All religions are one

Pope Francis, head of the Roman Catholic Church, recently met Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church. In a number of ways, this was a highly significant meeting: firstly because there has never been a meeting between the heads of these two churches before; secondly, because these two churches are openly in “schism” (having disagreed with one another centuries ago); and thirdly because the Patriarch of Moscow is arguably the pre-eminent leader of Orthodox Christianity. It was a meeting between the Catholic church, which is the biggest Christian body in Western Europe (and indeed the world), and the Russian Orthodox church, which is the biggest in Eastern Europe.

The present pope has, however, previously met leaders from various other Christian churches, as well as meeting Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, Hindu and Jain leaders. Clearly, he sees a need for ties and bonds to be established across these religious divides.

The Bahá’í Faith (to which I belong) is based on the fundamental idea that all religions are one. The major world religions were all founded by Messengers of God, although the message has later sometimes become distorted or lost along the way. Each religion was intended for a particular part of the world, and for a particular time. Every religion flourished when it was young and it furnished the society of the time with new ideas and a new spirit. But like everything else in this world, religions are subject to change and decay. After many centuries, therefore, a new religion must arise, to take humanity forward again. This idea is called “progressive revelation”. What is unique about the present time is that world travel and instant communication make this time potentially an age of unity, which would require a religion for the whole world.

Oneness of religion is one of the three fundamental “onenesses” of the Bahá’í Faith. The other two are: the oneness of God (that all religions are actually worshipping the same Supreme Being, whatever name their followers give to It) and the oneness of mankind. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá stated that “The gift of God to this enlightened age is the knowledge of the oneness of mankind and of the fundamental oneness of religion.”

At a time when fanatical elements claiming to represent their religions are causing grief and harm to others, it is crucially important that the genuine leaders of the different religions are seen to be coming together and embracing one another as brothers, as Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill just did. The world needs a huge catalogue of reforms and changes: for example, it needs to reform the economic system currently in place, and put an end to poverty. It needs to bring about a universal peace treaty leading to the abolition of war. It must seize the environmental challenges at a global level. As part of this move towards the future, religious rivalry and hatred can and must give way to the recognition of the oneness of mankind and of the fundamental oneness of religion.

You might cheat people, but you cannot cheat nature

On Saturday, an earthquake shook the south-western part of Taiwan, including the city of Tainan. A number of buildings collapsed, but most noticeably a 17-storey apartment block, the Weikuan Kinlung (“Golden Dragon”) building, where 35 people are so far known to have died and more than 100 people are still missing. Rather oddly, the building seems to have fallen over, rather than simply collapsing downwards, which is what usually happens in such disasters. Television footage shows the metal rods in the vertical towers to have bent and snapped. But an even more disturbing thing has now been shown on television: large tin cans can be seen to have been used in the construction of the building, where there should have been solid concrete.

The construction of a tower block involves collaboration between the developers, the architects, the engineers, the construction company, sub-contractors and the city authorities. It requires straightforward and honest dealings between all of these parties. If any one of them is involved in bribery or dishonest practices, people’s lives are being put in danger for somebody’s short-term gain. Somebody knows why those cans were used. Nobody “blew the whistle” on whoever decided that this should happen, and likewise no-one reported that the building was being constructed in this way.

Taiwan, like many other countries in major earthquake zones, has laws regulating new buildings, which should be constructed in such a way that they can withstand the ‘quakes. Clearly, one or more parties involved were cheating the system. As mankind moves forward, and learns to cope with, or even to tame, the forces of nature, a universal code of honesty is required. Abdu’l-Bahá said:  “Communication between the races of men is rapidly being established. Now is the time that all of us may… treat each other with honesty and straightforwardness.” His Father, Bahá’u’lláh, said: “Trustworthiness is the greatest portal leading to the tranquillity and security of the people. In truth, the stability of every affair hath depended and doth depend upon it.” When a family moves into an apartment block, they need to be able to trust that the architects obeyed the law, that the builders put up a building which will not fall over, that the inspectors actually saw that the work was done, and that the lifts, the water supply and electricity all work properly.

