends.

Anyway, this turned out to be the daily routine. Visiting time was followed by dinner, things started to wind down, and lights were out by 10:00. That night, after I had gone to bed, a newcomer came in who had been badly knocked around in an accident. He was given the space next to me on the floor, and groaned as he lowered his battered body stiffly onto the flimsy mat. As he told me his story, I remembered that Mónica had brought me the little bag of basic remedies that I carry when I travel. So I gave my new friend a painkiller, a balm for his bruises, and something to help him sleep. The next morning he thanked me profusely, saying he had been able to sleep all night and felt much better.

That is when I suddenly discovered a sense of purpose and mission in the midst of such a ludicrous situation. I started looking around for people in pain and treating their ailments as best I could. I became acutely aware of the man limping back and forth from the bathroom, of headaches and tummy aches, of insomnias, of pulled muscles from getting down from the second bunk too quickly, even of the neck and shoulder pains from the stress of imprisonment. That day Mónica brought me a whole list of basic medical supplies, which were notoriously lacking from the first-aid kit hung conspicuously on the wall. Soon I was being nicknamed “Doc” and people were coming to me for all kinds of minor aches and pains, and I was happy as could be... except for one thing.

There was a poor young man there who had been riding with his girlfriend on his motorcycle when they crashed. She was killed, and he was badly injured and taken to the government hospital. As soon as they had patched him up, they released him to begin his term in jail. There he was, barely able to speak coherently, with three inches of stitches up the nape of his neck, two broken ribs, a tube through his trachea to his stomach, and barely able to walk on his bruised legs and feet. Feeling powerless to alleviate his health problems, I spoke to the daily assembly, insisting that he should not be there and asking what we could do to get him back to the hospital. They all agreed, however, that once he was signed in, there was nothing we could do to get him back out again. It angered me to think that wealthier victims of accidents, who had perhaps more reasons to be locked up, were attended hand and foot in their comfortable clinics while this impoverished youth lay half dead in that dreadful place.

Speaking of which, the motorcyclist suffered a bone fissure and scraped skin on his left foot, and spent the week in a nearby clinic, where Mónica and Ahmad visited him several times. His insurance paid for his medical expenses, and my insurance paid to fix his bike. His wife spent the week trying to squeeze more money out of us, but we courteously insisted that we would take care of whatever our insurance covered. She even contracted another lawyer, but that achieved little more than increasing her own expenses.

Besides attending to people’s ailments, the other activity that brought me the most joy was the long afternoon talks over coffee and cookies. When my friends learned that I was a Bahá'í, they spoke of their confusion and concern over the proliferation of religions and the growing conflict among them. They appreciated the Bahá'í view of the oneness of the world’s great religions, whose Founders were like perfect mirrors, sent from age to age to reflect towards humanity the light, warmth and life of one same God in a never-ending process of progressive revelation and guidance. They agreed that the major reason each of these religions became divided internally and also rejected the next Divine Messenger who came to the world, was because their different religious leaders usurped the authority to interpret the Word of God for others. They were enthusiastic about the Bahá'í approach of encouraging the independent search for truth, eliminating the clergy entirely, and putting in its place a method of frank but courteous exchange of ideas called consultation.

And so it was that my life in jail became more and more tolerable, until someone threw a monkey-wrench into it. I was supposed to get out on Friday afternoon, which was a good thing because we had a National Assembly meeting that weekend, and Mónica would not have had the heart to attend if I was still in jail. But on Thursday evening, towards the end of visiting time, the lawyer called and told me to be ready in half an hour because he had my release form signed. I guess I should have been ecstatic, but my first thoughts were “What about the ‘patients’ I have been taking care of? What of the unfinished conversations over coffee? I won’t be able to give my farewell speech at the daily assembly!”

I told Mónica and Ahmad, and they were so happy that I knew I would never get away with asking for another day to tie loose ends. So I packed my things, gave El Capo the bag of medical supplies with a list saying what each one was for, congratulated and thanked him for having made the place so livable, and shook the hands of all 40 of my new friends, saying that I hoped to see them again under more favorable circumstances. The elderly taxi driver who took us home that night had been in the detention center three times. His contribution to life in confinement had been his guitar and a golden voice. He got so emotional while sharing notes with me that he decided to sing for us. As he sung of how God cried when seeing the horrible things that people do to other, I saw tears running down his wrinkled cheeks, and I knew that there was still too much goodness and beauty in this world to let oneself become embittered.

That weekend I took all my hurt and frustration out on the garden rake, and left the yard as clean as I could get it. Now my soul is at peace, and my hands full of blisters.

Epilogue:

So why do I stay in a country with so many problems? I recently saw a unique T-shirt design, with a map of Ecuador bleeding to death and the message “Last one to leave, turn out the lights”. Some 20% of Ecuador’s population has migrated abroad in search of work since the financial collapse of 1999. People keep asking me why I haven’t left yet, as it would be so easy being an American citizen. Others who seem to know what is coming down are advising those who have the means to leave now while they still can. Ecuador is no longer the island of peace it once was.

Monica and I have discussed this, and she reminds me that I did not come here looking for a comfortable, easy life, but seeking to make a difference. Sure, we would love to live elsewhere for a while, in order to achieve certain goals that we have. But we don’t want the reason to be because we are running away from trouble or looking for a cushy life. And even if we wanted to, the collapse of the old world order is increasingly affecting every nook and cranny of our beloved planet. No country or town can remain an island for long.

Rambo and the Dalai Lama

2005-10-04T16:19:00.000-05:00

The following is an introductory essay by Gordon Fellman to his book "Rambo and the Dalai Lama: The Compulsion to Win and Its Threat to Human Survival" (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998). I am placing it here to encourage everyone who visits my Blog to read, nay study this ground-breaking book.

This book builds from the proposition that until now most encounters have been organized so that the point of them is to overcome the other. This is true for the most part of relations between men and women, parents and children, whites and non-whites, leaders and publics, rich and poor, labor and management, athletic teams, business firms, advanced societies and developing societies, straight and gay, tall and short, well and ill, and so on.

I call this assumption that one must strive to overcome or submit to being overcome, the basis of the adversary paradigm. It also applies to humans' relations to nature which, like people, has been constructed as an enemy to be overcome.

The ultimate expression of the adversary tendency is murder, and that collectively is war. War has usually been fought with the maximum technology available. The use of atomic bombs in 1945 suddenly and drastically cast adversarialism in a new light. For the first time in the history of warfare, it became possible, indeed likely, that in using maximum technology in all-out confrontation, overcoming the other would necessarily also mean overcoming the self; i.e., homicide became inextricable from suicide.

The threat of massive destruction by nuclear devices was complemented by another form of technological assault, the industrial degradation of the environment to the point of numerous deaths and severely damaged systems of land, water, and air needed for survival. The human tendency toward adversarialism has become incarnated in objective processes which neither created nor defined adversarialism but rather came to represent it in stark, terrifying ways.

Historically, alongside the adversary paradigm and in secondary relation to it is the mutuality paradigm, based on the mutuality assumption that the other can be a friend, a colleague, an ally. Religious notions of community and love flow from this paradigm, even if they are ordinarily undercut by the adversary organization and practices of organized religion. Political systems idealize mutuality in official documents like constitutions and in politicians' rhetoric but contradict it in their behavior. The same is true in most if not all other institutions such as education and the family.

My claim is that in order to survive adversarial forms of onslaught, including the ethnic and religious strife which appears to be replacing the one over-arching conflict of the Cold War, mutuality will need to become the primary governing paradigm in human affairs and in humans' relations with the environment, inverting the historic and continuing condition where adversarialism is primary and mutuality, secondary.

My analysis attempts to provide a useful vocabulary for what I see as fundamental crises, indeed survival issues, on our planet today. It is a contemporary version of the timeless contrast between competition and cooperation. I find that in the speaking and teaching I do on this topic, people pick up the words and concepts I use and employ them immediately, and most effectively.

The central innovation of my presentation is my analysis of adversarialism and mutuality as coming in both normative and compulsive or pathological forms. By the adversary compulsion, I mean something beyond ordinary competition in sport, business, or any other social context. I mean an addiction, a drivenness that subordinates other considerations to a passion, indeed an obsession, with "winning." It is this compulsion that, for example, defines the destructiveness of political systems that forsake the political possibility of resolving real societal problems, in favor of destroying the other candidate, the other party, the other program, no matter what it may be.

I also identify a mutuality compulsion. Including in mutuality the ideas of empathy, recognition of the full humanness of the other, caring, nurturing, support, and love, I see mutuality that denies adversary inclinations as compulsive, just as I see adversarialism that denies mutuality inclinations as compulsive. Based on denial of essential parts of the self, each form of compulsion works against the possible reconciliation of humans and nature to each other in ways that can enhance human survival and well-being.

The book goes on to deconstruct both compulsions. I claim that people tend to project upon others qualities they have been taught they can not and must not face in themselves. Hence the other becomes the repository of the selfish, dirty, violent, lustful, failed, immoral parts of oneself that one denies, and as well, the nobler, communal, loving, caring parts of the self that extend beyond immediate friend and family relations and which most people feel are beyond their capacity to realize. In both cases one assumes that one ought not or can not achieve what is implied in one's desires.

Survival requires what I call reappropriation of the full range of qualities that the self is. In a chapter called "Reappropriation of the Self," I offer an analysis of the extent and nature of what can be reappropriated.

I also claim that a more fully mutualistic society is already at hand, but in minor form that is difficult to recognize until it is identified. Most people are familiar with mutuality in some contexts but so far fail to see their proliferation, their connections, and the possibility of a freer organization of society based on mutuality as its premise rather than adversarialism. In three chapters on "Seeds of Mutuality," I examine old seeds in old institutions, new seeds in old institutions, and new seeds in new institutions.

The book nears its end with an analysis of what I see as the major alternative to the destructiveness of the endless adversary relations with which we are currently saddled: globalism -- recognition of the globe as the primary unit of loyalty. I see a global culture already emerging in outline form in political values, language, economy, music, religion, and more. My goal is to analyze and to move beyond analysis in offering hope in the form of visions of mutuality and actions to help bring it about...

By Gordon Fellman, Brandeis University
A "Brother, Can You Paradigm?" Production.
Web site contents copyright, 1998. Find the original at:
http://people.brandeis.edu/~fellman/intro-essay.html)

The Culture of Contest

2005-10-04T15:47:00.000-05:00

The following is a review by Brad Pokorny of the book "Beyond the Culture of Contest: From Adversarialism to Mutualism in an Age of Interdependence", by Michael Karlberg. I am placing it here to encourage everyone who visits my Blog to study this seminal work.

In Western countries, it is taken for granted that the best way to settle political, economic, or legal differences is by putting two or more sides together in a contest and letting one side win.

But the adversarial system has distinct flaws. There is always a "winner" and a "loser."

Somewhere along the line, compromises are usually made, which may not be in the best interests of the whole. And there is always the possibility -- and an increasing one as corruption of various forms creeps into the system -- that money or power will win out instead of truth or justice.

What if there is a better way?

Michael Karlberg's new book, "Beyond the Culture of Contest," calls into the question the series of assumptions on which the adversarial system is based, asking whether they are not more products of culture than of our underlying nature.

It also offers a hopeful new model ("mutualism") in which non-adversarial decision-making could become the norm.

Dr. Karlberg, an assistant professor of communication at Western Washington University, criticizes the "assumption that contests are normal and necessary models of social organization."

In Western societies, he writes, there are three "core institutions" of society: politics, economics, and the legal system. Each is structured as a contest, he writes, designed to pit various parties, interests, or litigants against each other. And all three institutions are based on the notion of self-interest as the primary motivation.

"The political arena has been structured much like the capitalist free market," he writes. "It is an arena within which individuals, and the parties they construct, try to advance their particular ideals and interests in a self-interested and competitive manner."

The norm for adversarialism goes largely unquestioned, Dr. Karlberg adds, because it has become part of Western "culture." And that has occurred largely because of an assumption that human beings are by nature essentially selfish and aggressive.

The key to re-evaluating the culture of contest, then, is to re-evaluate our conception of human nature, Dr. Karlberg writes.

"Human beings appear to have the developmental potential for both conflict and cooperation," he writes. "Which of these potentials is more fully realized is largely a product of our cultural environment -- as demonstrated by the fact that different societies vary considerably in their expressions of conflict and cooperation."

Acknowledging that there will be a considerable number of skeptics who will remain wedded to the idea of contest, competition, and the efficiency of self-interest, Dr. Karlberg then examines various past and present forms of "mutualism."

In particular, he suggests that the various strands for a new kind of cooperative global culture are emerging in such areas as the feminist and ecological movements, modern systems and communications theories, and alternative systems for dispute resolution.

Ultimately, however, Dr. Karlberg suggests that none of these strands can be fully integrated without an overall change in our culture as a whole -- which, in turn, will require a re-conception of human nature and social structures.

What is needed, Dr. Karlberg writes, is "an alternative cultural formation" in which mutualism replaces adversarialism.

And he suggests a "case study" for such a model in the worldwide Baha'i community, "which has over a century of experience applying non-adversarial models...in an integrated and mutually reinforcing manner."

With some five million members, organized into local self-governing councils in more than 180 countries, Dr. Karlberg writes, the worldwide Baha'i community can be seen as a "vast social experiment that is testing the assumptions about human nature, social organization, and social change" that prevail in the adversarial system.

Dr. Karlberg, who is a Baha'i, notes that the Baha'i community follows a set of teachings that emphasizes cooperation, harmony, and unity.

Its institutional structures, he writes, are built around a non-partisan yet fully democratic electoral system that embodies non-adversarialism as one of its highest principles. In that system there are no nominations, no campaigning, and no underlying concept of interest groups or constituencies.

"The Baha'i electoral system embodies neither a contest nor the pursuit of power," he writes. "In contrast to partisan electoral systems the process is unifying rather than divisive. Since no one seeks election, there is no concept of 'winning.' At the same time, the electoral process remains eminently democratic."

Consultation

Dr. Karlberg also examines the principles of "consultation," the non-adversarial decision-making system that is used by all Baha'i institutions.

It seeks to "transcend the adversarial posturing and partisanship" and "patterns of negotiation and compromise" that mark traditional adversarial decision-making.

Dr. Karlberg writes that the history of the Baha'i community is, by and large, a history of individual self-sacrifice and dedication to collective interests, presenting a significant challenge to the assumption that human nature is incorrigibly selfish and aggressive.

Dr. Karlberg writes that the nature of global interdependence requires just such new modes of mutualism and cooperation in human endeavor.

"Because our reproductive and technological success as a species has led to conditions of unprecedented interdependence, no social group on the planet is any longer isolated," writes Dr. Karlberg.

"Under these new conditions, new strategies are not only becoming possible, they have become essential. An interdependent social body cannot coordinate its collective actions as long as its component members are locked in adversarial relationships."

Review by Brad Pokorny, Wed, 11 May 2005.
From Bahá'í World News Service
See "How everyone can win" at http://news.bahai.org

"Beyond the Culture of Contest: From Adversarialism to Mutualism in an Age of Interdependence" by Michael Karlberg. George Ronald. Oxford.
http://www.grbooks.com

Seville Statement on Violence

2005-10-03T17:23:00.000-05:00

The following statement was drafted by leading scientists from around the world, gathered in Seville, Spain, during the UN International Year for Peace in 1986. The scientific arguments are based on evolution, genetics, animal behavior, brain research and social psychology. I am including it in my blog because I feel it deserves broad dissemination and careful consideration by all.

Believing that it is our responsibility to address from our particular disciplines the most dangerous and destructive activities of our species, violence and war; recognizing that science is a human cultural product which cannot be definitive or all-encompassing; and gratefully acknowledging the support of the authorities of Seville and representatives of the Spanish UNESCO;

we, the undersigned scholars from around the world and from relevant sciences, have met and arrived at the following Statement on Violence. In it, we challenge a number of alleged biological findings that have been used, even by some in our disciplines, to justify violence and war. Because the alleged findings have contributed to an atmosphere of pessimism in our time, we submit that the open, considered rejection of these misstatements can contribute significantly to the International Year of Peace.

Misuse of scientific theories and data to justify violence and war is not new but has been made since the advent of modern science. For example, the theory of evolution has been used to justify not only war, but also genocide, colonialism, and suppression of the weak.

We state our position in the form of five propositions. We are aware that there are many other issues about violence and war that could be fruitfully addressed from the standpoint of our disciplines, but we restrict ourselves here to what we consider a most important first step.

1. IT IS SCIENTIFICALLY INCORRECT to say that we have inherited a tendency to make war from our animal ancestors. Although fighting occurs widely throughout animal species, only a few cases of destructive intra-species fighting between organized groups have ever been reported among naturally living species, and none of these involve the use of tools designed to be weapons. Normal predatory feeding upon other species cannot be equated with intra-species violence. Warfare is a peculiarly human phenomenon and does not occur in other animals.

The fact that warfare has changed so radically over time indicates that it is a product of culture. Its biological connection is primarily through language which makes possible the co-ordination of groups, the transmission of technology, and the use of tools. War is biologically possible, but it is not inevitable, as evidenced by its variation in occurrence and nature over time and space. There are cultures which have not engaged in war for centuries, and there are cultures which have engaged in war frequently at some times and not at others.

