A long time ago, a certain Baha’i scholar (I use that term quite loosely) began posting comments on my blog in response to my criticisms of the Baha’i Faith. Eventually, this person, Susan Maneck, waged a long running battle on one of my blog entries:
Of course she does! How else could she have posted her comments on YouTube? You can have a channel even if there is no content on it. And why doesn’t she bother to make her own videos? Anyway, here is her channel:
@Susan Maneck That’s no excuse. You can still post the response on your own blog and link to it here……but I know you won’t do that because you already know most non-Baha’is will see right through the House of Justice’s rancid bullshit. After all these disgraceful years, you are as much of a damned con artist as you ever were.
Then I waited for her to respond. After a while, I made another comment, to prove my point about her cowardice.
Subject: Access to materials at the Bahá’í World Centre
From: Bahá’í World Centre4 May 1999
Transmitted by email to Dr. Susan Maneck, U.S.A.
Dear Bahá’í Friend,
The Universal House of Justice has received your email of 30 December 1998 requesting clarification of the policies governing access to sources at the Bahá’í World Centre and regarding publication of primary source material available to people through other avenues. It welcomes the opportunity to provide further information on these issues and has instructed us to send you the following reply.
Your questions have to be considered in the context of the range of the work and responsibilities of the Universal House of Justice. One of the most important functions of the Head of the Cause is to guide the faithful to the tasks which need to be performed at each stage in its progress. It must allocate the resources of the Faith and point out those areas on which attention should be focused. Naturally, each individual tends to see the importance of his or her special interests or to focus on needs which are immediately apparent. All these have their own validity, but it is the Universal House of Justice which sees the whole picture and can guide the process. The friends must have faith in this, otherwise their efforts will be dissipated and even mutually conflicting.
The question of providing access to primary source materials is but one of the matters which must occupy the attention and consume the resources of the Cause. The written material of this Dispensation is incomparably rich and varied, and we now stand only a century and a half from the day on which the Bab announced His Mission to Mulla Husayn in Shiraz.
Access to source documents relating to the Bahá’í Faith which are held in libraries in different parts of the world, or are in the hands of individuals, is open to anyone who wishes to consult them, dependent only on the permission of the institution or individual in whose possession the documents are held. A major service which a number of Bahá’í scholars have rendered to the Faith is in tracing such deposits and, where possible, obtaining archival quality photocopies for the World Centre Archives and Library.
As for source documents at the World Centre itself: these are held by the Universal House of Justice in trust for the entire Bahá’í world and ultimately for the whole of humankind, of both present and future generations. There is tremendous work to be accomplished in sorting, identifying and cataloguing such documents so that they can be effectively studied without either damaging them or losing vital information by disturbing their inter- relationships. As far as the urgent needs of the Faith are concerned, the primary work in this respect must be devoted to the Sacred Texts rather than to documents of historical interest, although the latter are by no means ignored. It would be irresponsible for the House of Justice, without itself first being fully informed of what is in the Archives, to consider opening them to individual scholars for the pursuit of purely personal interests.
Far from allowing anyone to tamper with the historical records, the Universal House of Justice has the obligation to preserve the integrity, not only of the Sacred Texts, but of all the historical documents in its possession. It has, moreover, a responsibility for arranging their publication for the scholarly world in a coherent manner that will not give a misleading impression of events as a result of the mere choice of the items and the order in which they are made public. Undoubtedly, in due course, it will be possible to publish editions of historical documents in facsimile accompanied, in the case of each document, by a printed transcription, and supplemented by necessary commentaries and notes. It is with such thoughts in mind that the House of Justice feels that a certain discipline is required of those individual believers who decide, for their own purposes, to publish or translate documents which they have at hand.
This entire process is made the more delicate by past experience with those who, pursuing unacknowledged agendas of their own, have wished to publish certain documents for ulterior motives, or with others who have lacked the good sense and breadth of vision to act responsibly.
You refer to the principle of the unfettered search after truth. This is certainly upheld, but it cannot imply that the institutions of the Faith have a duty to make available to each enquirer every piece of information he or she requests. We are faced here, not with wisdom prevailing over the search for truth, but with a process of organic growth, both in the world and, commensurate with it, at the World Centre of the Faith.
The Universal House of Justice has asked us to assure you of its prayers on your behalf in the Holy Shrines for the reinforcement of your devoted endeavours to advance the interests of the Cause of Bahá’u’lláh.
With loving Bahá’í greetings,
Department of the Secretariat
cc: International Teaching Centre}}}
News flash: Anyone who followed the link provided by the original video poster could have seen that response. Susan Maneck made an issue out of nothing!
This sort of reminds me of the Roman Catholic Church which for over 1000 years kept the Bible locked up in Latin rather than let the common people read it in their own languages. Only scammers keep things hidden from the public!
@Dale Husband Actually, your own link takes you to their response, it is just that you very carefully posted only my letter and not their response which demonstrates who is the real con artist.
So she thought I had made the video? I didn’t and in any case she was lying, since I had actually just posted the entire response by the Universal House of Justice as a comment…..and in any case, a person still could have looked up the response by following the original link in the video’s description. And the real point of not bothering to include the reply in the original video was that Ms. Maneck was an idiot to make such a lame inquiry to begin with! Any objective non-Baha’i would have already figured out that the Universal House of Justice was running a scam…..why couldn’t she see it?!