However, at this point in human development, trustworthiness seems to be in very short supply: there are bankers who manipulate the lending rates; people who make dishonest telephone calls trying to obtain people’s bank details; sales callers who pretend they are ringing on behalf of government agencies; banks that endlessly alter the terms of the savings schemes, so that they can pay out less to the elderly and unwary; people who forge tickets to sports matches and concerts – the list is endless. Bahá’u’lláh, in the book Hidden Words, wrote: “With fire We test the gold, and with gold We test Our servants.” How people react when money becomes a temptation reveals their inner, spiritual condition, just as it took the force of nature to reveal the inner physical condition of the Golden Dragon building in Taiwan.

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Note: in July, 2015, the blog post "Out of Africa" discussed certain points related to corruption, and the September 2015 post, "It's Time We Got Our Act Together" deals with natural disasters such as earthquakes.               

        

       

I have a dream

I woke in the night on Friday from quite a vivid dream. I was helping to make a “rap” record, and I was the only “white” person in the studio. (I am not really white – my face and chest are pink, my arms are brown, especially in summer, but I do have white legs.) Everyone in the studio who knew how the equipment worked was “black”, and they were very friendly and helpful, amused by my ignorance of the technology, but not condescending. Suddenly, back to real life – and there in the dark, only partly awake, I knew I had to write a blog post about racism.

Martin Luther King made a very famous speech, in which he said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.” And what is the news from America? While the country has definitely moved on, it happens that all twenty actors nominated for the top “Oscars” this year are white. The Master of Ceremonies at the Award Ceremony will be a black man, Chris Rock; and the President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is a black woman, Cheryl Boone Isaacs (pictured above). But not one black actor has been nominated for any of the top twenty awards. If it had just happened once it would have looked like just chance, but when it happens two years running, it starts to look more like cultural bias.

In the United States of America, approximately 13% of the population is from African-American stock, descended from Africans taken there against their will. One of my Bahá’í friends, the actor Earl Cameron (now 98 years old), told me that his grandfather was seized from his fishing boat by a passing ship, after the British Parliament had outlawed slavery, and was sold as a slave in the Americas, ending up in Bermuda. Given that the black population of the Americas is there because of direct acts of force and violence, there is great sensitivity about the need now to ensure that everyone is being treated as being of equal value. The Bahá’í religion was founded on the principle of the oneness of mankind. Bahá’u’lláh said: “O people of the world, ye are all the fruit of one tree and the leaves of one branch,” and His son ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said (about a hundred years ago): “Let them look not upon a man's colour but upon his heart. If the heart be filled with light, that man is nigh unto the threshold of his Lord, … be he white or be he black.”

One of the early Bahá’ís in the United States was Louis Gregory, whose parents had been born into slavery, and who became very active with the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá encouraged Louis Gregory to marry a white English lady called Louisa Mathew. They married in 1912. He saw inter-racial marriage amongst the Bahá’ís as an example to the rest of the population, even though such a marriage was actually illegal in some of the States and caused them many problems. Many years later, Martin Luther King counted several Bahá’ís among his friends.

So what of the Oscar nominations? Already this year’s events have jolted the process somewhat, and the membership of the Academy in future will be deliberately steered into a different, and more diverse, direction. History is shaping us, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá knew it would, in the direction of Martin Luther King’s prophetic dream.

A Messenger of Joy

I heard on the radio this morning that the singer and musician, David Bowie, had died. This is not a person who was a great influence on my life, although I do own two of his records. However, music has a way of playing on the emotions, and is capable of taking the soul to higher states. “Singing and music are the spiritual food of the hearts and souls…” (although admittedly a different kind of music is also capable of arousing aggressive emotions). It is clear that a lot of people regarded David Bowie as a highly talented and original musician, and that he will be greatly missed. However, his music manifestly lives on, for people to select the pieces which mean most to them. Bahá’u’lláh said: “We have made music a ladder by which souls may ascend to the realm on high.” Mr Bowie’s music will live on, as a ladder for others, for many years to come.

But surely we would also wish for the person himself to continue. Bahá’ís believe that the human consciousness does survive after death – that we have some sort of “spirit” or “soul”, which returns to the spiritual realm. In the case of David Bowie, millions of people would rather that there was no sense that his passing was final. Rather, that his life on earth had achieved extraordinary results, and that now he himself is moving on.