2. IT IS SCIENTIFICALLY INCORRECT to say that war or any other violent behaviour is genetically programmed into our human nature. While genes are involved at all levels of nervous system function, they provide a developmental potential that can be actualized only in conjunction with the ecological and social environment. While individuals vary in their predispositions to be affected by their experience, it is the interaction between their genetic endowment and conditions of nurturance that determines their personalities. Except for rare pathologies, genes do not produce individuals necessarily predisposed to violence. Neither do they determine the opposite. While genes are co-involved in establishing our behavioural capacities, they do not by themselves specify the outcome.

3. IT IS SCIENTIFICALLY INCORRECT to say that in the course of human evolution there has been a selection for aggressive behaviour more than for other kinds of behaviour. In all well-studied species, status within the group is achieved by the ability to co-operate and to fulfil social functions relevant to the structure of that group. 'Dominance' involves social bindings and affiliations; it is not simply a matter of the possession and use of superior physical power, although it does involve aggressive behaviours. Where genetic selection for aggressive behaviour has been artificially induced in animals, it has rapidly succeeded in producing hyper-aggressive individuals. This indicates that aggression was not maximally selected under natural conditions. When such experimentally-created hyper-aggressive animals are present in a social group, they either disrupt its social structure or are driven out. Violence is neither in our evolutionary legacy nor in our genes.

4. IT IS SCIENTIFICALLY INCORRECT to say that humans have a 'violent brain'. While we do have the neural apparatus to act violently, it is not automatically activated by internal or external stimuli. Like higher primates and unlike other animals, our higher neural processes filter such stimuli before they can be acted upon. How we act is shaped by how we have been conditioned and socialized. There is nothing in our neurophysiology that compels us to react violently.

5. IT IS SCIENTIFICALLY INCORRECT to say that war is caused by 'instinct' or any single motivation. The emergence of modern warfare has been a journey from the primacy of emotional and motivational factors, sometimes called 'instincts', to the primacy of cognitive factors. Modern war involves institutional use of personal characteristics such as obedience, suggestibility, and idealism, social skills such as language, and rational considerations such as cost-calculation, planning, and information processing. The technology of modern war has exaggerated traits associated with violence both in the training of actual combatants and in the preparation of support for war in the general population. As a result of this exaggeration, such traits are often mistaken to be the causes rather than the consequences of the process.

We conclude that biology does not condemn humanity to war, and that humanity can be freed from the bondage of biological pessimism and empowered with confidence to undertake the transformative tasks needed in this International Year of Peace and in the years to come. Although these tasks are mainly institutional and collective, they also rest upon the consciousness of individual participants for whom pessimism and optimism are crucial factors. Just as 'wars begin in the minds of men', peace also begins in our minds. The same species who invented war is capable of inventing peace. The responsibility lies with each of us.

Seville, 16 May 1986

Scientists who wrote the Seville Statement on Violence:

David Adams, Psychology, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT., U.S.A.

S.A. Barnett, Ethology, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

N.P. Bechtereva, Neurophysiology, Institute for Experimental Medicine of Academy of Medical Sciences of the U.S.S.R., Leningrad, U.S.S.R.

Bonnie Frank Carter, Psychology, Albert Einstein Medical Center, Philadelphia (PA), U.S.A.

José M. Rodriguez Delgado, Neurophysiology, Centro de Estudios Neurobiologicos, Madrid, Spain

José Luis Diaz, Ethology, Instituto Mexicano de Psiquiatria, Mexico D.F., Mexico

Andrzej Eliasz, Individual Differences Psychology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland

Santiago Genovés, Biological Anthropology, Instituto de Estudios Antropologicos, Mexico D.F., Mexico

Benson E. Ginsburg, Behavior Genetics, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT., U.S.A.

Jo Groebel, Social Psychology, Erziehungswissenschaftliche Hochschule, Landau, Federal Republic of Germany

Samir-Kumar Ghosh, Sociology, Indian Institute of Human Sciences, Calcutta, India

Robert Hinde, Animal Behaviour, Cambridge University, Cambridge, U.K.

Richard E. Leakey, Physical Anthropology, National Museums of Kenya, Nairobi, Kenya

Taha H. Malasi, Psychiatry, Kuwait University, Kuwait

J. Martin Ramirez, Psychobiology, Universidad de Sevilla, Spain

Federico Mayor Zaragoza, Biochemistry, Universidad Autonoma, Madrid, Spain

Diana L. Mendoza, Ethology, Universidad de Sevilla, Spain

Ashis Nandy, Political Psychology, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, India

John Paul Scott, Animal Behavior, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH., U.S.A.

Riitta Wahlstrom, Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland

ORGANIZATIONS THAT HAVE ENDORSED THE STATEMENT

American Anthropological Association
American Association for Counseling and Development
American Psychological Association
American Orthopsychiatric Association
American Sociological Association
Americans for the University of Unesco
Anurrrat Vishra Bharati (Global Organization)
Associacion Peruana de Estudios e Investigación para la Paz
Association for Humanistic Education and Development (US)
Association of African Women for Research and Development
California State Psychological Association
Canadian Psychologists for Social Responsibility
Community of the Peace People (1976 Nobel Peace Prize)(Northern Ireland)
Czechoslovak Unesco Commission
Danish Psychological Association
Danish Unesco Committee
Honduras National Spiritual Assembly of Baha'i
International Association of Educators for World Peace
International Council of Psychologists
International Society for Research on Aggression - Commission on Violence
Italian National Unesco Commission
Laboratory of Education for Peace (Greece)
Medical Association for Prevention of War (UK)
Mexican Association for Biological Anthropology
Minnesota Psychological Association
Movimento por la Vida y la Paz (Argentina)
New York State Psychological Association
New Zealand Psychological Society
Norwegian Unesco Commission
Open International University for Complementary Medicines
Polish Academy of Sciences
Psychologer for Fred (Norway)
Psychologists for Social Responsibility (US)
Society for Psychological Study of Social Issues (US)
Spanish Unesco Commission
University of Montreal Department of Psychiatry
Veterans for Peace
West Virginia Psychological Association
World Federalist Association (US)
Yamoussoukro International Congress on Peace in the Minds of Men

ORGANIZATIONS THAT HAVE DISSEMINATED THE STATEMENT
American Political Science Association
Arab Writers Union
Associación de Estudios Bahá'ís--Chile
Association for Counselor Education and Development (US)
Association for Humanistic Psychology (US)
Association for World Education
Baha'i International Community
Canadian Psychological Association Section on Social Responsibility
Consortium on Peace Research, Education and Development (US)
Contemporary Trends in Development of Psychology (book) (China)
Finnish Psychological Association
Finnish Peace Research Association
Greek Pedagogical Association
Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation (US)
International Peace Research Association
International Political Science Association Peace and Conflict Committee
International Social Science Council
International Society for Comparative Psychology
International Society for Human Ethology
International Studies Association
International Union for Psychological Sciences Peace Committee
Japanese Psychologists for Peace
Japanese Research Association of Psychological Science
Mouvement Universel de la Responsabilité Scientifique (France)
New Zealand Council for Educational Research
Norwegian Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War
Norwegian Psychological Association
Peace Education Institute (Finland)
Permanent National Commission of Education for Peace, Ministry of Education (Peru)
Scientist Against Nuclear Arms (Australia)
Shanti Ashram (India)
Tampere Peace Research Institute (Finland)
USSR Academy of Sciences (Psychology)
World Association for Orphans and Abandoned Children
World Goodwill Newsletter

For further information, see:

UNESCO Brochure

Progress Report

Rethinking Social Science

2005-10-02T12:28:00.000-05:00

When Bahá'ís in Latin America tell contemporary social scientists about Bahá’u’lláh’s basic, overriding principle of the “Oneness of Humanity”, the response is usually that it is impossible. Why? In a nutshell, because present–day social science is based on theories of social conflict, not of social cooperation. They admit of division in diversity and unity in uniformity, but not of unity in diversity.

Contemporary social sciences in Latin America are based on a complex theoretical structure whose roots can be found in the 17th century and beyond, many of whose basic assumptions are taken for granted by most without daring or knowing how to question them. When someone states one of its platitudes, everyone seems to agree, but I think that deep down inside, they wish they could believe otherwise.

For example, I have spoken publicly a few times on "Capitalism, Socialism, and then what? Contributions to the search for new social and economic alternatives". This is potentially a very polemical presentation, as it questions some of the most deeply–seated assumptions in economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, etc. Nevertheless, several people have come up to me afterwards and thanked me for having put into words for them things that they had always felt intuitively, but had either been unable or lacked the courage to articulate to others.

So as a Bahá'í studying social sciences, what I think needs to be done is the following. On the one hand, we need to 'deconstruct' the old theoretical apparatus by showing its methodological and conceptual flaws. What I have come up with so far is that many of the 'proofs' that are used to support these assumptions are actually nothing more than analogies based on theories from other disciplines (mostly physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology) and applied to human society. Thus you get such pseudo-scientific aberrations as 'social Darwinism', 'social dialectics', etc.). This in itself is considered by many to be an epistemologically unsound practice.

One of the sources of this problem seems to be the fact that it is difficult to find a referent or datum that is common to all societies, on which to base solid social theory. So social scientists will borrow a referent or 'datum' from another discipline as a starting point for mostly philosophical speculations about how it might apply to the workings of society. This occurred while those ‘other’ sciences were still working under philosophical assumptions that were a spin-off from Newtonian physics: determinism, reductionism, mechanicism, materialism, etc.

Later on, when many or all of these original theories were falsified by the 'new physics', 'new biology', 'systems theory', 'systemic psychology', etc., the social spin-offs based on the former were not modified accordingly. The result is a set of false analogies based on erroneous theories from other fields that have already evolved beyond the point they were when those analogies were taken, leaving in their wake a set of deterministic, reductionistic, mechanistic, materialistic social theories in a time that no longer holds these types worldviews (cosmologies) to be tenable.

So a new breed of social scientists needs to be able to show where these other disciplines have evolved to in comparison to where they were when the analogies were taken, and suggest new analogies based on those new theories, which open up a whole new worldview that is neither deterministic, reductionistic, mechanistic, nor materialistic, but precisely the contrary. This would not produce social scientific 'proofs' per se, but rather be a way to strengthen the deconstruction of old theories and open up peoples minds to new possibilities.

Next we need new social theories to replace the old ones. This is not as easy as it might seem, because theories are established through induction, not deduction, for which there are not hard and fast rules. In fact, throughout the history of science, most theories have been thought up initially through intuitive processes (the “Eureka!” principle) and only later were worked out methodically. What theories are actually come up with has much to do with the filters and prejudices that either blind or enlighten the theoretician. This means that in order to renew the social sciences, we must be able to see society through new filters, very different from the ones we learn to see through when we study social science. How to break out of this vicious circle?

One way would be to take Bahá’í social principles (such as unity in diversity or socio–political evolution), and express them in the form of hypotheses that can then be worked on both empirically and philosophically, to gradually develop a new 'social construct' that is capable of taking the place of the old one that was 'deconstructed'. This would then make it possible to base novel policy proposals on these new theoretical structures, leading hopefully to solid interventions that would move the world purposefully towards what Baha'u'llah has prescribed for society.

If this theoretical groundwork is not solidly established first, I am afraid that few social scientists and policy makers will take Bahá'í social principles seriously. This can be done initially by taking referents from many different human groups, both historically and geographically, including taking the Bahá’í world community itself as a datum, which is what the Universal House of Justice invited the world to do in its statement “The Promise of World Peace”.

One area of endeavor that is of interest to me as a student of social sciences and as a Bahá'í, is the following. In the course of my studies, I have discovered that there are 3 fundamental issues that Latin American social scientists do not seem to be dealing with, but which are highlighted as essential in several messages of the Universal House of Justice to the United Nations or the world. These are:

(1) Human nature, which Latin American social sciences in general define very much according to what the Universal House of Justice answers to in the Promise of World Peace (homo economicus, rational animal, social Darwinism, etc.).
(2) The nature of society, which is defined in terms of the dynamics of conflict, as discussed in various Bahá’í documents, which I understand to be the very antithesis of the principle of the oneness of humanity.
(3) The issue of power. Conflict is based on an old-world concept of power, as dealt with in part VI of Global Prosperity, which is the sine-qua-non of modernist and possibly even postmodernist political studies.

I feel that if we could deal with these issues head-on, publicly and academically, it would make a real difference in the long run, as everything else in anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, etc. seems to be hinged on these 3 basic issues. One way of going about it would be as follows. First, compile Bahá’í references dealing specifically with each of these topics. Second, find out who is working on these subjects, and compile what they have written. This should include finding out what is being said by those who defend the old ways of thinking. Finally, once this groundwork has been done, establish and test out new hypotheses as described above.

On being a Religious Fanatic

2005-10-01T23:41:00.000-05:00

There seems to be a stereotype under which religion in general and my beliefs in particular have been classified, even by people who know little or nothing about them. This, combined with a dose of (anti-)religious prejudice, makes it difficult for some to listen openheartedly to what we religionists have to say, which is quite frustrating.

These people tend to arbitrarily, prejudicially, place my thinking in their self-defined 'religious' category wherein go all things fundamentalist, ignorant, based on blind faith in others, traditional, anti-scientific, unreasonable, backward, obscurantist, irrational, etc., as opposed to their own ‘free’ thinking, which is allegedly open-minded, intelligent, based on personal experience, modern, scientific, reasonable, progressive, enlightened, and rational.

This can be seen behind a question that was posted: “Is the solution to be found in religion, or politics, or perhaps a new economic system? Or, said differently, can we agree because we see the truth from God, or can we logically resolve differences through law and discourse, or will a new approach to global competition and human and commercial growth do it?”

This dicotomic tendency to box, label and limit the scope of different facets of life is as counterproductive as it is gratuitous. My 'religion' actually has as much to say about politics and economics, law and discourse, global competition and human / commercial growth, and many other issues, as it does about God, which you can easily see by typing "statement" as the keyword at http://www.bic-un.bahai.org and just glancing over the titles of some of the statements presented to the United Nations by the Bahá'í World Community.

A case in point is a recent response to a similar link I referenced, when someone said: "If anyone sends me some ideas and says go to www.popeisgodsgift.com for more information, I am unlikely to pursue it further... I am interested in discussing the ideas but have zero interest in them in relationship to any religion and therefore haven't and probably won’t follow your link." There is an abysmal difference between remitting someone to something like www.thepopeisgodsgift.com and posting a link to a serious proposal submitted to the General Assembly of the United Nations on the occasion of its 50th Anniversary by one of the largest and most highly regarded NGOs with consultative status before that Organization.

My point is that an unprejudiced mind would not write something off simply because it comes from a source that has been labeled 'religious', any more than you would expect someone to write off a posting simply because it came from a source that was labeled 'political'. A biased mind, though, would jump irreflexively to the conclusion that if it is 'religious' it is automatically proselytizing, and if 'political', then activism, 'getting involved'. I am not trying to twist anybody's arm into following my links; I am just trying to level off the playing field.

One reason given for this prejudice against religion is that it is "often used to manipulate people, sometimes in seemingly good ways, and other times in horrible ways. It is the source of as much evil as it is good in this world." I agree entirely, although you could say the same of party politics, advertising, hammers, or just about anything else, which notwithstanding have not subsequently been rejected by so many and with such vehemence as 'religion' has.

I think that if anyone were to seriously look into the Baha'i Faith with an unbiased mind, they would find – as I have – that it goes 180 degrees against most of the popular stereotypes about religion. In April 1992, Judge Douglas Martin, then Director-General of the Baha'i World Center Office of Public Information, stated:

"... the Cause of Baha'u'llah goes far beyond anything that humanity understands by the word ‘religion’. If the ecclesiastical systems of our world are religion, then the Cause is not; if it is religion, then they really are not. It does a disservice to the mission of Baha'u'llah, to the World Order which He has come to establish, to focus our public message in religious categories."

On Being an "Anti-American"

2005-10-01T21:00:00.005-05:00

The US presidential elections are of great importance, not only to Americans concerned with short-term home policy issues, but also to the world's peoples who are affected by the long-term effects of US foreign policy. I am convinced that, besides dashing the dreams and lives of countless fellow citizens of the world, current US foreign policy will inevitably have a boomerang effect on the US economy, security and even long-term viability, as we are beginning to see evidences of already.

In other blogs I have explained my conviction regarding the urgent need for a world-wide federation of nations, so that the foreign policies of each country might follow the democratic will of the world's peoples, and not just the economic interests of a handful of people in the most powerful countries, at the expense of others. Whether or not US readers agree with this approach, I would suggest that while cheering on your favorite candidate, you would do well to promote a profound revision of US attitudes towards the rest of the world.

The US as a country has repeatedly demonstrated its determination and ability to achieve whatever it sets its heart on, albeit 'over the dead body' of the rest of the earth's inhabitants. If the US put its mind to it, the country could achieve the establishment of a world-wide legal system to apply the principles of federalism and democracy to international relations. The fact that it has so far continually, systematically chosen otherwise is what irks me and makes me wonder whether all the talk of America defending liberty and democracy throughout the world is anything more than that -- empty talk.

