I just bought a book titled “A Gadfly Report”, written by retired UU minister Dennis McCarty, who has written many other books in the past. It is a critical analysis of the “Gadflies”, the infamous faction among UUs who reject the efforts to eliminate White Supremacy Culture among UUs.
Current Board: The founding NAUA members have elected a provisional Board of Directors. A new Board will be elected at the first Annual General Meeting.
President: Rev. Dr. Todd Eklof, Spokane WA.
Vice President: TBD
Treasurer: Lynn Jinishian, Spokane WA.
Secretary: Frank Casper, Atlanta GA
Directors at Large:
Ron Strange, Port Townsend WA
Terry Anderson, PhD, Edmonton AB
Candace Schmidt, Spokane WA
Richard Gammon, Spokane WA
Robert Jinishian, Spokane, WA
Mike Long, Charlotte, NC
Note the large number of leading members from Spokane, WA, which is Todd Eklof’s base of operations. Clearly, this is little more than a fan club of his. Including Frank Casper, who I have seen in Facebook. After seeing how arrogant he is, I blocked him in disgust.
Because of the decentralized and libertarian nature of the UUA, these people cannot be excommunicated from the Unitarian Universalist movement, but it is clear they want to create an outright split among UUs. After all, Todd Eklof himself said so, even titling a chapter in one of his books “I WANT A DIVORCE”.
Too many people seem to have become UUs, ironically, out of an elitist desire to reject and scorn religious fundamentalism, not a desire to improve themselves and their society for the good of all. But religious fundamentalism is itself a form of bigotry. Why abandon one form while clinging to others?
McCarty’s new book should put the final nail in the coffin of Todd Eklof’s credibility. He is a TRAITOR and should be rejected by all those loyal to the principles of Unitarian Universalism. He came from the Southern Baptist Convention…..and in my mind, he still belongs there, not among UUs!
I Kissed Dating Goodbye is a 1997 book by Joshua Harris. The book focuses on Harris’ disenchantment with the contemporary secular dating scene, and offers ideas for improvement, alternative dating/courting practices, and a view that singleness need not be a burden nor characterized by what Harris describes as “selfishness”.
By the late 2010s, Harris reconsidered his view that dating should be avoided, apologizing to those whose lives were negatively impacted by the book and directing the book’s publisher to discontinue its publication.[1][2]
In I Kissed Dating Goodbye, Harris popularized the concept of “courting” as an alternative to mainstream dating. In so doing, he raised discussion regarding the appropriateness of his proposed solutions, as well as the foundations on which he based his reasoning.
According to Harris, people in dating relationships put up a façade in an attempt to appear to be what the other person wants, thus hampering the “getting to know you” part of dating. Harris said that it is more appropriate and healthier in the long run to participate in “group dates” in order to truly understand the way a particular person interacts with others; in a group setting, a person is less likely to be able to maintain a façade. Harris proposed a system of courtship that involved the parents of both parties to a greater degree than is usual in conventional dating. In an interview with Family Christian Stores, Harris indicated that “people have taken the message of I Kissed Dating Goodbye and made it something legalistic – a set of rules. That’s something that’s beyond my control, and it’s disappointing at times…”[3]
The book has been cited as an example of belief in ‘benevolent sexism’ and ‘women as property’[5] as well as promoting ‘rape supportive messaging’[6] and ‘sexual purity teachings’ that emphasize a ‘hierarchical father-daughter relationship’ and reduces the agency of adolescent girls.[7]
Christian psychologists Henry Cloud and John Townsend suggest that avoiding dating in order to avoid suffering, as Harris advises, causes those who do so to forgo opportunities to mature, especially through learning how to create healthy boundaries.[12]
In 2016, Harris appeared to be reconsidering the claims that he had made in the book and apologized to several who publicly communicated how the book had influenced them to stay single or had been used by adults to impose stringent rules on them.[13][14]
During a 2017 TED talk, Harris said his greatest regret about the book was him transferring his fears into the book. He said: “Fear is never a good motive. Fear of messing up, fear of getting your heart broken, fear of hurting somebody else, fear of sex… There are clear things in statements in Scripture about our sexuality being expressed within the covenant of marriage. But that doesn’t mean that dating is somehow wrong or a certain way of dating is the only way to do things. I think that’s where people get into danger. We have God’s word, but then it’s so easy to add all this other stuff to protect people, to control people, to make sure that you don’t get anywhere near that place where you could go off course. And I think that’s where the problems arise.”[15]
