Check this out:
And other members of r/exbahai, including me, gave replies.
Same reason the Catholic Church kept the Bible locked up in Latin long after that language died out…..they didn’t want the common people to know they were being scammed. The Protestant Reformation led to the Bible finally being translated into the common languages. The Catholic Church was then forced to change.
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Because by modern standards Bahaullah and the Bab were extremely conservative, whereas the Baha’i Faith in the West markets itself as a religion for progressives.
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My take is that they know it says embarrassing material in it and if they were to translate it; members would leave in droves. It is quite revealing that William Miller who was a critic translated the Aqdas before the Baha’i Faith did. If Shoghi Effendi was such a great translator;why was he translating hundreds of pages before even attempting to translate Bahá’u’lláh’s most important work?
Also, if the Persian Bayan is the most important work of the Bab; why not translate it?
Is the Baha’i faith wants to spread their message because it changes lives for the better; why suppress it then?
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It should be noted that even the Baha’i writings that have been translated into English are incredibly damning. In 2017, I subjected the Kitab-i-Aqdas to a critical analysis from start to finish, working over the course of a week and a half.
https://dalehusband.com/bahai-writings-criticism/
https://bahai-writings-criticism.blogspot.com/2017/09/a-critical-analysis-of-kitab-i-aqdas.html
The following year, I did the same to Abdu’l-Baha’s Will and Testament:
https://bahai-writings-criticism.blogspot.com/2018/04/a-critical-analysis-of-will-and.html
And two years ago I went after one of the most prominent Baha’i “history” writers who got elected to the Universal House of Justice and completely discredited him too!
https://dalehusband.com/2020/08/10/adib-taherzadeh-con-artist/
It seems that FRAUD is a crime in every other human activity except religion. I don’t think Baha’is should be persecuted, but someone like Adib Taherzadeh really should have been exposed as a pathological liar long before he could get as powerful as he became. But he got away with his crap because of the corrupt leadership of the Faith before him. He was serving their interests, so they eventually made him one of them.
If you start with corruption, it tends to perpetuate itself. The Universal House of Justice is a completely illegitimate body that, along with the rest of the Baha’i Administrative Order, should be dismantled. But I am confident it will eventually fall apart on its own.
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This is where I get confused. Because I’ve asked people before what motivates the UHJ, and the response is usually that they are true believers. Yet I can’t understand how someone can be a true believer and lie about the faith that they supposedly believe in. Are they actually fraudsters trying to make money or have power? Or is it a version of cognitive dissonance, where they believe in a particular idea of the faith and then in their heads rationalise anything else that doesn’t fit with it, as either irrelevant or blocked out from their memory?
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Adib Taherzadeh wrote a book, The Covenant of Baha’u’llah, which is one loooooong collection of acts of “mental gymnastics”. This is when you start with the ASSUMPTION that something must be true, no matter what, and construct arguments to support the claim. That’s the exact opposite of how an honest investigation should be run. (“Here are the facts……what conclusions can we draw from them?”)
That book eventually made me realize after I got it that Christian fundamentalists and Baha’is argue the SAME WAY! And since I had already rejected Christianity…..
Most Baha’is (and Christians, really) are simply members of a loving community and may not give much thought to why they believe certain things. But in order to DEFEND dogmatic, extremist religion, you have to lie about it! You can either choose to believe the lies and thus be corrupted, or reject them after using consistent logic to cut through the double standards of mental gymnastics.
To understand how corrupt the whole process is, imagine if the police, the lawyers, and the courts all ASSUMED you were guilty of a crime and simply rejected an alibi you put forth (“I wasn’t even there, so I couldn’t have done it!”) and insisted you be punished because the facts didn’t matter, only the DOGMA that you are a criminal. THAT’S HOW MENTAL GYMNASTICS WORK!
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I remember somewhere reading that the Bab’s followers later followed a practice of dissimulation, lying about their own religion in order to work around persecution, or to gain influence and force regime change. I don’t know how accurate that might be, but it does make me wonder sometimes if the same thing is going on – we believe the faith, but we know it won’t be palatable for others, so we lie about what it really is, while retaining our belief in the hidden doctrine.
I guess this is what it might be, rather than deception for profit, or self-deception pure and simple. Mental gymnastics to me is slightly ambiguous, since it might imply that they are lying to themselves to deny a dogma they know to be true. Whereas it seems like maybe these people believe the ends justify the means – that they know and believe in the writings that they don’t share with others, but believe that it’s OK to lie about them, because the end result, of creating a new world system, justifies any measures.
Dale Husband's Intellectual Rants 