This kind of thinking has earned me the epithet of "blatantly anti-American". Some even go so far as to say that those who are not American citizens or who have chosen not to live in the USA have no right to question it. The flip side of the slogan "Love it or leave it" is those who have left the USA have probably done so because they do not love it. Has it not occured to those holding this position that possibly those of us who have left the USA are the only ones who are really living out the USA's professed concern for the well-being of other peoples than its own?

Additionally, perhaps the fact of not being American citizens or having chosen not to live in the USA (my case is the latter for those who wonder) puts us in the enviable position of being able to see US foreign policy more objectively, from the outside, and that this is why we tend to have more to say about it. Change managers are continually looking for outsiders to help them "see beyond the little box" and discover new paradigms of thought and action. Maybe the US should likewise welcome such people as opportunities to overcome a natural sort of "house blindness", instead of choosing to see them as "personna non grata".

If to question one's own country is to be against it, then some of the 'founding fathers' were among the greatest 'anti-Americans'. Much effort has been put into discrediting the quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson, "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism", an idea popularized by New York Mayor John Lindsay in 1969 when, in a speech at Columbia University, he stated, "We cannot rest content with the charge from Washington that this peaceful protest is unpatriotic... The fact is that this dissent is the highest form of patriotism."

Thomas Jefferson may as well said it first, however, since several other of his verified quotes show that this was the general drift of his thought: "All that tyranny needs to gain a foothold, is for people of good conscience to remain silent." "What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?" "The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all." "When wrongs are pressed because it is believed they will be borne, resistance becomes morality." "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."

Anyway, I think I have finally figured out what today's mass philosophy deem as anti-American. As long as one only speaks out against 'the administration', he can still be pro-American. However, the minute one starts suggesting that maybe the attitudes and actions (or lack thereof) of the American PEOPLE might have something to do with what is wrong, then he is "blatantly anti-American." You see, one cannot just go around suggesting that the people themselves are ultimately responsible for their government's policies, whether on home turf or abroad. That would sound too much like an actual democracy!

Politics versus Politics

2005-10-01T20:35:00.000-05:00

Because of their non-involvement in partisan politics, Bahá'ís are sometimes described as "apolitical". I think this is not entirely correct. The way I understand it, "politics" has two meanings. One is the science that seeks the best ways of administering the body politic. The other is a struggle for "power", defined as the ability to impose the will of one individual or group on others, which underlies the current party system. Baha'is are actively studying and trying to apply politics in the former sense, and many of Baha'u'llah's writings deal with this topic, all the way from strengthening grass-roots governance to establishing a world-wide federation of nations.

However, we avoid participating in politics in the latter sense, as we feel it is one aspect of the disease of divisiveness that is tearing apart the human race. Obviously, as long as the party system is in effect it will need its activists, but Baha'is neither join political parties nor campaign for or against any candidate. Rather, we promote and practice a system that we hope will gradually replace the traditional one, which applies collective decision-making through 'consultation' instead of confrontation, leading to unity in diversity of thought, and from there to unity in diversity of action.

How does this work in the Baha'i world community? Its governing bodies are elected by a method in which there are no candidates named nor campaigning for or against anyone. All adults of a community are eligible, making it more fully democratic than most electoral systems. This body at a local level is called the Local Spiritual Assembly, which is elected yearly by the direct vote of all local adult members. National Spiritual Assemblies are elected yearly through indirect voting, that is, by delegates elected directly through several District Conventions in each country, although all adult Baha'is of the country are eligible. The Universal House of Justice is elected every 5 years through indirect voting, that is, by the members of all National Spiritual Assemblies at that time, and all adult Baha'is of the world are eligible.

Each of these governing bodies has 9 members. Voters simply write 9 names on secret ballots in a prayerful attitude, seeking people with such qualities as unquestioned loyalty, selfless devotion, a well-trained mind, recognized ability, and mature experience, and elections result from a simple (not necessarily absolute) majority of votes. One interesting thing is that these nine have authority only when meeting as an institution; outside the meeting they have no special rank over the rest of the community. In this way, authority resides in institutions, but not in their individual members.

Authority is defined as the right to make decisions that others should abide by (including the institution's members themselves, who see themselves merely as servants of the institution, not as its figureheads). But these governing bodies do not represent a clergy (there is none in the Baha'i Faith), as they have no say in "matters of conscience". That is, they do not decide what Baha'is should believe, but rather what actions the community should take jointly in service to humanity. Their duties are administrative and in a certain sense legislative, as they put the final seal of decision on a process of search for best measures which starts at the grassroots level where members of all ages participate.

Obviously, there is a lot more to be said about the Baha'i administrative order, but I don't want to abuse the reader's patience. For further information, see the following sites:

Administrative system:
http://www.bahai.org/article-1-3-0-6.html (it is titled "Universal House of Justice", but talks about the other institutions I mentioned also).

Collective decision-making:
http://www.bahai.org/article-1-3-6-3.html

Service and Development:
http://www.bahai.org/article-1-8-0-1.html

A Tribute to Mom and Dad

2005-06-20T09:10:00.000-05:00

Today is Mom and Dad’s wedding anniversary, and yesterday was Father’s Day. On this occasion, I would like to reprint two thoughts I wrote some time ago for our beloved David R. Newton and Virginia Harriet Evans:

HE WAS FAITHFUL...

To the fundamental moral duty to
Seek out the truth in all things, and
Apply those truths in his life,
Leading him to live in accordance
To his convictions, and not just to
Talk about them with others.

He was faithful...
In fulfilling his responsibilities and
Not slacking, for he did his best
To ensure at all times that his
Wife and children would be
Provided with material, human
And spiritual sustenance.

He was faithful...
To the divine command to love
Without measure, not holding back,
For he freely gave and received in
Turn from most who knew him.

He was faithful.

THANK YOU, MOM

Thank you, Mom, for bringing me into this world and forming a united family for me, even when your relationship with Dad was not the best.

Thank you for pulling me out of the river and back into the row-boat by the scruff of my neck before the piranhas reached me.

Thank you for helping me explore the world, even when it meant doing things that nobody does, like playing with a cabbage.

Thank you for not being too strict in matters of order, letting me leave my room looking at times like the sun coming over the mountain.

Thank you for being respectful and supportive of my sense of identity, whether an Indian or a cowboy, even to the extent of changing my name.

Thank you for depriving us of so many things, like TV, that now I realize would have deprived us of so much more.

Thank you for making of the mountains our discotheque, of the forests our shopping malls, and of the paths and streams our main drag.

Thank you for teaching us, in our hasty running hither and thither, to stop and marvel at the lowliest blossom and the homeliest songster.

Thank you for the gemütlish times of warmth and cozy comfort; the tender moments of hugs and kisses.

Thank you for refraining from indoctrinating us, but rather teaching us to sing joyous praises to a Goodly Creator.

Thank you for kneeling with Dad in prayer by my bedside, and for the moments of silence at the table.

Thank you for all the meals we shared as a family, complete with the reading of exciting and inspiring stories.

Thank you for pineapple upside-down cake, shepherd’s pie, scalloped potatoes, spinach soufflé, oatmeal cookies, eggy pancakes, and other goodies.

Thank you for filling my free time and vacations with boy scouts, 4-H, summer camps, swimming, kayaking, square dancing, arts and crafts, and more.

Thank you for teaching me to cultivate the garden, bake bread, paint the house, use the sewing machine, fix the roof, and build a fire.

Thank you for encouraging and helping me to carry out my diverse projects and inspirations.

Thank you for challenging me to stretch my soul beyond its apparent limits and become all I could be.

Thank you for resisting the urge to protect, and giving me the freedom to travel alone, first by bicycle and then hitch-hiking.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and ideas with me, and especially for listening patiently to mine.

Thank you for being a model of honesty, sincerity, simplicity, humility, and the seeking of forgiveness.

Thank you for teaching me to seek my own answers, and for being supportive, no matter where the search led me.

Thank you for your unfailing letters filled with detailed descriptions of the outer world, and also your inner concerns.

And finally, thank you, Mom, for being true to your convictions and setting an example of steadfastness and single-purposedness.

On Returning Home

2005-05-28T12:39:00.000-05:00

The following is a letter I wrote to my son towards the end of his Year of Service between high school and college.

Dear son:

Now that your arrival is only two weeks away, I would like to share a few thoughts on returning home, for whatever they are worth, harvested from my own and others’ experiences in that field. It is something you look forward to the entire time you are away, but the actual return can be sweet, bitter-sweet, or just plain bitter, depending on how you and your fremly prepare inwardly for it. Let me start by summarizing the first and most important lesson I myself, your Mother and many of our friends have learned: THERE IS NO SUCH THING. Why not? Let me try to explain.

It’s not that the place and people are no longer there. Coming home is not just about traveling to a physical place where you were before you left. Rather, it has to do with that nostalgic need for things to be again the way they were before you left, missing what you knew in the past and wanting to go back there as if in a time machine. That former situation is what no longer exists. You can’t even pick up where you left off, because neither you nor anyone else are still where you were when you left off. Life never goes backward, only forward; and forward is where your home has gone and where you must go in order to find it.

And that’s not all. While you were growing up, you formed an image in your mind and heart of the people and places around you, not as they were, but as you saw them through your filters, which were based on who and how you were at that time. Now, not only have those places and people changed, but more importantly, who you are has changed, and that has changed your filters. It’s sort of like remembering everything green and then going back and seeing it all red, because you changed your green shades for red ones.

Another way of putting it is that before, you experienced home from the inside out, like a fish that doesn’t know he is in the water because he has never been out of it and has nothing to compare it to. Now, having been part of a different culture for almost a year, you have gained a more “objective” perspective on your home culture, and may find yourself looking at it from the outside in, like a fish that has been out of water and can now compare it to the atmosphere or the earth.

Also, your very memory of those places and people may have become somewhat distorted while away, as it gradually adapted itself to what you have needed to feel you left. Memory of course is selective, but it can also be molded by the imagination. This modified memory is the anchor you needed in order to remember where you came from, which in a way makes you who you are. Because your sense of identity is not achieved in a vacuum, but rather constructed from everything and everybody around you.

When you live in a foreign land, far from those familiar people and places, you actually lose much of that old identity, and start building a new one based on your new surroundings. Then when you return, you hope that your family and friends will see and appreciate the “new you”. But when you get there, the old familiar people and things trigger your old identity, and those other things that gave you your new identity are no longer around you. So you feel as though you had left an important part of yourself behind and wonder whether you ever really changed as much as you thought you had.

To make things worse, your family and friends have also been missing the “old you” for many months, and wishing they could see that “you” again. So when you finally return, they don’t see you as you now see yourself, but rather according to how they saw you before, or sometimes even a somewhat distorted version of that memory of you.

All this put together means that sometimes “going back” can be harder than leaving in the first place. In my case, the “culture shock” I felt during my first three months in Ecuador was nothing compared to the culture shock I experienced when I “returned home” five years later. I think this is because when you travel, you EXPECT things to be different and strange, and are mentally prepared for it. But when you “return”, you expect things to be familiar, as you remembered and missed them, and so are entirely unprepared for the reality that awaits you, which catches you off guard.

So my advice to anyone who is contemplating returning home would be this. I think the fewer expectations you have about yourself and others, the easier it will be. The only thing you can be sure of is change, and even that is unpredictable, as it tends to happen when and where it is least expected, and fails to happen when and where it is most expected. I guess what I am trying to say is that returning home will require at least as much of an open mind and effort as adjusting to your Year of Service post did. You will need to explore new ways of relating to your fremly, and they (we) will need to explore new ways of relating to the new you.

Having said all that, let me clarify that this is by no means meant to make you feel nervous or anxious about coming back. My only purpose is to give you the benefit of experience so that your homecoming will be just as wonderful as it should be. We love you very much, have missed you terribly all this time, and are very happy that you are “coming back” soon.

You probably didn’t need me to say any of this anyway, being the friendly, sociable, mature, adaptable, flexible, easy-going, basically happy, positive, level-headed, thoughtful, understanding, loving person you are. Also, I suppose the intensity of the effects I have described increases the longer you stay away, and 10 months are not five years. But at least now I feel better for having done my duty and given you some fatherly advice.

Taking advantage of the time and energy spent in writing this, I am copying this to my blog spot for others to see, also for what it is worth.

Much love and a big hug,
Your Dad, Peter.

No Way Back

2005-05-20T17:06:00.000-05:00

The following was written by Ahmad on May 13, 2005, while riding on a bus in Brazil, before my letter to him on returning home.

It is interesting to see how our thoughts were going in the same direction, only that he said it much better than I.

NO WAY BACK
There is no way back.
Nothing you say can be taken back,
nor will you ever go back home.

Your body will never occupy
the same space twice,
nor will your soul be the same as before.

So I would lie if I said I'll go back home,
for your home is made in every second that passes,
because the world of existence is bound to change.

So when you go to the place you used to call home,
and you discover that it's not the same,
think twice, because maybe what changed the most was you,
for the world of existence is bound to change.

Know then that home is none other
than the air you breathe,
and the dust under your feet...
and you will always feel welcome.

So when you wake up the next day
and meet the souls of those you love,
rejoice, because the world of existence is bound to change,
and they are one day closer to the Unchangeable.

And when you wake up the next day
and meet the souls of those you hate,
make the air you breathe and the soil you tread your home,
and be a good host,
so that they may feel welcome,
because the world of existence is bound to change
and we are bound to make it our home.

Thoughts on Prayer

2004-07-01T12:15:00.000-05:00

Most people who say their prayers "in the privacy of their chamber" do so in a very low voice, almost a whisper, perhaps to avoid bothering others, maybe because the dominant culture dictates that religion is a very personal thing, not to be aired openly in public, or that spirituality is best found in silence and reclusion.

Be this as it may, a problem arises when this practice is carried over to prayer meetings, and people mumble their prayers inaudibly into their shirt necks, almost as if they were ashamed to share something so intimate with others.

If we are happy to commune with God, let us share that joy with others, and raise up our prayers in a strong voice that will echo off the walls, fill the corridors and shake the foundations! Let us "make a gladsome noise unto the Lord"!

The dear friends of Peru even have the custom of "declaiming" their prayers as if they were reading poetry to a large audience. How inspiring! How uplifting!

***********

I once heard that the more specific one's prayers are, the more effective.
But I never really understood the wisdom of these words until I experienced it personally. We had just moved to a rather remote pioneering post in a small town in the Amazon region, and were suffering from culture shock, lack of running water, a damp house, snakes in the yard, frogs in the bath, and enormous flying cockroaches all around. In these conditions, I had to leave my wife with our two small children for a couple of weeks, to do a job in the capital city.

As I rode out on the bus praying for them, the advice about making one's prayers specific came to mind. So I said, "Oh God, give my wife consolation, and comfort her heart. But not just the kind of comfort that comes from the abstract understanding that You are with her always. I mean real, tangible comfort, as if I were there physically to help her." I later learned that at the same time I was pronouncing those words, her loving mother was knocking on the door of our new home to pay a surprise visit that lasted until I returned! How tangible is that?!

So friends, if you want to ask for something, have the courage to ask for exactly what you want. But be careful what you ask for: you just might get more than you expect, like the lady who asked for patience and was given quintuplets. To give you a personal example, I was once doing a very difficult and important translation, and prayed for help to do as perfect a job as possible. Well, I must have been assigned the most persnickety translator in the entire "Heavenly Concourse", because it took me all morning to get through the first page! The work was brilliant, but I had a deadline to meet. So I prayed again, asking for someone a little less fussy and more efficient, and thus was able to get the job done well and on time.

Top Model Mistaken for Miss Universe

2004-05-29T11:22:00.000-05:00

Jesahel Newton will have many adventures to tell her grandchildren after a lifetime in the country that gave “Banana Republic” its name, where anything can – and often does – happen. But none will be quite so exciting as the day she was ushered into the middle of the Miss Universe pageant by mistake!

Jesahel and a handful of other models had been chosen to help out at the inaugural event. But as their van approached, the people lining the streets saw what looked like a group of beauty queens inside, and began clapping and cheering. The girls just smiled and waved, unwittingly fanning the enthusiasm of the crowd.

As the van pulled up, an over-zealous security guard, eager to do his job, whisked them quickly through a side door and ushered them to the seats reserved for the Miss Universe candidates near the stage. Jesahel and her friends obediently filed in, as the partially-filled auditorium stood to applaud their entrance.

Rather sheepishly, the girls sat down and waited, while overhearing whispers like “They’re gorgeous!” and “What countries are they from?” Finally the organizer arrived and angrily bustled them off to the back, where they were to greet arriving guests.

Meanwhile, the surrounding streets were closed off and the van was unable to get close. So when the event ended, Jesahel and her group had to walk five blocks out. Once again, the streets were lined with a cheering crowd, ecstatic at the idea of finally getting a glimpse of the most beautiful women in the world.
“It was fun” grinned Jesahel. “It’s not every day you get taken for a Miss Universe candidate!” When asked if they tried to tell people who they really were, she replied with a mischievous twinkle in her eye, “We didn’t want to disillusion anybody!”