In 1997, Harris moved from Oregon to Gaithersburg, Maryland to be a pastoral intern.[10][11] There, “C. J. Mahaney, a charismatic Calvinist and founding pastor of megachurchCovenant Life Church, took Harris under his wing and groomed him to take over the church.”[12] Harris was lead pastor of Covenant Life Church from 2004 until 2015.[13][6] Harris assumed the role of senior pastor at Covenant Life Church at the age of 30.[10] In January 2015, he resigned from that role due to a desire to broaden his views and connect to other parts of Christianity. In an interview, Harris said the isolation of Covenant Life, and of a small cluster of churches of which it was a part, may have fed leadership mistakes, including the decision of pastors — himself among them — to handle a child sexual abuse case internally instead of going to police.[6]
In 2016, Harris stated that he was reconsidering the content of I Kissed Dating Goodbye[15] and apologized to people who said that they had been hurt by its teachings.[16][15] In 2018, Harris disavowed I Kissed Dating Goodbye and discontinued its publication.[17] His publishers agreed that I Kissed Dating Goodbye and two other follow-up books would not be reprinted once the current stock was depleted.[18][19] Harris appeared in a documentary film called I Survived I Kissed Dating Goodbye, where he spoke to people who were critical of the book.[20][21]
In July 2019, Harris announced that he and his wife were separating due to “significant changes [that] have taken place in both of us”.[22][23] Subsequently, Harris revealed that he no longer considered himself a Christian and his wife began pursuing a career as a singer-songwriter under the name Shannon Bonne.[24][25][26] In addition to his previously discontinued books, with Harris’s announcement of his loss of faith, the documentary film lost its distributor due to the negative reaction from the Christian market.[27]
My guess is that his extremist views on sexuality, often called “purity culture” were so tied up with his Christian views that when he realized purity culture was bullshit, it also caused his faith to be destroyed as well. That’s what often happens to people with extreme religious views of any kind that don’t measure up to reality at all.
To illustrate the stupidity of purity culture, which is by nature sexist and unrealistic in its expectations of young people, I made this:
And I am confident that it will stand up to reality far better than Harris’ stupid book……or even his former religion!
The ONLY reason I was ever homophobic was because of my being raised Baptist and later being a Baha’i. Once I stopped believing in the idea of infallible God-centered religions, I dropped my bigotry against LGBT people. I accepted that the founders and writers of most great religions knew nothing about sexual matters.
Oh how interesting! May I ask what enticed you to become Baha’i?
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So here I was making a casual reference to one of my past religions and apparently this other person had never heard of it, so I had to explain to them what it was about.
My assumption that if there was a God, then logically I needed to find the most recent religion founded in his name instead of following an older one. One should know the will of God for this age, right?
Once I realized that the Baha’i Faith was no better than Christianity, I gave up on belief in God completely. I am atheist now.
That’s so interesting to me because I often hear the opposite claim. That we should go to the oldest religion as its the most true. I’ve met Christians who legitimately believed Christianity was the first religion. Then there’s Islam that claims all the prophets of other religions were actually Muslims whose words got corrupted over time + we are all born Muslims. I’ve never seen someone contemplate the opposite before.
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I thought, “In what universe does that make even a little bit of sense???”
About three years ago, I blocked in disgustWahid Azal’s main account on reddit after discovering what a totally despicable liar and traitor he was against r/exbahai. Links to all the stories and evidence about his treachery can be found here:
And in a recent post, he doubles down on his bullshit, thus showing he has absolutely NO sense of ethics whatsoever. To put it bluntly, he is indeed EVIL. Recently, he blocked me in return, no doubt to stop me from seeing more of his lies, but I learned to get around that barrier to see what he’s been doing.