Bahá’ís believe that this life is a sort of matrix – a learning environment to prepare our souls for the next life. However, trying to imagine what the next life is like is as difficult for us as it is for the child in the womb to imagine this life. The baby is unaware of the life that awaits it here, even though that life actually surrounds it! The same is probably true of the next life – it is connected with this life in a way which we cannot even imagine. In the Bahá’í understanding, the next world is a different plane of existence entirely: “The Kingdom of God is sanctified (or free) from time and place; it is another world and another universe.” However, it is a plane which allows for progression. The old ideas of a static heaven or of rebirth into this world are replaced by a new understanding more in keeping with our modern concepts of infinity and of parallel universes. Death, then, becomes an open door to another existence, one in which the soul can flourish. Our happiness in the next world is largely dependent on the qualities which were acquired in this life. Trustworthiness, honesty, kindness, love, tolerance, patience and love of God are all spiritual qualities which we can work hard to develop, or which we can choose to ignore. These very qualities or attributes are those which are necessary in the spiritual life to come. Musicians who have opened the channel to spiritual sensibilities should be able to flourish in the next world.

So physical death is also the door to a new, spiritual, life. This is why Bahá’u’lláh said, with reference to every person who moves on: “I have made death a messenger of joy to thee. Wherefore dost thou grieve?”

The Winter Solstice

(this is a guest blog by my wife, Ann)

 

Hi there! I am writing this on the shortest day of the year. Last night apparently thousands of people visited Stonehenge to witness the sunset closest to the solstice, as presumably many people have done in the last few thousand years. Standing at the head of the avenue leading to the stones, the midwinter sunset is visible (weather permitting!) through the central arch.

It is easy to understand why those of us who live this far north should find this an important time of year – I, for one, feel greatly cheered by the prospect of more sunlight and the hope of summer! It is thought that it was the advent of farming (as a change from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle) which made marking the seasons so important – knowing when to sow crops, for a start. If we were going by what nature is doing in England at the moment, for example, we could easily think it was spring already and time to start planting! (We have had an exceptionally mild spell and around here we have daffodils flowering two or three months early.) Certainly those who built Stonehenge and other Neolithic monuments had a good knowledge of the movements of the sun, the moon and some of the planets.  Apparently even the Romans realised that the ancient Britons had far more astronomical knowledge than they did!

Actually, of course, the Stonehenge monument was built and rebuilt over a long period of time – more than a thousand years at least, so it is likely that knowledge increased during that time and that some beliefs changed. From a Bahá’í point of view, we understand that God has always sent His Messengers to earth – no part of the world has been left out, at any time in history. Of course, we only know about those Messengers who appeared before the advent of writing through the stories handed down through the generations. However, these provide plenty of evidence for Great Teachers in many parts of the world, such as among the native Americans, for instance.

We will never know the beliefs of the Stonehenge people, but we can know something about their civilisation. They were certainly organised enough to meet together at Stonehenge from all over Britain (even as far away as Orkney) and live, feast, and presumably worship together, not to mention working together to raise huge stones as monuments to their beliefs. They obviously had a certain degree of unity, even if it was only perhaps once a year. Now, thousands of years later, we can build on that idea, only this time we need to live and work in unity with the people of the whole world in order to achieve much greater monuments to our civilisation, such as equal opportunities, peace and justice for every single person. Then the people of the future will be able to look back in admiration and approval of what we have achieved. No doubt those people will have their own challenges, perhaps learning to live with people from other planets? At least they will have a Messenger for their own time to guide them.

Whatever happens, I suspect that if people are still living this far north, then at this time of year they will still welcome the prospect of more sunshine! 

Space – The Final Frontier?

The news media in the United Kingdom have got very excited, because a British man has joined the crew of the International Space Station for a few months. The I.S.S. is jointly owned by 26 different nations, and has been crewed by people from at least 17 countries so far. The Station has a wide number of uses – the conduct of experiments, actual space research, the study of human biology, etc – and is probably thought of as the first stop on the way back to the moon, or a jumping-off point for Mars.

Bahá’ís believe that ours is not the only planet to carry life. Bahá’u’lláh stated that, “…every fixed star hath its own planets, and every planet its own creatures, whose number no man can compute”. What is more, there will have been at least one “Prophet, bearing a Message…in each of the worlds whose number God, alone…can reckon”.

Bahá’u’lláh’s Son, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, gave a talk in Paris, in 1913, stressing that it was time to start making efforts to reach other planets. Of course, at the time, man had only just succeeded in flying an aircraft over the English Channel! But in the mind of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá space travel was the next step. It is a great pity that the powers of the time did not work together on this, but instead directed their efforts towards war.