Jesi, as her friends and family affectionately call her, began her modeling career at the age of 13, in a small local agency that did more teaching than actually landing its graduates any contracts. But the experience served to bolster her self-confidence and awaken an interest in fashion design. Two years later, she renewed her training in CN Modelos, one of the capital city’s top agencies, and right away began receiving calls.

Jesi’s first contract was a fashion show for one of Colombia’s major textiles producers, Lafayette. A reporter attended, and soon afterwards a full-page picture of Jesi on the catwalk appeared in the magazine Seventeen. Several castings followed, all of which resulted in her being awarded the coveted plaque as “Best Publicity Model” at the graduation ceremony.

It was then that Jesi was chosen as part of a select group of models to play a double role at three of the Miss Universe events. They were to serve as ushers and attachés, while modeling original creations by the Fashion Design School of the Universidad Tecnológica Equinoccial (UTE).

This exciting job was crowned by their participation in a full-blown fashion show of all the confections prepared for that purpose. Jesi was particularly pleased with the work of the Argentinean student who designed her formal gown. “I want to get his card,” she said excitedly, “so I can have him design my clothes when I am rich and famous!”

Has all this gone to Jesi’s head? “I started modeling school because it was a fun place to make new friends” she recalls. “Later I discovered the pay was good, too.” What does she do with the money left over after expenses? “Well… besides bubble gum and candy?” she giggles. And suddenly that darling, child-like grin shines through, reminding us that she is still the same sweet ‘Jesipooh’ we all know and love.

What about her plans for the future? “After giving a year of service in Australia, I want to study fashion design, maybe at the UTE.” Why Australia? “I love the kangaroos and koala bears,” she says. And after that? “Continue with graduate studies, maybe in Italy or France.”

So there you have it, folks: a true rising star, right under our very noses. We will be following her career closely.

The Federal Principle

2004-04-08T20:25:00.001-05:00

One interesting solution that is being considered for various countries with diverse geographically-based ethnic groups who have entered into a cannibalistic power struggle for national dominance is to apply the federal principle.

This consists of: (1) dividing the country into political units that roughly encompass those ethnic groups' traditional or current territories (states, provinces, departments, or whatever); (2) establishing a democratic government in each unit, complete with legislative, executive and judicial powers; (3) establishing a federal government to create the legal framework within which the federated units will pass their own laws and interact with each other.

The same federal principle can also be applied at the local level, if the provincial level is not sufficient to satisfy popular demands. The federal government has ultimate control over all natural resources in the country, and administers them directly or by delegation in benefit of the whole. There is also discussion of a bottom-up taxation scheme, as opposed to the top-down method that most countries currently use, but that is another issue.

This would be the beginning of a solution for this specific problem, but if the US public wants to make sure that something like this never happens again, it should demand that its government promote the application of this same federal principle to international relations, making each of the current independent nation-states a federated member of a world-wide democratic legal system, again complete with legislative, executive and judicial powers.

For a statement by the Baha'i International Community to the United Nations on how this can be achieved in practice, see http://bahai-library.org/?file=uhj_turning_point_nations.html. See also the "World Federalist Movement" at http://www.wfm.org/, which is "an international citizen's movement working for justice, peace, and sustainable prosperity" that calls for "an end to the rule of force, through a world governed by law, based on strengthened and democratized world institutions" and is "inspired by the democratic principles of federalism."

Does the US believe strongly enough in democracy to apply it to international relations, even if it means giving up its hegemonic power over the rest of the world and its economy? Or is democracy only an ideal when I am the one benefiting from it? Do the people of the US care enough about those living in other countries to bow to their interests as deeply as they have bowed to their own? Federalism makes us all citizens of one country, thereby sharing the same overall fate. In other words, it serves to wake us up to and officialize the current world situation.

Residents in all federated states of the US felt personally affected by the very localized attack of 9/11. In contrast, how closely have they felt similar tragedies in other, non-federated, parts of the world, like the Madrid bombings, for example? Aye, there's the rub!

Human Race Unity

2003-06-21T12:06:00.000-05:00

The watchword of Baha'i work for the oneness of humanity has always been "unity in diversity". This deceivingly simple concept requires us to rise above two aspects of the former paradigm, which is still strong as pointed out: that of "unity" as requiring "uniformity"; and that of "diversity" as necessarily a source of "division".

Many also confuse the term “equality” as meaning "sameness", which is also not our purpose. There is infinite diversity in relative strengths and weaknesses between individuals. The inequality of mobility and wealth among races are clear signs of the persistence of racism in our societies, which caused the unbalance in the first place.

Men and women also seem to have differing physical strengths and weaknesses, and society seems to cultivate the appearance of certain mental or emotional strengths and weaknesses that have come to differentiate men and women culturally.

As I understand it, "race" is not a term that can be scientifically applied to the infinite physical varieties among human beings. The lightest blacks are whiter than the darkest whites, and vice-versa. Any physical strengths and weaknesses that may be attributed a given group are adaptations to different types of environments, not a sign of "superiority" or "inferiority".

According to the UN, therefore, "race" is not defined by shape and color but by ethnic identity. For example, the blond haired, blue eyed boys in the Ecuadorian Amazon Region who speak, think, dress, live, and act like Huaorani Indians ARE Huaorani Indians, no matter what their shape, color or ascendance may be.

As for ethnic groups, again the differences are more culturally than physically determined, and many physical differences are a product of cultural diversity (such as nutritional patterns that affect height and weight).

Manfred Max Neef et al. have a very interesting study that identifies 10 basic human needs, and then states that "culture" is the diverse answers that human groups give to those same basic needs.

There is a fascinating video called “The Global Brain”, from a Psychosynthesis Conference in Canada years ago, which starts out by using rational and scientific evidences in defense of the concept that planet Earth is actually a self-regulating, living organism in its own right (comparable to the “Gaia Theory”).

It then asks a fascinating question: What are we, as the human race, doing here? What part of this living organism are we? He concludes that our role is that of the planet’s brain (which, I might add, would potentially be capable of consciously regulating certain activities and avoiding certain pitfalls that the planet has been unable to handle alone, such as the formation of extensive deserts, global warming or cooling beyond healthy limits, and the total disappearance of species).

It then likens each individual to a neuron of that brain, and our current “population explosion” to the “neuron explosion” that occurs at a given point in a fetus’s development, without which the brain is unable to reach the “critical mass” needed to function as it should.

Reaching this critical mass must go hand-in-hand with the sister process of interconnection, which he identifies as the fantastic advances in communications and transportation technologies over the past 100 years, and which could very well enable us to “think” as a single, collective organ.

Of course, achieving this requires simultaneously developing greater diversity of thought, and at the same time getting beyond the current individualistic, mechanistic paradigm that has lead us as individual cells to live for ourselves and not for the organism we are part of, much like cancer cells in a body. In this same vein, see also “The Lives of a Cell – Notes of a Biology Watcher” by Lewis Thomas.

(June 21, 2003 )

Prophets and Religions

2003-06-21T12:02:00.000-05:00

Someone said that "The essential question of religion is 'Is there a God?'." I think that by the time one commits to a religion, the essential question is not "Is there a God?" but rather "How can I better understand God's Will for me and for society, and then best dedicate my own will and life to serving that greater, overriding, all-encompassing Will?"

And I believe that is where the Manifestations of God come in, as they are capable of revealing that Will to us from age to age and from place to place in an authoritative fashion, thus achieving increasing levels of unity where before there was progressive fragmentation.

As to God relating directly to each one, I am sure His Spirit inspires us common individuals, and we may feel that inspiration as having authority for our personal lives. But the problem arises when we claim our inspiration to be authoritative for others, as this creates divisions in society, which eventually can give rise to utter chaos.

The clergy has probably been most guilty of this, and that must be one reason why (we believe) God's Will for this age, as revealed by Baha'u'llah, is the total elimination of the institution of priesthood (there is no clergy in the Baha'i Faith) and the establishment of a new religious culture where each individual investigates truth for him/herself and then may share the results of that search with others (as in good Quaker tradition), but is forbidden to claim it as an authoritative interpretation.

I agree that the Manifestations of God have attempted to guide us in directions that are good for us and result in productive, happy, fulfilling lives. But if they are just "very wise people", then they are also very big liars, as they all have claimed that their words and deeds were not from them, but from God, who sent them.

Obviously, there have been many "very wise individuals" throughout history, who have had more or less impact on society, but their candles pale in comparison with the profound, revolutionary transformations in the fortune of humankind, brought about by these veritable Suns of Power and Might, whose vitalizing effect on the minds and hearts of millions is still strong even after several millennia. Why not say that this is all a logical process, AND the work of God? Or must we necessarily perceive God's work as illogical?

The same person said: To date, my primary difficulty with the Baha’i religion has been its middle-eastern orientation (hey, I'm Scottish). I answered: If the geographical cradle of a Religion gives it its orientation, then why are most Scottish people Christians? Or do they think Jesus taught around the Loch Ness? God's Messengers have to be from someplace, but I don't see why that should make their Messages any less universal.

Actually, they seem to have always been sent to the most degraded peoples (maybe that is why Baha'u'llah wasn't Scottish), and then to have raised these peoples up to the highest pinnacles of spiritual, cultural and material prosperity, as if to show through deeds -- not just words -- the tremendous power of God's Creative Word to transform individuals, nations, and the world.

Then that person asked the million-dollar question: "And if you believe that the prophets are messengers from God, then why do so many of them emanate from the Middle-East? What about the vast majority of the world's people who don't seem to be served by the prophets we frequently mention (Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Baha'u'llah)? ... I believe you may acknowledge the existence of many prophets (major and minor) that are in China, or India, or Africa, but I wonder why they are seldom mentioned?"

Sorry, did I leave out Krishna and Buddha this time? As I have said, I am no authority on this or any other matter, but here's what I think:

(1) If I had to choose the one most strategic place on Earth for a message to reach the "four corners of the world" (Europe, Africa, Asia and the Pacific) as quickly as possible, I couldn't think of a better cross-roads than the Middle-East, at least until fairly recently in human history, like the heart that pumps life-blood to the rest of the body.

(2) Yes, the Baha'i Faith does "acknowledge the existence of many prophets (both major and minor) from China, India, Africa" and many other places, including the Americas, although not necessarily by name, but rather as a basic principle: that God has made a Great Covenant with the human race, whereby He promises never to leave us without divine guidance, and we promise to accept and obey that guidance whenever it comes. This, and the basic assumption that God would not be God if He were not a just God, implies that there was never a time or place on Earth that was fully devoid of the light of knowledge and the warmth of love shed upon the world by those dazzling Suns of Reality.

(3) One case in point is Viracocha (lit. "Emerged from the Lake"), who appeared to the area of Lake Titicaca (high in the Andes between Peru and Bolivia) roughly around the period of Muhammad, taught the Indians three commandments (do not lie, do not steal, do not be lazy), prophesied the coming of a Bringer of world unity, and became the starting point for the great Incan civilization, which united thousands of warring tribes throughout the continent, and at the time of the Conquest was far more highly specialized and developed than the more aggressive European civilization.

(4) As you know, many of the world's peoples and languages did not have a system of writing until fairly recently, so the teachings of their Prophets were passed from fathers to sons as oral traditions. The ones that eventually managed to get written down (mostly in the Middle-East, like "Genesis", and parts of Eastern Asia) have survived; the rest have all but disappeared.

(5) As you also know, the conquest of most of the world by various European nations included systematic efforts to obliterate all traces of native cultures, replacing them with the "Christian" European culture. The Holy Inquisition was in full swing when it infested what is now Latin America. North American Indian children saw their parents murdered and were then put into WASP schools to become "civilized". Slave traders repeatedly culled the cream of Africa's great civilizations, the strongest, the most intelligent, the religious and political leaders, and burned down their magnificent wooden structures, until there was no more civilization to speak of, and then justified their profitable business by pointing out that, after all, they were only infra-human savages. And so on. No wonder we now hear little or nothing of their Prophet-Founders!

If I may risk discussing scripture, hopefully to the dismay of none and to the delight of at least some, John 5 says "(46) For had you believed Moses, you would have believed me; for he wrote of me. (47) But if you believe not his writings, how shall you believe my words?" Evidently, the only passage in the Hebrew Bible that could apply here (as corroborated by Luke in Acts 3:22-24) is in Deuteronomy 18, where Moses says:

"(15) The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brethren; him you shall heed... (17) And the Lord said to me... (18) I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brethren; and I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him. (19) And whoever will not give heed to my words which he shall speak in my name, I myself will require it of him."

Here it appears that Moses is saying that Jesus would be a Prophet like Him, placing the two at the same level. This, of course, is contrary to current Christian doctrine, although Jesus confirms it by saying "for he wrote of me" and by referring to the coming of the following Prophet as His own Return.

Interestingly, Muhammad also confirms this principle of the oneness of the Prophets in Surah 2:130: "Say, 'We believe in God, and in that which has been sent down to us, and sent down to Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob and the Tribes, and that which was given to Moses and Jesus and the Prophets from their Lord. We make no distinction between any of them, and to Him we submit'." I suppose you already know that one of the basic teachings of Bahá'u'lláh is "progressive revelation" whereby all the Prophets, both major and minor, represent varying stages in one single majestic process through which God educates and "civilizes" humankind, like the never-ending cycle of sun by day and moon by night.

Strangely enough, although it can be argued that both Moses and Jesus supported this principle of oneness, both Muhammad and Bahá'u'lláh are criticized by Christians for doing so. But continuing on down Deuteronomy 18, Moses says how to identify a true Prophet:
"(20)But the prophet that shall presume to speak a word in my name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or that shall speak in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die." This quote was apparently used by the Jews to justify killing Jesus, and by Christians to reject Muhammad's "Allah", although in Jesus' native tongue, Aramaic, the word for God was also "Alá".)

Finally, Deuteronomy 18:22 says, "When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the thing follows not nor comes to pass, the Lord has not spoken it, but the prophet has spoken it presumptuously, and you shall not be afraid of him." Combine this with Jesus' criterion "by their fruits you shall know them" and you have a powerful proof of the Missions of all the Prophets, one of Whose most obvious "fruits" is having raised up some (if not all) of the world's great civilizations on the solid foundation of their revealed words!

Mírzá Abú'l-Fadl, in “Letters & Essays 1886 - 1913", the chapter called "Did Moses Prophesy Muhammad?", defends a different thesis: that Deuteronomy actually refers to Muhammad, and does so very convincingly, as always. His main arguments are that:

(1) in biblical prophesy "Lord" refers to Jesus and "Prophet" to Muhammad;
(2) the Pentateuch is actually full of less obvious references to both;
(3) the questioning of John the Baptist (John 1:19-21) shows that the Jews were awaiting three persons: the return of Elijah (John), the advent of the Christ (Jesus), and the coming of "that Prophet" (Muhammad); and finally
(4) that Luke, a disciple of Paul, was not infallible, being actually a second-generation Christian who had never met Jesus.

One argument he does not use is the incredible similarities between Moses and Muhammad ("One like unto Me"); you could actually make a list longer than the one comparing Jesus and the Báb!

(June 21, 2003)

Creation vs. Evolution

2003-06-21T11:56:00.000-05:00

About creation vs. evolution, I feel the Bahá'í approach resolves the debate. First, however, it is important to know that Bahá'u'lláh states that the creation of the world was not a one-time event as a literalistic interpretation of the Bible would imply, but is rather a never-ending process that has been going on ever since God was Creator. And since God by definition is Unchanging, the creative process is just as eternal as God is.

Now the missing link between creation and evolution is this: the means through which God produces the never-ending creative process is the natural law of evolution. Remember that according to Baha'u'llah all natural laws, including evolution, were created by God and are thus an expression of His Will. (By the way, Muslim scholars discovered this law long before Darwin was even a twinkle in his father's eye, thus adding weight to the thesis that religion is not by definition anti-scientific). Marc said: "Could someday science cross path with religion and all would make sense? That would certainly be an ideal." I have found that the Bahá'í Teachings make it possible to achieve that ideal.

For Bahá'ís, then, the creation vs. evolution debate is anathema. Just as a new-born child evolved from a single-celled organism in a liquid environment through various stages during which it took on different forms that were apparently anything but human, and yet was always human from the start and is termed a "new creation" when born, so the human species (actually, kingdom) has similarly evolved through different stages and forms (like Paul's "reasonable amoebae"?) in the process of its creation. In fact, we are still evolving -- from our collective adolescence to maturity as one people.

Another issue is whether the different species had to evolve from each other, as Darwin suggested, or each species could evolve within itself as a separate tree, as Bahá'u'lláh sustains. This depends largely, I believe, on whether the appearance of life is seen as a one-time, probabilistically "impossible" or "abnormal" accident from which all life forms must then necessarily branch out, or as a "normal" phenomenon that is an essential part of nature and will therefore appear in infinite variety whenever and wherever the conditions are right. I would go for the latter, the implications of which I find absolutely dumbfounding!