Like all other bahai lists online, exbahai is an echo chamber with an agenda tasked with gatekeeping and stymieing real opposition. There you have outright cyberbasijis rubbing shoulders with the BIA, like that recent arrival who was exposed here who is so transparent about what they are it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out. But whenever they and their transparently gratuitous talking points are pushed back against, this is what they always do: block. Yet note that over the past 4 years traffic to that subreddit has seriously come to a halt and it isn’t what it used to be. People are wisening up to the fact that not all is what it seems with exbahai. But when you appoint an imbecile, child groomer-pedo and head case like Gomer as a moderator, that is what you should expect. Also after u/investigator919 said what they said about the Woman, Life, Freedom Revolution in Iran, that list literally put a nail into its own coffin because there is no way they can talk that down or walk back an exbahai moderator’s outright parroting of IR government lines regarding what happened and is happening in Iran. This is why u/investigator919 was brought back as u/SuccessfulCorner2512 who is pretending now to be an exbahai hailing from an aristocratic Iranian bahai family when it is obvious who this person actually is.
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wahidazal66
But that shouldn’t deter you. Just get another ID and go back over there and give em hell. I’m still there and whenever I don’t have anything better to do I have been commenting there for over 2 years now with an ID they won’t even expect. Been doing the same with r/bahai as well. In this age of hybrid warfare, there are no rules; and, morally speaking, no one is obliged to actually respect and abide by what the corporate American Tech Beast and its rules say. If you can find ways to f*ck with their heads and sh*t on them, by all means do so! This is a war after all. My rules are the Bayan and my own completion of it. Period, full-stop, and not American capitalism’s rules and the rules of its assorted minions who are the ultimate Enemy. No one ever won a war by abiding by their enemy’s rules which is also what Krishna tells Arjuna in the Baghavad-Gita during the battle scene. As I said to you privately, this is what the Qalandari Left-Hand Path is really all about: only abiding by the divine rules but never the rules of man! Again, note the story of Khidr and Moses in the Quran.
So let’s dissect these statements. shall we?
Like all other bahai lists online, exbahai is an echo chamber with an agenda tasked with gatekeeping and stymieing real opposition.
Azal claims the only real opposition to the Baha’i Faith is him. This is not possible at all because he is a Bayani and it was the Bab who started the disruptions in Persia (AKA Iran) that Baha’u’llah would decades later take advantage of to form his own Baha’i community out of the ashes of the failed Babi community. In order to really defeat the Baha’i Faith, you must discredit BOTH the Bab and Baha’u’llah! And that is something I can do…..because I am an ATHEIST!
There you have outright cyberbasijis rubbing shoulders with the BIA, like that recent arrival who was exposed here who is so transparent about what they are it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out.
I wonder who he was referring to. And what the hell is a “cyberbasiji”? His making up terms like that to insult people is just stupid.
But whenever they and their transparently gratuitous talking points are pushed back against, this is what they always do: block.
No, he gets banned from places like r/exbahai for being dishonest, disruptive and verbally abusive. Trolling, basically. That’s really all he does.
Yet note that over the past 4 years traffic to that subreddit has seriously come to a halt and it isn’t what it used to be. People are wisening up to the fact that not all is what it seems with exbahai.
He is just making that up. r/exbahai is doing quite well considering how few members it has. We do a lot of good there. I moderate that place, so I see what goes on there. Speaking of which:
But when you appoint an imbecile, child groomer-pedo and head case like Gomer as a moderator, that is what you should expect.
“Gomer” is the nickname he invented for me. And there is no proof whatsoever that I have ever molested or groomed a child. He says that about me because he knows I am better at discrediting the Baha’i Faith than he is, as noted before. I have written against pedophiles several times, as well as against teachers who sexually abuse their own students, like Mary Kay Latourneau, may she be damned!