@Dale Husband You are wrong about the Baha’i Faith and equally wrong about the Church. The RCC did not not keep the Bible “locked up in Latin” for a thousand years. During the early Middle Ages Latin was the only language of literacy. The Latin Bible was called the Vulgate because that translation made the Bible, which was original in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, available to the literate population of Europe. The common people were not literate in any language. Even at the height of the Renaissance, after the invention of the printing press, the literacy rate of Europe was about 5%. That wasn’t the Church’s doing. For the most part they were the only institution to make education available during that 1000 years. The letter from the House merely says they don’t have the resources to make their sources available to everyone and points out that most of them are available elsewhere. Take your prejudices somewhere else!
Then how would she explain the case of John Wycliffe, who translated the Vulgate into English and was condemned by the Catholic Church for doing that, among other things that challenged its dogmas?
In keeping with Wycliffe’s belief that scripture was the only authoritative reliable guide to the truth about God, he became involved in efforts to translate the Bible into English. While Wycliffe is credited, it is not possible exactly to define his part in the translation, which was based on the Vulgate.[30] There is no doubt that it was his initiative, and that the success of the project was due to his leadership. From him comes the translation of the New Testament, which was smoother, clearer, and more readable than the rendering of the Old Testament by his friend Nicholas of Hereford. The whole was revised by Wycliffe’s younger contemporary John Purvey in 1388.
There still exist about 150 manuscripts, complete or partial, containing the translation in its revised form. From this, one may easily infer how widely diffused it was in the 15th century. For this reason the Wycliffites in England were often designated by their opponents as “Bible men”.
The Council of Constance declared Wycliffe a heretic on 4 May 1415, and banned his writings, effectively both excommunicating him retroactively and making him an early forerunner of Protestantism. The Council decreed that Wycliffe’s works should be burned and his bodily remains removed from consecrated ground. This order, confirmed by Pope Martin V, was carried out in 1428.[9] Wycliffe’s corpse was exhumed and burned and the ashes cast into the River Swift, which flows through Lutterworth.
Indeed, Wycliffe was part of the growing trend of dissenting from Catholic dogma and practice that finally enabled Martin Luther to actually start the Protestant Reformation. One of Luther’s most famous works was his translating the Bible into German. That could have been done centuries earlier.
The assertion by Maneck that “Latin was the only language of literacy” for centuries doesn’t address WHY that was so, nor why literacy in general was so limited in most of Europe. It was limited by DESIGN!
Europe in the Middle Ages was dominated by a political and economic system known as feudalism, which was characterized by a strict social hierarchy. At the top were the monarchs, including kings and emperors who ruled their lands with absolute power. Below them was the nobility and the clergy who had most of the wealth and exercised power of their own over the lower classes. The next level below was the peasants who were free but were also poor. And finally in some countries there was an even lower class known as serfs, who were slaves bound to the land and forced to work on farms for little or no pay. It was in the interest of the upper classes to keep the peasants and serfs uneducated, since an educated population would be more likely to question authority and tradition and demand better lives for themselves.
Here’s an illustration of how that hierarchy may have functioned (indeed, modern capitalism is directly descended from feudalism):
You’d think that Ms. Maneck, who is supposed to be a historian, would know that!
Repeating a point of hers:
The letter from the House merely says they don’t have the resources to make their sources available to everyone and points out that most of them are available elsewhere.
First, what resources would the House of Justice need? And how exactly did the House of Justice come to this conclusion?
Second, even in the House of Justice’s response to Maneck it did not specify examples of such outside sources.
Indeed, the very idea that historical documents relating to the early times of the Bab and Baha’u’llah are not suitable for exposure to the public smacks of a lack of transparency that one would only expect from scammers and tyrants, not credible leaders!
2 thoughts on “Susan Maneck, Baha’i apologist (and IDIOT)”
Susan Maniac once called the FBI on me, claiming that I had threatened her. I had written her, after she “Back Bit” me to others…calling me a Covenant Breaker…when No decision had ever been taken regarding my self. (I resigned from the Baha’i faith. I cannot be a CB, as I am not a Baha’i.) I wrote her that she ought “watch her back” if spreading malicious gossip.
The FBI did, in fact contact me and ask me to come to their offices in Houston, where they interrogated me regarding this. They had print-outs of our correspondence, and simply asked if I intended hurting her. I told them that the Baha’is consider “Back Biting” to be the “Murder of one’s Soul.:” I did not intend to hurt her physically. They let me go. I never wrote that Bitch again。
Well, I hope my blog entry gave you some amusement. It shouldn’t have been so easy to discredit her. This is more proof of what a degenerate cult the Baha’i Faith is!
Dale Husband's Intellectual Rants 
Susan Maniac once called the FBI on me, claiming that I had threatened her. I had written her, after she “Back Bit” me to others…calling me a Covenant Breaker…when No decision had ever been taken regarding my self. (I resigned from the Baha’i faith. I cannot be a CB, as I am not a Baha’i.) I wrote her that she ought “watch her back” if spreading malicious gossip.
The FBI did, in fact contact me and ask me to come to their offices in Houston, where they interrogated me regarding this. They had print-outs of our correspondence, and simply asked if I intended hurting her. I told them that the Baha’is consider “Back Biting” to be the “Murder of one’s Soul.:” I did not intend to hurt her physically. They let me go. I never wrote that Bitch again。
Well, I hope my blog entry gave you some amusement. It shouldn’t have been so easy to discredit her. This is more proof of what a degenerate cult the Baha’i Faith is!