It has been said -- quite rightly, I believe -- that while other beings possess different degrees of awareness, the exclusively human rational capacity empowers us to detach ourselves from and transcend our own condition, enabling us to look back upon ourselves from the outside and become aware of our own awareness. Now, if we accept the "Gaia" worldview of the planet Earth as a single living organism and the role of the human kingdom (as opposed to the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms) as the "global brain" of that organism, then we, as an essential susbsystem of that greater overall system, provide Mother Earth with the capacity to detach herself from and transcend her own condition, look back upon herself from the outside and become aware of her own awareness.

This would make us the Earth's self-awareness, putting us above nature in that sense, although not in the sense of being able to do without her, nor of not arising from her womb, but rather of providing nature with a way to rise above herself. Why? What for? First of all, because without such self-awareness she would be incomplete, and according to Systems Theory, all things strive towards a fuller expression of their latent potential. Through us, Mother Earth can cut and polish into luminous brilliance her rough gems, cultivate into luscious splendor her wild fruits, train into usefulness and companionship her wily dogs and horses, untangle into magnificent gardens her gnarled thickets, and then look back upon herself in the mirror of our eyes and be pleased.

Finally, because Earth's self-regulatory functions can only achieve so much, she suffers from diseases such as desertification and extinction of species, as well as potential outer threats such as burning meteorites and melting ice masses from space, which only the awareness we bring can prevent or heal. Granted, during the long gestation and infancy of humankind we took more than we gave back, and during our collective adolescence we are acting in wantonly destructive and downright self-destructive ways, but our mother has patiently, tolerantly taken all this in stride, for as we cross the threshold towards our maturity as a system, we are/will be coming into our own and taking greater responsibility for our true role.

Life after Death

2003-06-21T11:55:00.000-05:00

We have a running joke in our family, which started when we read together where 'Abdu'l-Bahá says that this life is a mere shadow of the next one; its faint, shifting reflection in a pond. Now whenever we enjoy something special, like a warm swimming pool, a good book, a chocolate float, or a colorful sunset, someone asks if these things exist in the next world, and the invariable answer is that they are a mere shadow of the ones there.

Several days ago, early Sunday morning, Jesi accompanied me to the market to sell Goldie's nine pitch-black puppies. Weeks before, she had put a different-colored ribbon on each one, given them all names, and knew the special peculiarities of every one. Her last act of love to them was to try to haggle the highest price possible, as if to vindicate before the world at least some of the value they held for her.

A few days later, our very un-streetwise Sultan got out, ran away, and although we searched high and low, we couldn't find him. Finally we gave up, with horrible images of him lying in a mangled furry pile next to a highway somewhere. Goldie, now all alone, started moping around with a hung head and an unmistakable look of sorrow on her face, and my sweet Jesi was heart-broken at the enormity of it all. She looked up at me with imploring eyes and asked, "Are there dogs in the next world?" I smiled back reassuringly and answered, "The dogs in this world are a mere shadow of the ones in the next." You should have seen the warm glow that spread across her face!

We finally found Sultan, following a friend's tip-off, at the house of a neighbor who had been "keeping him for us". He hadn't eaten, hadn't been brushed, and the other dogs had injured him. On top of that, the neighbor wanted a reward for finding him! Sultan went wild when he saw us, and I guess it will be some time before he tries something like that again.

Purpose of Life

2003-06-21T11:54:00.000-05:00

Slowing down seems to be quite an issue in the US, where the frantic pace of life seems to be wearing people thin, and yet so few seem to be clear on where they are headed with so much hustle and bustle. Like Stephen Covey says, they climb a ladder all their lives, and reach the top only to find it was up against the wrong wall!

Here in South America it is the other way around; sometimes I think we need to turn the tempo up a few notches. Life is so much more laid back and people are so much more important than the job at hand or than “things”, that the latter two often get the short end of the deal. There must be a happy medium somewhere between the two cultures!

However, somehow the idea of slowing down makes me uneasy, not just because I am a firm believer in pacing oneself by finding and maintaining one’s Optimum Stress Level (OSL), but also because my interest in “Future Studies” has led me to conclude that we are fortunate enough to be alive in this incredible period of history when we can experience first hand the monumental, earth-cleansing whirl-wind cause by the final death and disintegration of a corrupt old world and simultaneous birth and integration of a wonderful new world. And we can choose to be either the victims, spectators or protagonists of this fascinating drama.

Some say that the writings of their religion say: "We are born, we try to have a good time, we die, finis!" and that they are not looking for any major change. I challenge this and invite them to question it, as it is a way of thinking that is very typical of first-world, opulent societies (15% of us), but is preposterous and even offensive to third-world, impoverished societies (85% of us). If "trying to have a good time" is truly the purpose of life, then it would that imply one or both of the following:

(1) Those who are able to "have a good time" have a moral responsibility towards those who are unable to do so because of the vicious circle of poverty (in all senses);

(2) Those who nevertheless are unable to "have a good time" for any reason might just as soon die, be killed, or kill themselves as not fulfill their purpose for living.

Not that I am against having a good time. "If you can't do what you like, then like what you do." But I think that either or both of the above alternatives would be the logical consequence of raising it to the status of the purpose for life.

Number (1) ultimately challenges its own basic assumption as it would eventually imply that the purpose in life is to ensure that all human beings enjoy the right and ability to have a good time, and number (2) is just plain untenable. So we are back to square one.

Also, many people, myself included, feel there is a vast difference between simply "having a good time" and achieving true happiness. And what is needed to achieve the one and the other are worlds apart.

I would be more inclined towards achieving true happiness as a purpose in life. Personally, I just hope and pray that someday before I die I will be enabled to do something that pleases the Blessed Beauty. That's all that really matters...

Someone wrote: “...our beliefs are hooked to the core of our being and a key part of our feelings about why we are here.... If we are wrong we are potentially pissing our lives away....”

That is why I find this type of discussion not only intensely exciting, and perhaps at times even emotional, but also essential to the very act of living. I don't think that achieving our purpose in life is cut and dried - black or white.

There must be infinite shades of gray, meaning that most everyone fulfills his/her purpose to some extent, and that most no-one could claim to have fulfilled it to the highest degree possible. The movie "Vertical Limit" can be summed up in the Indian Moslem's wise words: "We are all going to die; the important thing is what we do beforehand," or something to that effect.

Regarding whether or not the human condition is above nature, the first point to get out of the way is the question as to whether or not there is a "human spirit" or "rational soul" (both of which refer to the same thing). Because if there is, it would by definition put us above nature. End of debate.

However, there seem to be those who need desperately to believe that there is no such thing. This despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, not to mention the positive effects that such a recognition has ultimately had throughout history on both the individual and society as a system.

The way I figure it, if there is no soul, those of us who believe there is and try to act accordingly would be no worse off for our mistake, whereas if there is a soul, those who believe their life is finite and act accordingly might come to regret it.

However, if such an unfounded belief makes those people feel more at ease, I have no intention of trying to take their pacifier away from them. (See also discussion of science and technology as, in a sense, putting us above nature.)

(June 21, 2003 )

Good and Evil

2003-06-21T11:53:00.000-05:00

In a nutshell, Bahá’ís believe that there is a power of good but no power of evil. Evil is the absence of good just as darkness is of light, cold is of heat, and ignorance is of understanding. The ancient myths (see) about Satan and the like are not to be understood literally, but rather are symbolic portrayals of the human ego that leads us to rebel against God and commit harmful acts against ourselves and others.

The purpose of our existence is to gradually develop the divine qualities of love, compassion, humility, truthfulness, excellence, etc. in our own soul, which we achieve through study, prayer, reflection, service to others, and the grace of God. This process will continue after this life, through infinite worlds in an eternal quest after the Source and Purpose of all. Heaven and hell exist in each of those infinite worlds, being not so much places as states of the soul: realizing our closeness to our Beloved, or our remoteness from Him.

A sister of mine said, "If there is no evil, then there is no sin", and we do not believe there is none, but that it is the absence of good and does not arise from a Force of Evil (such an Anti-God would be inconsistent with the concept of the Oneness of God), just as shadows are the absence of light and not from a source of darkness. I agree that the ego/devil is very tricky, and that one of its best deceptions is to make people believe that it isn't a problem, and that it might actually be a strength. I also agree that eternal life is an undeserved gift from God, that sin is like a disease that endangers that gift of life, and that "sin is anything that separates us from God" and "anything that hurts someone else" (or ourselves).

One of my brothers said: “The question is, is a natural disaster the absence of good? Or is it evil? Or is it god's will? What about a murderous rampage. Evil? The absence of good? Or god's will?”

I think you can't ask if something is good or bad without adding the word "for". Everything I can think of is good for some things and bad for others. As a matter of fact, I would go even further than that and ask "in comparison to what?" Because some things are better or worse for certain purposes than others, and most times you have to strike a compromise between two "goods” or choose the lesser of two evils. Fundamentalism, however, tends to go for the extremes and get very antsy when you start touching on the gray areas in between.

Given this premise, then what could a natural disaster be good or bad for? Forest fires are an essential part of the ecosystem, although some living beings may be burnt by them, and controlled burning achieves the same purpose with less risk. Earthquakes are vital signs of Planet Earth's organic life, and the longer they are put off the harder they hit, but some are invariably harmed by them and building technology is used to compensate.

Also, the human suffering caused by natural disasters is good for the spiritual maturation of those who experience them, as they tend to put the really important things into clearer perspective and bring people together, but only insofar as the sufferer receives the event with the appropriate attitude. They all follow natural laws and are thus expressions of God's Will if we accept Baha'u'llah's premise that "the laws of nature are God's Will as expressed on the physical plane". Furthermore, the Creator has endowed us with the capacity of reason whereby we can compensate some of the negative effects by protecting ourselves and also protecting Earth from itself as its custodian, correcting and avoiding ecological diseases like deserts and extinction, and from outside threats like large meteorites or ice masses.

As for a murderous rampage, I think violence, along with the rising crime rate, drug abuse, sexual license, overeating, etc. are signs/symptoms of underlying social/spiritual diseases. Are signs/symptoms good? In the sense that they inform us of the presence of an underlying disorder, they are, although they may hurt and it would be better to detect and treat the disease earlier on. What would be bad would be to treat only the signs/symptoms and not the underlying disease, or worse yet to dismiss them entirely, as many are doing these days.

Some lifted their eyebrows at my use of the term "ancient myth" in reference to the story of Lucifer, to which I answered that the use of the term was not meant to make the story of Satan "seem archaic and silly". The fact (and sometimes facts hurt) is that it IS ancient, being probably older than both Abraham and Moses (the former having no textual words of His own in the Old Testament, and the latter having only the 10 commandments and a short prayer as His textual words, and all the rest being compiled long afterwards).

It also is a myth in the technical sense of the word, which does not mean a lie told to our forefathers, as the common use of the term would have us believe, but rather an analogical story passed from generation to generation for the purpose of symbolically representing a concept through concrete images, which could not have been adequately portrayed in abstract terms, especially not to the illiterate, uneducated masses of the time. There is a growing literature on the importance and use of myths, in both ancient and modern times. For example, George Lucas, the author of "Star Wars" stated that the series was written to be a much-needed modern myth.

My own research has lead me to conclude that each World Religion in turn has been the Medicine needed for the social/spiritual disorders of its time. In each era the disease is different, so the Medicine must also vary. That is why each Prophet/Physician has adapted His message to the needs of the time, for example, at one stage talking about a real Satan, and at another time explaining that he is a symbol for the human ego, once saying "slay the other tribes" (Moses) and later saying "turn the other cheek" (Jesus), once saying "overthrow oppressive governments" (Muhammad) and later saying "obey the government" (Bahá'u'lláh).

Although often we in our short-sightedness have been unaware of why these Prescriptions were given, trust in the Prophet's long-sightedness and wisdom, and love for Him, have lead to obedience, which has enabled the Medicine to take its desired effect, while disobedience has invariably deepened the disorder and/or delayed healing. This is not a subjective matter of blind faith, but rather is an objective phenomenon that can be observed repeatedly throughout human history.

I am still ruminating on a brother-in-law’s comments on Luke 4:1-11. I think that if Jesus was alone in His retreat, He was the only one who knew what really happened, and must have later explained a spiritual reality to His disciples in the simple, concrete, more understandable form of a parable, as was His custom, in order to teach them (and especially the leaders of the religious/political order to be built up centuries later in His Name) an important lesson.

May I enthusiastically second the following: "It is not likely that a God who we of Faith believe to be the loving Creator of all, should have created man with a fatal weakness, and then created a super-being (devil) to exploit that weakness..." and might I add "...and then condemned man to such an excruciating punishment for all of eternity for having once failed the test against such tremendous odds during such a short life-span!" This should be proof enough to a believer that there is far more to the symbols of "devil" and "hell" than first meet the eye!

Search for Truth

2003-06-21T11:52:00.000-05:00

Some cringe from the search for truth because they find it difficult to do. I also find it hard to think deeply about things, but maybe no more than the physical pain and weariness of working in the yard or working at the computer for long hours. Granted, the search for truth is hard work, but then again most worthwhile endeavors are.

One person wrote: “Regarding our varied beliefs, I notice that most folks have some searching early in adulthood give or take and then settle on a ‘truth’ that fits their experience. As long as this truth doesn't leave them disenchanted at some point they spend the rest of their life shoring up their belief in that truth as opposed to continuing to seek for a potentially conflicting truth.”

I can't argue the point about early searching, although I know people who did not feel they found what the were looking for until quite an advanced age, and some who never did. There must be a basic human need to discover some 'truth' that helps us make sense of the world around us, some coherent world view that gives meaning to our lives.

The danger, as he suggests, is that we can potentially become comfortable and complacent in our cozy little paradigms, thus reject any possibility of exploring outside of it, especially in areas that might put our 'truths' to the text or in doubt. As a Baha'i, for example, I have had to struggle with the tendency to assume that the basic principle of the "independent search for truth" only applies while you are yet a 'seeker', i.e., before you become a 'believer', which could lead to a stagnation of the seeking process.

May I emphasize that anything I say is merely out of my own current, limited understanding, and that I fully hope to eventually grow in understanding to the point where I can refute my earlier statements. However, having clarified that, I also do not think it is necessary to wait until my understanding is perfect (it never will be) before sharing where my thought is at now, much less fear potential rebuttals, as I personally find it a wonderfully enriching exercise to painstakingly write out my thoughts and then carefully think through any responses I receive. Talking doesn't usually require / develop that kind of mental discipline, although it does have its own advantages.

Someone wrote: "I know it is all belief... and that there are no 'rational, well-grounded arguments' in faith." This depends on how you define "faith", and a Bahá'í would define it as "certain (i.e. sure) knowledge of something, and the positive actions that arise as a consequence". The faith a physician's patients have in her is based on her academic background, years of experience, current position, etc. The faith they and she have in her prescriptions is based on long-time observations of predictable results given similar circumstances. Once they and she know these things, it is not necessary to question every little detail of every successive case, and healing comes more easily.

There is a certain trust and confidence established, which facilitates action, like the faith you have in the floor holding you up or the sun rising tomorrow. Likewise, my faith in Baha'u'llah's prescriptions for the individual and for humanity as a whole are based on my first having carefully scrutinized His "credentials" and then having seen the marvelous effects of His Teachings when put into practice throughout the world. Interestingly, the necessary relationship between faith, knowledge and action is leading more and more authors to write about the "faith of the scientist" and the "science of faith".

I agree that "the idea that you can use the writings of a religion to prove its validity is the ultimate in circuitous and therefore invalid arguments", unless your approach is to show how those writings have transformed individuals and societies for the better. In this case, the effect of the writings on the world would be one proof of the validity of a religion, which I find to have been the case throughout recorded history. The people's response to the holy books of the world's great revealed religions seems to have been the principal cause, whether directly or indirectly, of the rise of the great civilizations, and their forgetfulness of the spirit of those books, the cause of their downfall.

Yes, "Seekers seek till they have found" but I see my situation vis-à-vis the Baha'i Faith as similar to that of a student who enters a university as one stage of his search, but then the real search begins: to learn as much as possible. The wonderful thing about this "university" is that it not only allows but encourages the investigation of divergent / alternative approaches (as opposed to fundamentalism, which discourages / prohibits this). One is free and even urged to question former understandings, and there is no priesthood that is authorized to impose his/her own understanding on you. Nobody claims to "have the truth", but rather to be immersed in a never-ending process of discovering it.

In this "university", there is no one "right" answer and the rest "wrong", but rather many different angles from which to look at the same object of study - the more the better - as each adds to the wealth of understanding of all. Here, truth and reality are synonymous. The existence of an objective reality / truth is accepted, but not the notion that any individual or group of human beings has been able to grasp more than an infinitesimal part of it.

The best thing of all is that knowledge is not attained for its own sake, but rather as a tool to be more effective in learning how best to serve the advancement of society. Yes, I am comfortable in this "university", although it has a way of making me feel uncomfortable with what I have achieved so far, challenging me to question my basic assumptions and even to start my education all over again if necessary.

On the occasion of April Fool's Day, 2000, I received a graphic titled “Where is the Black Spot?”, which lead me to reflect on a trick that we, the human race, have played on ourselves for too long already. How strange that SCIENTIFIC POSITIVISM (a delusion that had such a powerful effect on the popular philosophy of the XX Century and still misleads many masses) should have placed such blind faith on our physical senses and the instruments that extend them, rejecting the validity of the other three sources of knowledge: logic or reason, revelation, and intuition.