Also after u/investigator919 said what they said about the Woman, Life, Freedom Revolution in Iran, that list literally put a nail into its own coffin because there is no way they can talk that down or walk back an exbahai moderator’s outright parroting of IR government lines regarding what happened and is happening in Iran.
She wasn’t beaten to death. That was the lie that triggered the protests. The CT-Scans clearly show a prior brain surgery. However, since the average Joe can’t make a distinction between brain surgery and a blow to the head, everyone went with the narrative that she was killed because that’s what they wanted to believe. I had to fact-check the CT-Scan images myself through one of our relatives who is a doctor because I had no idea what the CT-Scan of her head was showing.
This is how the media fools you. And yes, the “so called” supreme leader (I don’t consider him my leader) wasn’t lying in this case and in similar protests. Every time there is any form of protest in Iran it is hijacked by ISRAEL / SAUDI / US / MEK media channels. I was surfing twitter for the past two weeks and there were so many lies being propagated by their media channels and being re-twitted and established as fact that it made me sick. Three examples:
-Tweet: <So and so district of Tehran has been overtaken by protesters.> Me: You idiots I live here there is no protest in this district and there never was.
-Tweet: <shows movie captioned: “innocent protester killed by police.”> Few hours later the complete movie is tweeted by another account that shows the so called dead protester getting up and walking away.
Tweet: <Iranian security forces open fire on peaceful people that had gathered to pray in the city of Zahedan killing twenty.> I immediately thought to myself this doesn’t make sense. Why would someone do this? Then even after a separatist group posted a video and claimed responsibility for inciting the violence, thousands of twitter accounts were still retweeting the initial fake narrative for days.
The whole goal is so called regime change. At the end of the day no one cares for Mahsa Amini or any other woman in Iran (if they did we wouldn’t have been sanctioned by western governments to the dark-ages). Just a few days ago nearly 30 Shia women were killed by suicide bomber in Afghanistan. No one batted an eye. In fact those bombings and killings of innocent women happen on a daily basis in Afghanistan, Yemen, and also Palestine. But no one cares. No one gives a shit. What made Mahsa Amini different? What makes Iran so special? Regime change in Iran. Toppling a government that opposes the west and refuses to bow to it.
The Iranian government is neither the angel that it portrays itself and neither the devil that is portrayed by the west. It’s like every other government with its shortcomings and also good points. But if you want to measure the level of savageness of a government by counting the number of people it has killed, then I’m sure it’s no where near the top of the list where the US / Israel / Saudi and a bunch of other western countries stand.
What’s ironic about Wahid’s demonization of investigator919 is that Baha’is in reddit do the same thing to him and for the same reason: he is a Shia Muslim who lives in Iran. But if you look carefully, he is NOT merely parroting the claims of the Iranian government.
And yes, the “so called” supreme leader (I don’t consider him my leader) wasn’t lying in this case and in similar protests.
The Iranian government is neither the angel that it portrays itself and neither the devil that is portrayed by the west. It’s like every other government with its shortcomings and also good points.
He may have blind spots with regards to Shia teachings, but he does show critical thinking in this case.
There was an exchange of messages between him and me that read as follows.
I’ve been so ANGRY about Iran and about Islam these past couple of weeks that I wasn’t sure I could even discuss the matter with you without coming across as rude and even a bit bigoted. Thanks for not humiliating me in public.
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No need to apologize. I don’t blame you for being angry. The media and cyberspace these days is filled with truths, half-truths, and outright lies. No one knows what to believe anymore.
Moving on……
This is why u/investigator919 was brought back as u/SuccessfulCorner2512 who is pretending now to be an exbahai hailing from an aristocratic Iranian bahai family when it is obvious who this person actually is.
Another completely made up claim. I can usually tell when someone like Wahid Azal or DavidBinOwen is using sockpuppets to infiltrate subreddits they have been banned from (which is a clear violation of reddit rules). They have a distinctive writing style and means of expression that they cannot change, which proves they are incompetent. So is Wahid saying that investigator919 is better at faking a personality than he is? LOL!
The difference in expressions between investigator919 and SuccessfulCorner2512 is light years apart. So why did Azal claim they are the same person? Because that is what pathological liars do, even if it makes them look STUPID!