While the astronauts are floating along the corridors of the space station, living and working together in friendship, the politicians down on the Earth’s surface, coming from the same countries, are still engrossed in conflict, instead of urgently tackling the planet’s many problems. It must be very obvious to the astronauts on the space station, as they look down, that the earth is one entity. Perhaps if the world’s leaders could be up there too, then they might understand things differently and be prompted to make greater efforts towards uniting the world and preserving the planet’s ecosystem.

Clearly, the ability of the major powers to suspend their rivalry and send Russian, American and British astronauts off together in the same capsule is in itself a positive sign. However, for all the co-operation in space, we are still lacking solutions to problems such as warfare, racism, starvation, disease, gender inequality, political boundaries, universal education, religious rivalry, etc, etc. But once we do begin to see mankind as one human family, and the whole earth as our home, we will be able to make exciting discoveries on the “final frontier”. As Bahá’u’lláh explained, “Know…of a truth that the worlds of God are countless in their number, and infinite in their range.”

Let’s see what’s out there!

A First for the World

Paris is in the news again – this time for positive reasons. The 2015 Paris Climate Conference (COP21) has come to an agreement, which 195 countries are signing up to. This is not yet the conference to end war. There is no agreement yet that all the world’s religions have the same source. This is not the gathering to ensure gender equality in every society, nor the one to explicitly proclaim the oneness of mankind. But it matters. This is the conference at which every country seems to recognise the need to act in order to avoid a man-made catastrophe, and by its very existence it is establishing that mankind is responsible for its own common future.

It is of supreme importance that the countries of the earth – so diverse in many ways – are all agreeing on something so significant. The intention is to limit the amount of climate change. The forests, the soil and the underlying sediments were all “carbon sinks”, meaning that much of the world’s surplus carbon was tied up in them. But for centuries, we have been burning coal and oil, chopping down the forests and allowing the soil to be eroded by wind and flood. Gradually, the carbon has gone up into the air as smoke and fumes. We need to reinstate the natural carbon cycle, in which plants take in the carbon dioxide breathed out by animals. The consumer-driven materialism, which has allowed man’s life to lose its connection with nature, and with any inner sense of spirituality, must be abandoned, with a return to a more natural rhythm of life. As Bahá’u’lláh expressed it: “The civilisation, so often vaunted by the learned exponents of arts and sciences, will, if allowed to overleap the bounds of moderation, bring great evil upon men... If carried to excess, civilisation will prove as prolific a source of evil as it had been of goodness when kept within the restraints of moderation. Meditate on this, O people.”

We have to keep the different aspects of the earth in balance. As Bahá’u’lláh’s Son, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, put it: “Even as the human body in this world which is outwardly composed of different limbs and organs, is in reality a closely integrated, coherent entity, similarly the structure of the physical world is like unto a single being whose limbs and members are inseparably linked together.”

Talking of the society of the future, Bahá’u’lláh predicted that rich people would voluntarily give some of their wealth to help others. At a global level, this is reflected in the new agreement, in that the equivalent of £65 billion will be given by the rich countries to the poor countries each year, to help them develop their economies using renewable technologies, which otherwise they would not be able to afford.

But climate change is not the only process driving vast numbers of people into starvation, into fleeing as refugees, into suffering and despair, because we still have conflict. Baseless ethnic rivalries, senseless religious jealousies, ideological or selfish political struggles all combine to hold back the era of peace and progress which most of mankind yearns for. The Climate Change Conference in Paris must surely be a precursor for the “vast, all-embracing assemblage of men” which Bahá’u’lláh stated “the rulers and kings of the earth must needs attend,” and which “must consider such ways and means as will lay the foundations of the world's Great Peace amongst men.”

If this first major, worldwide agreement on tackling climate change can be built upon, if our mutual interdependence can be fully recognised, if trust between countries can be increased and can eventually lead to the universal peace conference then this really will be a great achievement. In the Bahá’í view, there is a glorious future in the long term, which is well worth working towards: “The Lord of all mankind hath fashioned this human realm to be a Garden of Eden, an earthly paradise. If, as it must, it findeth the way to harmony and peace, to love and mutual trust, it will become a true abode of bliss, a place of manifold blessings and unending delights. Therein shall be revealed the excellence of humankind.”