True, logic and reason are limited by the basic assumptions that they part from. Otherwise they would not lead to such diverse and even contradictory conclusions. Revelation, too, depends on rational interpretation in order to become applicable, and thus has ended in sectarian division and conflict. And intuition is often hard to distinguish from imagination and/or desire, leading many astray. Yet the physical senses are also limited in power, and have often lead to illusions of reality, as the attached test demonstrates, and has been shown time and again throughout the history of science.

Only the confluence of these four rivers into the sea of knowledge can lead to true understanding. Their combination, and not their segregation, is what has contributed most to the true progress of civilization. Our passionate attachment to one or the other, in exclusion of the rest, has only lead to blindness and error.

So where is the black spot? This question, like so many others, can only be answered by one willing to approach the issue from different perspectives and piece together a response that satisfies the criteria of each.

I recognize that my words may be full of the "missionary zeal" that is characteristic of one who has found something so tremendously awesome and earth-shattering that they just can't keep quiet about it, as was the case with Socrates. But what true lover can be still and hold his tongue, having once gazed upon the ravishing countenance of his beloved? I say, more power to him!

It certainly is not my purpose to upset anybody, but rather to contribute a differing viewpoint to the general search to understand God's Word and Will for mankind. Because it is not a matter of not reading or not accepting His Word, but rather of seeking to understand it better every day. For what true believer can claim to have understood completely the full significance of even one phrase of what Jesus and others sent by God have taught?

I think the fact that many have actually made such a preposterous, vain, arrogant, haughty, proud, conceited, and pompous claim is why Religion has broken up into so many sects (i.e. divisions), each claiming to have a monopoly on Truth and blaming the rest of not being faithful to God's Covenant with humankind. These are the "false prophets", who are wolves in sheep's clothing that go about dividing up the flock. Let us not fall into that trap, for if anything is evil, that is. (It is interesting to note that the word "prophet" in the New Testament and Apocryphal Books is used to mean "teacher" or "predicator", which is quite different from the meaning commonly given the word nowadays.)

There seems to be a pattern of very vehemently defending those interpretations of the Bible that are literal, but being much more lenient about interpretations that are not. Why is that? For example, Christ said we must be baptized with water and fire. The fact that "fire" has been interpreted symbolically explains that fact that you don't see too many Christians going around with "baptismal burns" on their bodies.

My point is, how does one choose which passages to interpret literally and which not? Obviously there is no simple answer, or else all of Christianity would be united in their views. I believe that in order to do so, we need to make use of our God-given faculty of reason and the fruits of scientific study, and that in general terms, whatever literal interpretation does not stand this test needs to be studied more deeply.

Fortunately, it is not necessary to have all the information in order to make sense of the world, as data is not the same as understanding. Any understanding we have is necessarily limited with regard to our object of study, as the former is just a map or model of the latter. We may think that some maps are better than others, or that some are better for certain purposes than others, but in the end, a map is not the territory. Here is an interesting illustration of how incomplete or even incorrect info can lead to truth:

"I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid aoccdrnig to rsceearh at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."

(June 21, 2003)

Agnosticism

2003-06-21T11:51:00.001-05:00

Some say: "I don't believe in anything except the probable lack of anything to believe in." This kind of thinking, along with all of its implications, has become quite popular over the last century or so, especially in the Western world. It has taken on all the characteristics of a movement or school of thought, in spite of the pride its adherents take in claiming they "think for themselves".

In fact, it has almost become a profane religion, having its prophets (seminal thinkers and writers), its belief or value systems, its priests (professors), its temples (university classrooms), its followers (growing millions, both east and west), and even its mission (to scoff at anything and everything anyone else believes in, without advancing anything better to take its place, perchance it might be scoffed at in turn).

It even has its own sport, as its adherents often take pride in their ability to wrestle other people's ideas into deadly lockholds just for fun. I have found many to be just as closed-minded and "fundamentalist" as the believers they ridicule, adding fuel to the flames of sectarian strife they so disdainfully scorn. It is easier and less challenging, in this age of unrestrained individualism, to espouse this self-complacent tendency, than it is to bold the rapids of true search.

The way is as broad and level as an immense, sandy desert, although I dare say as dry and sterile, too. Most will secretly admire one’s cool detachment, one’s nonchalance, one’s modern thought, not knowing what its basic assumptions are, much less how to confront them. What are they, historically speaking, and how and why has such a large chunk of the world's population come place such blind, unquestioning faith in them?

However, an agnostic's beliefs are just as ‘religious’ as anyone's, and their thinking is by definition just as dependent on an historical dialog as anyone else’s. To ignore important recent developments in that global dialog means to dwell on earlier stages in that collective thought process, which have since been heavily questioned and mostly rejected by much of the more recent thinking. Far from being backward, many ideas that a modern agnostic might poo-poo are actually supported by many of those ‘important recent developments’.

Now, if you believe that thought is an entirely individual matter, like one’s choice of consumption items in a store, then the above will make no sense. But if you believe, as I do, that thought is an eminently social activity, such as the building of a termite mound or the construction of a science, then I think you will understand where I am coming from.

Some have gone from "atheist" to "agnostic", from rejecting the Unknown straigh out to accepting that unknowns are an essential aspect of human life. The original agnostics stepped beyond primitive beliefs that Absolute Truth or Absolute Reality could be known by humans, a misconception apparently still running rife in our days. They did not reject the concept of an Absolute Truth or Reality, for if Truth / Reality exists it is necessarily One. Rather, they realized that the human mind is frail and limited, and thus is incapable of ENCOMPASSING or CONTAINING that Absolute Truth / Reality.

This implies that any truth or reality we humans are able to comprehend is by definition relative and not Absolute. To accept this necessary relativity of our understanding is to adopt an attitude of humility regarding opinions or interpretations differing from ours, and of openness towards the possibility of learning from them. It means sharing freely and mutually the fruits of our search, but admitting from the start that no matter how sure we are now of the rightness of our thought, tomorrow we will have to admit how limited it really was in comparison to what we will know then, and so on. Interestingly, this view is now held by much of the scientific community, having had to go through several soul-searching changes in paradigm itself over the past century.

As a Bahá’í, I too consider myself to be an agnostic in the above sense, which has nothing to do with the modern-day "don't know and don't care" use of the term. Rather, I believe that an Absolute Truth exists, that we may gradually approach it, but never quite reach it, and that this inability to encompass the Absolute results from our limitations as human beings, which is in harmony with the truest agnostic tradition.

I also believe that this would include the truth about ‘God’ as well as what we call ‘science’, since an ‘Absolute Truth’ would necessarily include both and would answer questions of science and belief at the same time. The only caveat about putting God and Science in the same basket is to make sure not to confuse an object of knowledge (God) with a method for knowing it (science). It might be better to say that all objects of study (God, the world of spirit, the material world, etc.) can be studied using different methods (science, philosophy, religion, etc.).

Bahá’u’lláh says that truth / reality can be read in two different "Books": that of "Creation", which includes this unlimited universe and maybe even other planes of existence as well, and that of "Revelation", which includes all the Sacred Scriptures revealed to humankind from the beginning that has no beginning to the end that has no end. (For my fellow-scientists, by the way, these two Books are considered mutually complementary, not contradictory.)

How can anyone claim to have encompassed the entirety of even a small portion of either one of these Books? Especially considering that there is far more to both of them than first meets the eye. I guess not knowing, and admitting it – accepting to face squarely and unflinchingly the gaping chasm of doubt – is a very difficult thing to do. So we tend to either cover it up quickly with whatever is at hand and then cling to that same answer for the rest of our lives, or we turn our backs on that unsettling, uncomfortable hole and try to pretend it just isn't there.

Einstein said that the secret of genius is the ability to resist this temptation until something really novel and useful appears. I think it is in the best interest of all humanity that we learn to replace these two habits pertaining to our collective childhood with new, more mature patterns of true seeking. I personally expect to be spending the rest of eternity in the fascinating quest and exciting discovery of truth / reality, without ever actually coming to the end of that journey. There is always so much to learn!

(June 21, 2003)

Divine Assistance

2003-06-21T11:51:00.000-05:00

Some complain that good and bad seem to happen randomly to good and bad people. They should define good and bad, in terms of people and events. What I mean is that we are each somewhere along the process of becoming all we can be, which I believe is the purpose of life in this world and the worlds to come. Often what we wouldn't choose for ourselves is the best thing for us in our development, and what we would choose is bad for us. Sometimes we need to go through sickness, poverty, trials, and difficulties in order to evolve our hidden inner potential. Those who don't are not necessarily better off because of it.

I have also seen in my own life that God desires what is best for us at all times, whether we like it or not. When I have needed to learn gratitude, He has placed me in the lap of luxury; when I have had to learn to trust fully in Him, He has put me in situations where there is no other alternative; and when I have needed to learn perseverance and endurance, He has kept the object of my longing just beyond my reach. Not that we always get what we need without making an effort to receive it. The low-hanging fruit is always there, just above our heads, but we must reach up our hands to take it. That is what prayer is all about, although I have also learned the hard way to be careful what I pray for. Nothing comes without a price, like the case of the woman who prayed for patience and got quintuplets!

Concepts of God

2003-06-21T11:49:00.000-05:00

One of the things that have been changing and will continue to change throughout this critical period in history is our old paradigms of what “God”, “spirituality”. etc. mean to us as individuals an as a society. Many people with the sensitivity to perceive the demise of those old paradigms have jumped off the boat entirely, which actually seems to have become a raging fad in the “Western” world.

I wonder why it is so important to defend a belief in the non-existence of God, a human soul, true Prophets, etc. What is it that is REALLY at stake underneath all the nonchalance and cynicism?

I sincerely admire those who have had the guts to abandon those old paradigms without having anything to fill the awful, hideously gaping emptiness that they have left behind. That kind of leap into the abyss is truly an act of faith, albeit somewhat mislead, because their rejection of these things is much like seeing that our food has gone bad and turned poisonous for human consumption, and in consequence deciding that the whole concept of eating food must be rejected in the name of healthy living.

No wonder the 20th Century has succumbed to spiritual famine! I think that one of the truly urgent needs of the times is to work together in the search for new, healthier paradigms of “religion”, “God”, “spirituality”, etc. This may prove to be another of the things that can help save the people untold suffering and enable us to reach our glorious destiny as a race.

All our concepts of God are limited attempts to define the undefinable. Our ideas of God seem to have evolved by paradigm shifts, much as our scientific concepts do, and there is no reason to believe that they should not continue to do so. Most atheists I know have chosen that path simply because they have rejected old paradigms of God and not had new ones to replace them with.

Someone said he initially felt obliged to pray and search in order to be accepted by others, which I never thought was a good reason to do anything. In fact, I would often do just the opposite of what I felt pressured into, in protest against that method of manipulating one's feelings in order to achieve a forced conformity. He tried God and found Him lacking; God failed to live up to his expectations of Him.

I wonder if those expectations were not cultivated by the consumer-society brand of "feel good" spirituality that surrounded us as children (outside of home, of course), which seeks personal satisfaction through getting "happy vibes" by anything from drugs to meditation to hiking.

My own mystical experiences have taught me that, more often than not, one's search leads through blood, sweat and tears, and not necessarily to any "spiritual high". But after all, the purpose of the search is not to "feel good", but to learn, to grow, to mature. And often, one's sustained effort, difficulties and long-suffering do much more for us than walking around on cloud nine all the time.

So my counsel to other seekers is this: if along the way you enter a tunnel with no end in sight (a "dark night of the soul" in mystic lingo), be glad, for you are being tested by One Who shall not be put to test. And if at another time a sheering joy fills your soul ("consolations", the mystics call them) just keep on walking, for this is only a signpost, not the end or purpose of the journey.

To this, another wrote: "I agree that there is a lot more blood, sweat and tears than euphoria in the search for God's Will. A lot of it is simple obedience. It is definitely a way of self-denial for the greater good…”

This brings up another reason for rejecting belief in God: to avoid having to obey His laws, some of which one may not necessarily understand or agree with. The western world has become overly enamored of individual freedom, leading us away from that “simple obedience”, while perhaps divine laws were always meant to protect us from our own ignorance, short-sightedness and self-centeredness.

Historically, whenever a Messenger of God has revealed laws and limits, according to the needs of the time and place where they have been given, it has been for our own protection and education, and not out of some kind of perverse authoritarian whim or fancy.

It is interesting in this vein that the Incan Prophet Viracocha taught the people three basic commandments that are still sacred to Indians today, while most of the rest of society has forgotten them: no lying, no stealing, no laziness.

Some say that they would only believe in God due to a strong ‘personal experience’ such as His coming up and talking to them. This kind of crass empiricism has been found useless for much of contemporary scientific inquiry, in fact for all but the most simple matters. Imagine someone saying he will not believe in subatomic particles unless one comes up and slaps him in the face. ¿Then why expect a test for God to be that simple?

Most (some say all) phenomena cannot be studied directly, but only through the observation of their effects on other phenomena. Take gravity, for example: we still do not understand why or how it works, but only that it exists because of how things behave. ¿Why expect the ‘God’ phenomenon to be otherwise?

Furthermore, such a direct, personal experience of God, such as many claim to have had, falls under the category of subjective knowledge. Such a ‘proof’ would therefore not be scientific, as science supposedly seeks objective knowledge.

In order to be scientific, one would have to develop a number of necessary criteria by which to judge the person’s claim to be God, and then test them out repeatedly under different circumstances and by different people. ¿How does one distinguish between a mineral, a plant, an animal, a human, a Prophet, or God?

These criteria would have to take into account at least our basic definition of God, which I am assuming would include aspects like ‘unlimited’ (while humans are limited), an ‘unknowable essence’ (as per the blog on agnosticism), etc., and therefore would end up excluding your friend in the street, leaving you back at square one.

In conclusion, it is almost as if this requirement for believing in God had been designed for the sole purpose of avoiding ever having to face such a possibility.

(June 21, 2003 )

On being Sorry

2002-06-21T12:00:00.008-05:00

At a Deeper Level

A man sinks a sharpened dagger
deep into his brother's heart.

Seeing his brother's pain, he
removes the blade and says
I'm sorry if I hurt you.

His brother musters up a smile
in an attempt to hide his misery
and says that's OK, don't worry.

And the man goes his way, happy to have
been able to communicate with his brother
. . . at a deeper level.

*********
For years, I sought to get closer to my family by trying to be Mr. Niceguy. Oftener that not, though, I would come away with a feeling of having been vehemently misunderstood, unjustifiably criticized, and soundly put down, not only for my beliefs, but also for what I have done and failed to do ever since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. My reaction was usually to retreat into my cave and pretend I didn’t care, in order to protect myself against getting hurt.

Then one day I got tired of the abuse and gave up trying to please others. I began sticking up for myself, countering the customary attacks with a few choice words of my own and putting the accusers in their place. After the initial shock (I guess they thought I would never react), my tormentors would soften their tone, start to talk about it and work it out, and we would finally apologize to each other, with or without tears, hug and make up.

Apparently, the relationship had to worsen to the point that it crossed some sort of conflict-level threshold before it could improve. It occurred to me that we were still following what we had been trained to do from childhood. As kids, whenever we felt our relationship had gone a little stale, we would get into a good fight until Mom or Dad would stop us and put us in a room where we would have to stay until we “settled things”.

They specifically coached us that “settling things” did not mean telling the other what they had done wrong and defending one’s own behavior, but required that everybody recognize their own fault, confess it to the other, and ask for forgiveness. Once that was achieved, I always felt a sudden freedom, joy and closeness that would make it all worthwhile. The feeling was so powerful that it was virtually impossible to fake. Mom and Dad always knew whether or not things had really been ‘settled’.

And the fact is that I never felt quite as happy and close to my siblings as immediately after one of those “settling things” sessions. Unconsciously, I may have even come to hope our quarrels would escalate to the point of meriting this method in order to feel the joy and closeness at the end of it all. Who knows if have still been playing out this weird cultural ritual in our adult lives?

A case in point: after 32 years of hoping that any of my siblings would see fit to visit me in Ecuador --and much insistence on my part-- one couple finally broke down and decided to come for two weeks. Our extended family made every effort to make it as enjoyable and memorable an experience for them as possible, and enjoyed their presence immensely.

And yet, after such a marvelous visit, the last evening included a tirade against me, my beliefs, my studies, my actions, and my life. I was so surprised and taken aback that I could not speak. A lifetime of almost-forgotten pain and heartache in the face of rejection and contempt from those I loved most enveloped me like a recurring nightmare come back to haunt me. Had I been deluding myself by thinking that after so many years anything had changed in me, them, or our relationship?

My first conditioned response was to smile and assure them that everything was fine, but then it occurred to me that if I buried the truth now, I may never again have the chance to say what I really felt. That has happened before, and it is something that can bug you forever.

So I mustered up the gumption to explain that this kind of open criticism is entirely inappropriate in Ecuador, even among enemies much less loving brothers. I tried to answer what were mostly misconceptions of where I was coming from and misunderstandings of Ecuadorian culture. Finally came the tears, the apologies and the hugs that meant we had crossed that invisible threshold and communicated 'at a deeper level'.