But that shouldn’t deter you. Just get another ID and go back over there and give em hell. I’m still there and whenever I don’t have anything better to do I have been commenting there for over 2 years now with an ID they won’t even expect. Been doing the same with r/bahai as well.
So here we see Azal clearly admitting to violating reddit rules and encouraging such violations from others! That should get him banned permanently from reddit, and I mean ALL his accounts, FOREVER!
In this age of hybrid warfare, there are no rules; and, morally speaking, no one is obliged to actually respect and abide by what the corporate American Tech Beast and its rules say. If you can find ways to f*ck with their heads and sh*t on them, by all means do so! This is a war after all. My rules are the Bayan and my own completion of it. Period, full-stop, and not American capitalism’s rules and the rules of its assorted minions who are the ultimate Enemy. No one ever won a war by abiding by their enemy’s rules which is also what Krishna tells Arjuna in the Baghavad-Gita during the battle scene. As I said to you privately, this is what the Qalandari Left-Hand Path is really all about: only abiding by the divine rules but never the rules of man! Again, note the story of Khidr and Moses in the Quran.
This is the “ends justify the means” fallacy. Joseph Stalin made himself the supreme lawmaker in the Soviet Union for decades and killed MILLIONS of his own people simply to enforce his will on them. Mao Zedong killed millions of his own Chinese people. Pol Pot is said to have killed ONE-THIRD of the Cambodian people in the same way! And I have no doubt if Wahid Azal ever gains political power anywhere, he will also exterminate people. After all, in war you kill people en masse on a regular basis … and didn’t he call what he does a war? Why protest against the tyranny of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the hypocrisy of the Haifan Baha’i leadership when he is indeed no better than them?
And Wahid Azal’s own insanity make me think the Bab was just as crazy and dangerous. No wonder he was killed in 1850!
And for the record, my rejection of the Baha’i Faith in 2004-2005 had nothing to do with the Bab. But I hate the Bab’s legacy NOW……because of WAHID AZAL! May he be DAMNED forever!
Once, there was a false prophet who died and went to hell. A decade later, one of the prophet’s followers also died and went to hell. He then saw the prophet he had believed in.
“Sir, you lied to me! How could you have done that to me and so many others?!”
The false prophet replied, “I did it because you were dumb enough to believe me. That was reason enough.”
IF YOU CAN’T IMAGINE THAT SOMEONE HAS LIED TO YOU, THEN YOU ARE THE REASON SOMEONE WOULD LIE TO YOU!
There is no such thing as Haifan or Unitarian Bahá’ís. You can’t make things up like that. I can call myself the Wizard of Oz but it doesn’t mean anything.
The difference between Haifan and Unitarian Bahais is Haifan Baha’is believe that after Baha’u’llah’s death Abdul Baha’s Will was to be followed, which appointed Shoghi Effendi and then the UHJ as the successors, whereas Unitarian Bahais believe that after Baha’u’llah’s death the instructions of the Kitab i Ahd were to be followed, which appointed Mirza Muhammad Ali as the successor of Abdul Baha.
I don’t see why you think there is no such thing as a Unitarian Bahai.
No it says the station of Muhammad Ali is beneath that of Abdul’Baha. It says nothing of him succeeding Abdul’Baha. It also says we must obey Abdul’Baha and to turn away from him is like turning away from Baha’u’llah. Abdul’Baha was free to choose his successor and he chose Shoghi Effendi. It’s a done deal. There is nothing to argue.