I realize that this cultural trait may not be limited to my family. When I was a boy, having been raised a pacifist and taught that violence was never the answer and to always turn the other cheek, I was bullied around quite a bit by my peers. But during one Summer camp my patience ran out and I let loose all those years of bullying, shame and frustration on my tormentor. He came up to me later, said I had fought well, and said he wanted to be my friend.

This brings me to how I used to feel whenever Dad apologized, for the umpteenth time, after loosing his patience and inflicting "cruel and unusual" punishment on me, sometimes justifiedly, but more often not. He would fly into a rage of "righteous anger", face red, fists clenched, body trembling, and voice stammering, and just let his gut think for him.

I remember letting myself trade a bit of sonly respect for contempt every time he did that. Later he would put on that expression of saintly remorse and say he was sorry and that he loved me, and I would respect him even less. If he loved me so much, I would think, why did he act that way towards me?

I was still quite young, but can clearly remember the scenario, when the cup of my heart finally overflowed with contempt. That is when I decided I actually hated him with a vengeance and started looking for ways to demonstrate my scorn. I have had to live with the effects of that decision, and its spiritual poisoning, all my life since then.

I shared this with him years later, during his stay here in Ecuador I think, and he did not say he was sorry. He just thanked me for sharing it with him, and I appreciated that. It's incredible that we were finally able to come so close after all that... this is something I can never be grateful enough for.

Brüderhof Leadership

2002-06-21T11:58:00.000-05:00

I have read through a lot of brüderhof stuff, including KIT conference memoirs and the case of the correspondence with the "seeker" who finally decided they were full of it, the latter being the cause of strong negative reactions on my part towards the KIT leaders. The way I see it, there are two fundamental issues here:

One is the fact that many mistakes were made in the past (we are personally witnesses to that), whose wounds have been mutually licked ad nauseum by the "survivors", and many or most of which have been acknowledged as mistakes or "sins" by brüderhof people and apologized for. Whatever happened, for whatever reasons, is water under the bridge and there is little if anything that can be done about it, except maybe seeking material support for some of the less fortunate. I am certain that to throw more timber on that already-roaring bonfire would be of little or no practical use.

The other issue is that of the on-going leadership and its weaknesses and/or corruption, which could give way to similar difficulties in the future. This I believe would be a concern worth acting upon, if you really wanted to make a personal campaign of it. If you did, I would see two possible approaches. The first is to assume that the leadership problems are due to individual corruption or "evilness", in which case the most obvious course of action would be to get those "bad" personalities ousted and let "good" people take their place. I think this would be an overly simplistic, linear way of looking at the problem, and would not achieve any fundamental, long-lasting changes, even if it were practicable.

A second approach would be to assume that all or most of the brüderhof members are or believe themselves to be sincere in what they stand for, including the leaders, and that the same problems could and would arise no matter who happened be "in power" at a given moment. This would imply that the basic problem is not personal, but "systemic" (see Peter Senge, "The Fifth Discipline"). In other words, that there is something inherently wrong with the system itself, the way decisions are made and how they are carried out. In systemic problems, as you probably already know, even when each individual does the best, most reasonable thing given his/her circumstances, the system fails (something that dear old Adam Smith overlooked, for example, much to our demise).

I think this second approach is the most likely one, but that achieving such a revolution would require people with a great deal of patience, perseverance, love, tolerance, forgiveness, teamwork, good listening skills, humility, a willingness to learn, and the ability to get people to really want to change without feeling it was being pushed upon them. It would require carefully diagnosing the way the system currently operates, and describing what exactly makes it fail. But assessing the problem would be of little avail if not followed up by clear, effective proposals for concrete reforms to correct what is wrong with the system.

At this point, the reader may have no interest in pursuing this any further. But if you do, I would be interested in having a short rundown on what you perceive to be the major problems and their solutions. I have my own thoughts in this regard, gleaned from years of studying and working with an alternative system that really works, but I wouldn't dream of taking the time and effort it would require to carefully explain them unasked, only to run the risk of once again awakening my dear readers' old prejudices against all things "religious" and being undeservedly accused of blind faith, dogmatism, fanaticism, and other disparaging epithets used defensively by would-be contenders having nothing more constructive to place on the table! So, let me know where you stand... “

Volcanic Ash

2002-04-11T11:19:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, Monica and I were returning from a walk to the corner stores for some milk and a movie, to have a gemutlisch family time with hot chocolate around the fire. Looking up, we were surprised to see the eastern half of the sky had turned a unusually menacing purple-gray color. We thought a whopper of a storm was brewing, and hurried home.

Not long afterwards, it started to “snow” a fine gray drizzle of volcanic ash, which started covering everything with a thin layer. We rushed out to put the dogs in the shed, covering our nose and mouth to avoid breathing or swallowing the acrid stuff that burned our eyes and throat and stiffened our hair. The newscast informed us that a volcano in the Ecuadorian Amazon, appropriately named “Reventador” (burster, exploder, blower), had erupted unexpectedly, putting a nearby road out of commission and spewing ash over a 200 kilometer radius.

We had already sealed the doors and windows against the “Guagua Pichincha” explosion a few years ago, so no ash filtered in, but everywhere was a sulphurous smell of rotten eggs, especially when it rained just enough to wet the stuff. Electricity was cut off in the evening, and we had a fitful night of dizziness, headaches, unquenchable thirst, and an uncanny darkness and silence outside.

This morning we awoke to a “snow day” with ash still falling. The newscast said there had been more eruptions during the night, and there was no school nor work until further notice. The whitish-gray sky and land outside, the accumulation on our skylights, and the unusual cold and quiet, I kept having that excited feeling I used to have as a kid on a snow day, and having to remind myself that it was not snow but poison.

All this is very new to us, having lived most of the time in Cuenca, which is south of the volcanic area and never sees this kind of pnenomenon. Those who have always lived in the northern part of the country seem to just take it into stride, which I guess we will learn to do also.

Doomsday Prophesies

2001-09-11T12:20:00.000-05:00

One niece asked what the current events had to do with the Apocalypse and asked for encouragement, to which I answered: I was touched by your open confidence in asking me for encouragement. I know from our times together and your letters that you have always tried to seek out what is right and then to be faithful to what you have found. I think that this is all that God really asks of us: to make a sincere effort to find truth and follow it. And if we fail, or stumble and fall, then He is the All-Forgiving, the Most Merciful, the One Who overlooks the shortcomings of all mankind.

You asked about Revelations, and said that Chapters 17 and 18 especially scared you. Now, I don't want to get into a long exposé about prophesies (there are many books that do this better than I could), but would just like to point out a few basic principles I use for understanding prophesy in general. First, you probably already realize that the language in almost all prophesy is symbolic: stars in the night are religious leaders who guide the people after the Sun of Reality has set; clouds and smoke are anything that blocks the people's vision from seeing the truth; a tremendous catastrophe can symbolize the peoples' turning their backs on God, etc.

Secondly, in order to comprehend most prophesy, it is necessary to understand a fundamental religious principle that Baha'is call "Progressive Revelation", which simply means that God reveals His will for humankind gradually, from age to age through His chosen Messengers, like chapters of a book, not suddenly for once and for all. Thus, Moses brought us one chapter of the truth, and Jesus brought another chapter. Then He said "I still have many things to tell you, but you cannot bear them now", prophesying that other Messengers of God would be sent after Him to bring more chapters. Prophecies usually refer to the advent of those Messengers to come, the time and circumstances of their coming, and how they and their followers will be pursued and finally victorious.

Thirdly, one cannot just read prophesy like a story book and expect to understand it, any more than you can watch a bird outside your window and expect to comprehend all of its bodily functions, how it flies, etc. There are people who dedicate their entire lives to studying birds, and if you want to know anything about them, you ask an expert. Similarly, the study of Holy Writings is a science (called exegesis), and there are scholars who have spent their entire lives to studying that science. Not all of them agree with each other on all points, any more than there is absolute agreement among scientists, but then again, that is what keeps people searching and studying, and we would do well to take advantage of their work.

Finally, most prophesies are not for the guidance of the people who live in the time in which they are revealed. Rather, they are for the guidance of the people who live in the time in which they are fulfilled. That is what it means when John was told to seal up the books until the time of the end. Luckily for us, virtually everything contained in the Apocalypse has been unfolding gradually from the time of Jesus all the way up to the present day, so it is now possible to try and understand it and gain an incredible historical perspective from it. That perspective in and of itself is a source of hope, courage, and inspiration to serve the Cause of God in this unique Day.

Now, this precise moment in that historical process, when the "Christian West" and "Moslem East" are on the verge of a massive standoff, is probably not a good time to be to be telling a Christian that Muhammad is also a Messenger of God, because I'm sure you will agree that both Christians and Moslems have strayed very far away from the inner essence of their respective Teachings. But the fact is that chapters 17 and 18 of the Apocalypse refer to that period in history when the chapter of the God's truth that was revealed to humankind through Muhammad was betrayed and trodden under foot by his supposed followers. Actually, the glorious chapters that follow are closer to our time, and I am not just saying this to cheer you up.

Obviously, what I have just said about prophesy in general is only the broad pencil-strokes. If you want to get deeper into this fascinating topic, I recommend a very good website: http://bci.org/prophecy-fulfilled/index.htm Here you will find a little bit of everything, but what I most recommend for you is the section on "Religious Unity", which explains in greater detail the basic principles I have just touched upon, then "Christian Prophecies", which contains a very thorough analysis of the Revelation of Saint John from beginning to end, and finally "Christian Topics", which covers a number of issues that should be of interest to you.

However, before you get into this fascinating study, after which you will know more than most about Christian prophecy, I suggest you take a bubble bath of encouragement in the attached statement called "The Promise of World Peace". Here you will find the categorical promise that world peace is "not only possible, but inevitable", although humanity must decide whether to make peace after "unimaginable horrors" (like what just happened) or through a timely, conscious act of will. The rest of the statement talks about why we have not reached peace so far, what needs to be done to achieve it, and what we can expect for the future.

You said, "I think you already think that the United States is in for something bad". Actually, I think it is in for something very good, but first it seems to need some hard knocks in order to wake up to its true calling. I believe the US is called upon to lead the rest of the world into peace, as defined in the "Promise of World Peace". The issue for me is not if, but when. The frustration I have expressed is from seeing how far the American people seemed to be from perceiving the real underlying problems and what urgently needed to be done about them. We seemed to have been treating these issues almost like a spectator sport, until a foul ball came and hit us squarely in the forehead. Now we have awakened to the need to participate more directly in what is going on. The question is, how?

Our personal mission at this precise time in history should be to do everything in our power to encourage the American people to establish peace NOW, and not wait until we no longer have any other choice. During normal times, our mission could be limited to something normal like "to lighten my neighbor's load" or "to lend a helping hand". But extraordinary times like these require extraordinary missions. Peace is within our reach at this very moment, and yet the world still resists making the small sacrifices (like unlimited national sovereignty) needed to do the job right for once and for all, which obviously does not exactly mean "returning to a 'normal' life". We seem to want to try everything else first (ignoring the problem, or throwing money/bombs at it), which will only put off the inevitable and deepen our own and everybody else's suffering.

This suffering you speak of is nothing but the birth pangs of the new world the attached statement speaks of. Knowing this not only gives me hope for the future, but also makes it clear that my role should be to assist in the advancement of this birthing process. That is what we as Baha'is are trying to do with all our heart, so we have no time to worry or to be afraid. The worst thing that could happen is that we die, but then again we never expected to live on this earthly plane forever, did we? So for me the real worst thing would be to die without having made a difference. The best thing that could happen is that while we yet live we can help our world come closer to its true, glorious destiny. And that would make it all worthwhile.

The Twin Tower Bombing

2001-09-11T12:07:00.000-05:00

The following exchange occurred following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. I first wrote:

“Our hearts are heavy with sorrow and horror. The terrible anguish that for so long has gripped a large part of the world "beyond the borders" has finally found its way through that impregnable dike and spattered paradise with its blood. Will this make its inhabitants even more hardened towards the ill fate of the rest of the world, or will it soften their hearts to the realization that the world is inevitably one, and that what affects one affects all? Only time and the ripples on the pond can tell.”

Then this exchange took place with a family member:

> For our children this will be the first time they have actually
> experienced a world changing event that incites horror and
> disbelief, one that they can watch over and over on TV.

What about Taiwan, Rwanda, Croatia, Colombia, etc., etc., etc.? Does it have to happen within US borders to be "world-changing" and "incite horror and disbelief"? What is the real difference between us and them?

> Whether or not this will soften our hearts to the Palestinian cause or
> even the world situation as Peter suggests remains to be seen, but
> I certainly don't share his apparent optimism.

I believe that the measures that must be taken are not for the faint-hearted (as different from soft-hearted). They are extremely tough, not in a military sense, but in the sense of requiring of us a courageous self-questioning of time-honored assumptions and deeply-rooted paradigms (see below).

> Another, in full Muslim dress stated, "the United States is paying
> for Israeli bullets that have killed Palestinians." Soften our hearts, I
> don't think so.

During times of peace, it is easy to talk of the virtues of peace. When vengeance knocks at our doors, and then at our hearts, then the sincerity of that talk is tested, as is our maturity and readiness for peace as a people.

The following are in our minds and hearts at this crucial time:

"The American nation ... stands, indeed, from whichever angle one observes its immediate fortunes, in grave peril. The woes and tribulations which threaten it are partly avoidable, but mostly inevitable and God-sent, for by reason of them a government and people clinging tenaciously to the obsolescent doctrine of absolute sovereignty and upholding a political system, manifestly at variance with the needs of a world already contracted into a neighborhood and crying out for unity, will find itself purged of its anachronistic conceptions, and prepared to play a preponderating role ... in the hoisting of the standard of ... Peace, in the unification of mankind, and in the establishment of a world federal government on this planet.

"These same fiery tribulations will not only firmly weld the American nation to its sister nations in both hemispheres, but will through their cleansing effect, purge it thoroughly of the accumulated dross which ingrained racial prejudice, rampant materialism, widespread ungodliness and moral laxity have combined, in the course of successive generations, to produce, and which have prevented her thus far from assuming the role of world spiritual leadership ... which she is bound to fulfill through travail and sorrow." (July 28, 1954, Shoghi Effendi: Citadel of Faith, Pages: 126-127)

I am sorry if any of this upsets anyone, but I do not feel this is a time to be pussy-footing around the real issues that are at stake here.

To this a friend wrote: “So basically I'm hearing "your" views are better then ours (USA's). I understand your style is not to "pussy foot" around, but could you take off the cleats for awhile yet.”

I answered: I was pleased to see you actually speak up on an issue aired by the group, although your own opinion was lacking except that you did sound pretty upset. I hope you take this as it is meant: an attempt to sincerely though respectfully help you to question some basic assumptions, although you really did not give me a lot to go on.

> So basically I'm hearing "your" views are better then ours (USA's).

(1) Do you always hear this kind of thing when anyone is courageous enough to stick his or her neck out and express an honest opinion, or am I privileged in this sense? Whether the former or the latter, maybe you should ask yourself why. To help you get started, there is a saying in Spanish, which goes something like, "Each sinner judges others in the light of his/her own sins".

(2) Did I miss out on something? When did all the millions of US citizens come to a consensus on what their view was going to be? Actually, what I have been hearing through the US media are many different opinions, some of which I agree with and others not. Don't forget that the Internet, CNN and cable TV puts the US in a fishbowl for all the world to see.

(3) Or do you think that "your" views somehow represent those of the USA, in which case you really need to do some intensive soul searching. Also, if this is the case, how could I think my views are better than yours, if you have not graced me with your opinion yet?

(4) Contrary to your hearing, I am just exercising my constitutional right to have an opinion and express it in an honest but courteous way. In return, I have received two rather rude replies from loved ones who have not even granted me the basic courtesy of saying why they do not agree with me.

(5) When you say "yours" and "ours", you seem to be implying that I am not also a part of the USA, as if I were not a US citizen entitled to adding my two cents' worth to the discussion like everyone else. I know that the fact I chose to make my life outside the States irks some Americans. They ask me "So what is wrong with the States?" as if my choice to dedicate my life to promoting the development of Ecuador were an act of treason. But if the US is really as sincere as Dorothy's article says about helping out the rest of the world, then why ostracize those who participate in that effort at the grass roots? Or should foreign aid only be understood as sending out money and/or bombs?

> I understand your style is not to "pussy foot" around,
> but could you take off the cleats for awhile yet.

(5) I understand you are hurting, but believe it or not, I'm hurting too, not just as an American, but also as a world citizen. The entire world has been shocked and grieved by the attack. If you cannot accept that this could be out of a basic sense of human solidarity, then at least because the dead and injured were from virtually every country, race, class, and religion on the planet. Many Ecuadorian families are suffering the loss or injury of their loved ones in attack.

(6) As the saying goes, "Strike while the metal is hot." I believe there is no better time to explore an issue than when it is burning foremost on people's minds. And to judge from the numerous articles, editorials, letters, etc. that I have seen on it, I am not the only one who thinks that way.