Only in the Haifan translation. Beneath is a mistranslation of the word بعد, which means “after” and does not mean “beneath”. Earlier translations did not use the word beneath. I include the Horace Holley translation in this post:
This is what the Kitab i Ahd says in the original language:
وصيّة اللّه آنکه بايد اغصان و افنان و منتسبين طرّاً بغصن اعظم ناظر باشند انظروا ما انزلناه فی کتابی الاقدس اذا غيض بحر الوصال و قضی کتاب المبدء فی المآل توجّهوا اِلی من اراده اللّه الّذی انشعب من هذا الاصل القديم مقصود از اين آيه مبارکه غصن اعظم بوده کذلک اظهرنا الامر فضلاً من عندنا و انا الفضّال الکريم قد قدّر اللّه مقام الغصن الاکبر بعد مقامه انّه هو الآمر الحکيم قد اصطفينا الاکبر بعد الاعظم امراً من لدن عليم خبير
Whether or not you translate it as “beneath” or “after” does not change the fact that the passage is not implying in any way about who should be the successor after Abdul’Baha. I can’t fathom how you can read it in such a matter. Once Muhammad Ali broke the covenant by not recognizing Abdul’Baha it’s a moot point. Muhammad Ali was excommunicated so he can’t be the successor anyway. You need to stop spreading this kind of disinformation. It’s so harmful to your soul that I am deeply saddened for you.
Verily, God hath ordained the station of the Greater Branch after the station of the former. Verily, He is the Ordainer, the Wise. We have surely chosen the Greater after the Greatest as a Command from the All-Knowing, the Omniscient!
To make sure Muhammad Ali (and everyone else in the family and the community) knew that Muhammad Ali was to obey Abdul’Baha. So that Muhammad Ali would not challenge the successorship after Baha’u’llah’s death, and everyone would turn to Abdul’Baha for leadership and there wouldn’t be a schism.
Clearly Baha’u’llah felt the need to address Muhammad Ali by name specifically so that there would be no doubt or question amongst everyone in the family. I’d recommend you read God Passes Bye which talks quite a bit about the trouble that Muhammad Ali was causing at the time for Abdul’Baha. Later in Abdul’Baha’s ministry, Muhammad Ali went as far as trying to have Abdul’Baha crucified by the Ottomans.
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Well, that was over two months ago. When I found that thread, I decided that FrenchBread needed to be taught a lesson in humility. So I went after him!
If other Baha’is are anything like YOU in the way you argued with trident here, then clearly those responses in the Baha’i subreddit are not to be trusted.
You said:
There is no such thing as Haifan or Unitarian Bahá’ís. You can’t make things up like that. I can call myself the Wizard of Oz but it doesn’t mean anything.
That’s like saying there is no such thing as a Christian outside the Roman Catholic Church. Don’t be so bigoted! Then you claimed:
[The Kitab-i-Ahd] says the station of Muhammad Ali is beneath that of Abdul’Baha. It says nothing of him succeeding Abdul’Baha. It also says we must obey Abdul’Baha and to turn away from him is like turning away from Baha’u’llah. Abdul’Baha was free to choose his successor and he chose Shoghi Effendi. It’s a done deal. There is nothing to argue.
Do you read the original languages of Baha’u’llah’s writings, Arabic and Persian? Apparently not! When trident tried to correct you with the actual quotation from the passage in question, you simply doubled down on the falsehoods.
Whether or not you translate it as “beneath” or “after” does not change the fact that the passage is not implying in any way about who should be the successor after Abdul’Baha. I can’t fathom how you can read it in such a matter. Once Muhammad Ali broke the covenant by not recognizing Abdul’Baha it’s a moot point. Muhammad Ali was excommunicated so he can’t be the successor anyway. You need to stop spreading this kind of disinformation. It’s so harmful to your soul that I am deeply saddened for you.
Why do you assume Mirza Muhammad-Ali broke the Covenant? Because you believe what was written about him decades after the fact? You weren’t there, so you don’t know what really happened, do you?