(7) Why is it that every time someone suggests that there is room for improvement in US foreign policy, it is taken as an anti-American attack? Do you really have to agree with everything the US does or says to be in favor of the country? Have I made the mistake of taking the platitudes of the "rule of democracy" and "freedom of speech" too seriously for my own good?

America's future spiritual leadership was foretold by 'Abdu'l-Baha, not because the US is in any way superior to the rest of the world, but because it is further down the vortices than the rest of the world, and so will be thrown out the bottom earlier. To deny that, and to pretend that what America needs is a pat on the back and a big smiling "You're doing great!" (like everyone does in Hollywood), I believe to be a gross error. When are we going to wake up and smell the coffee? Where goes public opinion supposedly goes the nation. Are we as Baha'is supposed to do everything possible to let the people go on sleeping the sleep of the innocent (in the archaic sense of the term)?

After war was declared on the Taliban, I wrote: Last night, stripping away the masterful rhetoric and real toastmastership, the way I see it, Bush officially inaugurated WW III (or IV if you count the "cold" war). You are either with us or against us, and if the latter then watch out, he said. This time the war is supposedly against terrorism, but unfortunately Bush and his advisors do not seem to see terrorism for what it really is: the tip of the iceberg; a sign or symptom of something much bigger, much deeper and much more complex -- something that will never be gotten rid of with bombs, but which could turn out to be a sleeping giant that those same bombs might awaken, and then may God help us all.

Tribute to the Báb

2001-05-23T12:03:00.000-05:00

Today is a Holy Day (2001), when Bahá'ís the world over celebrate the anniversary of Declaration of the Báb in 1844. Our ears are still ringing with the celestial compositions premiered yesterday at the inaugural ceremony of the Terrace Gardens on Mount Carmel, and our hearts are still aglow with the 2000 lights that illumined the Shrine of the Bab, in retribution for so many years of undeserved banishment and imprisonment, where He had not even a candle at night!

That youthful Renovator of al humanity was subjected to a life-time of cruel persecution and indignities, until finally the Bab was publicly executed by 750 rifles before a multitude. The first volley only cut the ropes by which He was suspended, but the norm to pardon the life of a condemned man when the first attempt at execution fails was ignored. And second regiment of 750 was brought in to deal the final blow.

To heap insult upon injury, the Báb's mangled body was ignominiously dumped by a moat outside the city, in the belief that His influence would end there. But those sacred remains were spirited away by night, and then protected from further persecution by being moved from place to place for decades, until they finally came to rest in that magnificent Shrine on God's Holy Mountain, which has now been befittingly adorned with the "Path of the Kings" stretching almost one kilometer from top to bottom.

The auspicious inaugural ceremony, attended by 3000 persons, including dignitaries and Bahá'ís from every corner of the globe, was a noble attempt to offer a befitting vindication of the true station of the Báb, which I will reproduce here in His own words, translated eloquently from the original Persian and Arabic into King James English:

"I am, I am, I am the promised One! I am the One whose name you have for a thousand years invoked, at whose mention you have risen, whose advent you have longed to witness, and the hour of whose Revelation you have prayed God to hasten. Verily I say, it is incumbent upon the peoples of both the East and the West to obey My word and to pledge allegiance to My person."

"I am one of the sustaining pillars of the Primal Word of God. Whosoever hath recognized Me, hath known all that is true and right, and hath attained all that is good and seemly... I am the Primal Point from which have been generated all created things. I am the Countenance of God Whose splendor can never be obscured, the Light of God Whose radiance can never fade. Whoso recognizeth Me, assurance and all good are in store for him... Were I to remove the veil, all would recognize Me as their Best Beloved, and no one would deny Me..."

"Verily I am the 'Gate of God' and I give you to drink, by the leave of God, the sovereign Truth, of the crystal-pure waters of His Revelation which are gushing out from the incorruptible Fountain situated upon the Holy Mount. And those who earnestly strive after the One True God, let them then strive to attain this Gate... Verily I am the One Who is hailed in the Mother Book as the 'Great Announcement'.... I am the Mystic Fane which the Hand of Omnipotence hath reared. I am the Lamp which the Finger of God hath lit within its niche and caused to shine with deathless splendour. I am the Flame of that supernal Light that floweth upon Sinai in the gladsome Spot, and lay concealed in the midst of the Burning Bush."

The Báb states that His station is the same as that of all the Messengers or Manifestations of God that have come to humankind: "Verily, the sun is but a token from My presence so that the true believers among My servants may discern in its rising the dawning of every Dispensation [the Day of a given Manifestation of God]."

"In the time of the First Manifestation the Primal Will appeared in Adam; in the day of Noah It became known in Noah; in the day of Abraham in Him; and so in the day of Moses; the day of Jesus; the day of Muhammad, the Apostle of God; the day of the 'Point of the Bayan' [the Bab]; the day of Him Whom God shall make manifest [Baha'u'llah]; and the day of the One Who will appear after Him Whom God shall make manifest. Hence the inner meaning of the words uttered by the Apostle of God, 'I am all the Prophets', inasmuch as what shineth resplendent in each one of Them hath been and will ever remain the one and the same sun."

Now, before you ask how the Báb could equate Himself to Jesus, take a look at the fascinating parallels between their lives, and ask yourselves whether the reasons for believing in one of them might not be the same reasons for believing in the other:

- Both were young (in their early twenties) when they declared their missions as Messengers of God. The length of their ministries was very short and came to a climax with dramatic swiftness.
- Both inflamed, inspired and transformed the people with their Teachings, on which basis a new World Religion was established.
- Both were well-known for their humility and loving kindness. The purity of their lives was enough to awaken the sense of shame in those they taught.
- Both performed miraculous healings.
- Both bravely challenged the traditional conventions, laws and rituals of the religions into which they were born, and openly condemned the unrestrained ambition and corruption they saw around them, both religious and secular.
- Their main enemies were among the religious leaders of their own lands, who were the instigators of the attacks they suffered, and both were made victims to indignities.
- Both were carried by force before the governmental authorities and subjected to public interrogation, and both were flogged after the interrogations.
- Both replied with the same words to the question "Are you the promised One?"
- Both walked, first in triumph and then with suffering, through the streets of the cities where they would later be executed, and both had to parade publicly, under great humiliation, down the road that led to their place of martyrdom.
- Both spoke words of hope and promises to one that would die with them. Actually, almost the same words: "You will be with Me in Paradise."
- Both were publicly martyred before the hostile gaze of a multitude of onlookers, both being ignominiously suspended before the gaze of a multitudinous enemy.
- Darkness covered the region after their martyrdom, beginning in both cases at midday.
- Their bodies were lacerated by the soldiers at the time of their sacrifice, but ended up, finally, in the hands of their loving followers.
- When their bodies, in both cases, disappeared from the places where they were placed, the religious leaders tried to explain away the fact.
- Only a handful of their followers were with them at the time of their death, and in each case, one of their main disciples denied knowing them. That same disciple, in both cases, later became a hero.
- Confusion, surprise and despair came upon their disciples, in both cases, after their deaths, and each of them had an outstanding woman follower who played a dramatic role in getting the disciples to stop looking only to the past and turn their faces to the future.
- Each of them spoke to their disciples, charging them to carry their Messages to the ends of the Earth. Through them (the Peters and Pauls of each age), their Faiths were carried to every corner of the world.

But besides having the station of an independent Revealer of God's Word in His Day, the Báb was also the Precursor of Bahá'u'lláh. Just as John the Baptist said of Jesus, "He who cometh after me is much greater than I, whose sandals I have no right to bear", the Báb said of Bahá'u'lláh: "...all that hath been exalted in the Bayán [the Báb's Holy Book] is but a ring upon My hand, and I Myself am, verily but a ring upon the hand of Him Whom God shall make manifest [Bahá'u'lláh] - glorified be His mention!"

So, this is how I have spent a good chunk of my Holy Day ... sharing a bit of what is dearest to me with some of the people who are dearest to me.... We just finished watching, at last, the video of the Wednesday morning inaugural event where our dear Akin read with such dignity those inspiring, electrifying, galvanizing words that the Báb spoke to his 18 apostles before sending them out into the world to carry God's renewed Word to a thirsting Humanity.

We felt as one with the multi-colored river of thousands of souls representing the diverse races and peoples of every corner of the globe, mingling into a single symphony of joy, ascending with such devotion that "Jacob's Ladder" up God's Holy Mountain, and circling reverently around the Primal Point.

Now it is time once again to gird up the loins of endeavor in order to carry forward that daunting task, inherited from our spiritual forebears, the Breakers of the Dawn. Exciting things are happening in the world, and it is an undeserved blessing to be a part of it all!

On World Peace

2000-01-21T12:33:00.001-05:00

The formation of a world federation of nations, or what Baha'is call the "Lesser Peace" is not a single event, but a process that has been evolving and has reached several major milestones during the 20th Century: the end of national empires and imperialism, the independence of virtually all remaining colonies, the downfall of practically all dictatorships and their replacement with nascent democracies, the establishment of international organizations and treaties for almost all common concerns, especially those created under the auspices of the League of Nations and later the United Nations System, the universal interdependence of the economic system, and most importantly, an almost universal disgust with war and search for peace.

So although the actual institution of the world federation of nations has not been established yet, the groundwork and foundations needed for it certainly have been laid during this "Century of Light". Even when it is established, it will only be the beginning of its legal existence, will initially be very imperfect and highly questioned, and will require much evolution before it becomes all that many people who work towards it currently foresee it as being. Even then, such a political peace, born merely of a legal restructuring of international relations, can only be an empty shell – a body with no spirit – unless and until we build the "Most Great Peace" born of inner changes that express themselves in a fundamental reordering of our collective existence in all aspects – what Christians call the Kingdom of God on Earth. This is what Baha'u'llah came to establish, and is the mission He passed on to us.

The Baha'i community is not just sitting on its hands hoping the Lesser Peace will come on a certain date to vindicate a prophesy. We have been working day and night throughout the world for 156 years to MAKE it happen. And although we fully understand that the legal structure itself will not be created by the Baha'i community, but rather by national political leaders, there are clearly at least two fronts that we have been working on, which complement the enormous efforts also made by innumerable other groups. One is promoting the concept and attitude of the unity of humankind and world citizenship (as well as their profound implications) among the planet's masses and leaders through all possible means.

'Abdu'l-Bahá’s "Fifth Candle of Unity" is where I got the idea that world government would be established in this century: "the unity of nations – a unity which in this century will be securely established, causing all the peoples of the world to regard themselves as citizens of one common fatherland." My error was in confusing nations with states, governments or countries, while the term "nation" actually refers more to a cultural or ethnic grouping, i.e., "a stable, historically developed community of people with a territory, economic life, distinctive culture, and language in common" (according to Webster) than a political unit. And sure enough, the 20th Century saw the development of a world-wide culture of global consciousness.

The part that refers to the unity of states and governments, I now understand, is this: "The first candle is unity in the political realm, the early glimmerings of which can now be discerned." These "early glimmerings" probably refer to the League of Nations, established after WW1. These quotes, by the way, are from a letter addressed by 'Abdu'l-Bahá (son of Bahá'u'lláh) to Jane Elizabeth Whyte, wife of the Moderator of the Free Church of Scotland, and is commonly known as the "Seven Candles of Unity":

"O honored lady! ... Behold how its [unity's] light is now dawning upon the world's darkened horizon. The first candle is unity in the political realm, the early glimmerings of which can now be discerned. The second candle is unity of thought in world undertakings, the consummation of which will erelong be witnessed. The third candle is unity in freedom which will surely come to pass. The fourth candle is unity in religion which is the corner-stone of the foundation itself, and which, by the power of God, will be revealed in all its splendor. The fifth candle is the unity of nations – a unity which in this century will be securely established, causing all the peoples of the world to regard themselves as citizens of one common fatherland. The sixth candle is unity of races, making of all that dwell on earth peoples and kindreds of one race. The seventh candle is unity of language, i.e., the choice of a universal tongue in which all peoples will be instructed and converse. Each and every one of these will inevitably come to pass, inasmuch as the power of the Kingdom of God will aid and assist in their realization."

A recently published in-depth analysis of the XX Century entitled "Century of Light" points out that while it will be decades – or perhaps a great deal longer – before the vision contained in this letter is fully realized, the essential features of what it promised are now established facts throughout the world. It analyzes each Candle of Unity, saying that in several of the great changes envisioned – unity of race and unity of religion – the intent of 'Abdu'l-Bahá’s words is clear and the processes involved are far advanced, however great may be the resistance in some quarters, and that to a large extent this is also true of unity of language.

It describes "unity of thought in world undertakings" as a concept for which the most idealistic aspirations at the opening of the twentieth century lacked even reference points, but which is also in large measure everywhere apparent in vast programs of social and economic development, humanitarian aid and concern for protection of the environment of the planet and its oceans. "Unity in freedom" has today, it says, become a universal aspiration of the Earth's inhabitants. Among the chief developments giving substance to it, 'Abdu'l-Bahá may well have had in mind the dramatic extinction of colonialism and the consequent rise of self-determination as a dominant feature of national identity at century's end.

As to "unity in the political realm", the document explains that the reference is to unity which sovereign states achieve among themselves, a developing process the present stage of which is the establishment of the United Nations. 'Abdu'l-Bahá’s promise of "unity of nations", on the other hand, it says, looked forward to today's widespread acceptance among the peoples of the world of the fact that, however great the differences among them may be, they are the inhabitants of a single global homeland.

It concludes by saying that whatever threats still hang over humanity's future, the world has been transformed by the events of the twentieth century. That the features of the process should also have been described by the voice that predicted it with such confidence ought to command earnest reflection on the part of serious minds everywhere.

Someone asked: "...does the failure of these prophesies raise the question of fallibility of your prophet and if in these areas, where else? Does this undermine the whole belief system and signal a crumbling of the heretofore growing religion, Bahá'í?"

I would first venture to say that the "whole belief system" of the Bahá'í Faith is actually not grounded on the fulfillment of certain prophesies. Rather, it is built upon a set of fundamental principles that not only stand the test of reason, but have also demonstrated their ability to transform both individuals and societies when put into practice. Any mention of future unfoldments in the Bahá'í teachings has the effect of providing an historical perspective that makes sense of seemingly disconnected and often disheartening occurrences.

This includes, for example, such statements as: "Soon will the current order be rolled up, and a new one unrolled in its stead"; the concept that the human race has gone through stages analogous with the infancy, childhood and youth of an individual, and is now suffering a turbulent adolescence, on the threshold of its long-awaited collective maturity; and the view that social evolution has lead us inexorably to ever-greater levels of unity, from families, to tribes, to city-states, to independent nation-states, and that the current evolutionary stage is the formation of a world federation.

The ability to see current events as part of an organic evolutionary process provides not only hope for the future, but also the foresight to understand what is required of us at each step of the way. It is like in a fruit orchard. The farmer does not have to be a prophet to foretell the stages the trees will go through on their way to productive maturity, because it is a foreseeable organic process. This foreknowledge not only promotes patience with the long process, but also enables the farmer to schedule timely interventions in order to maximize his eventual benefits.

My second answer is more of a hermeneutical approach, and therefore perhaps of less general interest, but I will throw it out anyway for what it is worth, with the disclaimer that of course whatever I say is my own harvest and should not be taken as anything like an "official" Bahá'í position. The term "prophet" is often understood solely as one who foretells the coming of the Judgement Day. However, there are actually two kinds: (1) judgement-day prophets (Nabí in Arabic), and the Manifestations of God or Revealers of His will for the present age (Rasúl in Arabic).

Moses, Christ, Muhammad, and others were both types of prophet at the same time, but Muhammad also claimed to be the last "Nabí" (judgement-day prophet). This means that the One to come after Him would be a "Rasul" (Manifestation of God) whose mission would be to actually bring the Day of Judgement, not just prophesy its coming at some later date. Bahá'u'lláh has made it clear that He is precisely that Promised One, and that the period we are living in is the Promised Day, when all things would be tested and tried, all things worthy would be preserved and raised up, and all things unworthy would be abased and destroyed.

That is precisely what the major "paradigm shifts" are all about, that we have been going through ever since Bahá'u'lláh’s coming some 150 years ago. Each and every field of human activity has seen more changes and advances in these past 150 years than in the sum total of the rest of human history. We are truly witnessing the unfolding of a "new heaven and new earth", because the old heaven and old earth are passing away, as Jesus so pictorially put it.

There are multiple meanings of the Judgement Day, all the way from individual choices to global upheavals. However, one specific meaning that should help answer your particular concern is the fact that Bahá'u'lláh wrote to the kings and rulers of His time and instructed them on how to establish the Most Great Peace on Earth, thus avoiding the painfully circuitous, agonizing route to peace that the human race seems to have chosen. He also told them in no uncertain terms how and when they would be cast down if they chose to turn their backs on His counsel.

Each and every one of these verdicts were executed with unfailing precision. However, they should not be perceived as prophesies, but rather as the King of kings judging between His faithful and unfaithful subjects. If you would like to see the rest of this history in a readable, interesting, attractive form, I recommend "The Prisoner and the Kings" by William Sears, which you can read and/or download at: http://bci.org/prophecy-fulfilled/pk1.htm .