The real reason for the dispute between the brothers was because Abdu’l-Baha falsely claimed infallibility for himself after Baha’u’llah made clear in the Kitab-i-Aqdas that NO ONE but God and a Messenger of God could be infallible. He also warned his followers in that book that no one could claim direct revelation from God for 1000 years after his time. Abdu’l-Baha’s claim about himself made it look like he was equal to his father and that made Muhammad-Ali think Abdu’l-Baha violated the Covenant. And once the Covenant was broken, the obligation to obey Abdu’l-Baha became irrelevant. Abdu’l-Baha was just as bound to the rules of his father as Muhammad-Ali was. Having Muhammad-Ali act as a check on Abdu’l-Baha’s absolute power was actually a wise thing for Baha’u’llah to do, in hindsight. Too bad most Baha’is, including you, have chosen to ignore the actual facts about Baha’u’llah’s own teachings. Instead, you use talking points that really don’t make sense. Trident did say:
Wouldn’t it make things clearer to just not mention Muhammad Ali, and just say that everyone was to obey Abdul Baha?
Obviously, yes! Then you said:
Clearly Baha’u’llah felt the need to address Muhammad Ali by name specifically so that there would be no doubt or question amongst everyone in the family.
Because……if Abdu’l-Baha was caught breaking the Covenant, Muhammad-Ali would have the right to challenge him by the authority given to him by both the Kitab-i-Aqdas and the Kitab-i-Ahd. And THAT’S WHAT HE DID!
And as for this final claim of yours:
Later in Abdul’Baha’s ministry, Muhammad Ali went as far as trying to have Abdul’Baha crucified by the Ottomans.
That’s absurd! And when did the Ottoman Empire ever crucify people?
It’s only natural for Shoghi Effendi after being made Abdu’l-Baha’s successor to demonize Muhammad-Ali to justify what was done. Therefore, his book God Passes By is not credible. It’s like Joseph Stalin demonizing Leon Trotsky after Stalin became the Soviet dictator, even though Trotsky was also a loyal Communist.
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The next day after I made that comment, I discovered that FrenchBread had blocked me and my comment had been downvoted by several people. Such pathetic cowardice! But that’s what happens when Haifan Baha’is can’t control the conversation like they can in r/bahai! They run away!
Wahid Azal has a long history of picking stupid fights with people just to pump up his hyperinflated ego. This week, he did it again to one of my exBaha’i allies.
It’s difficult to understand that view, to be honest. If I were to rank the Baha’i figures in terms of harmful beliefs, the Bab would top it by some margin, followed by Baha’u’llah (though the future potential for harm is greater for BH). The Bab caused anarchy and bloodshed for several years, and when given a viable plan to stop the bloodshed, he replied that the blood was like fertiliser for the soil. He advocated beliefs so deeply fanatical that we can find no parallel outside recent extremist religious movements such as ISIS, e.g. taking possessions away from non-believers to give to believers, burning books, and many other despicable, evil, and ludicrous teachings.
The notion that God would “manifest” on Earth and tell us to burn books and kill non-believers, as the Bab did, makes me shudder. The Bab was definitely one of the evilest men in recent Persian history.
I’m not too concerned with the Bab’s teachings on violence since Baha’u’llah came later and banned holy war and abrogated the burning of books. So it is no longer an important question if the Bab taught violence. In any case, there have been times in history where violence was justified (e.g. pre-Islamic Arabia).
What is your evidence that the Babis endorsed burning books and homicide, you shameless IR hack? Tell us again how many leftists Khomeini ordered executed without trial at the tail end of the war with Iraq that you so-and-sos started.
The Bab caused anarchy and bloodshed for several years,
This is IRI state propaganda and mullah nonsense articulated by the same people who literally created anarchy in Iran during 1978-9 to seize power by force and murder millions. No such anarchy was created in Iran by the Babis. They were pushed by a corrupt system, and so rightfully took a stance of defensive jihad against it. Proto-ISIS was the Ayatollah Khomeini and the system you truck for, basiji-e-koon kesh!
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I recognized this user as another account being used by Wahid Azal, so I deleted the comments and reported them to the other mods of r/exbahai, causing him to be banned again.
SuccessfulCorner then went to the new post Azal made in his own subreddit.
You don’t know who I am? Some of the people of Hot Air (أهل هباء) (i.e. our terminology for bahais first coined by Subh-i-Azal) consider me to be enemy #1.
Now, you have made a series of false assertions that come straight out of the textbooks of IR state propaganda regarding the Babi period. Can you support what you say?
Let’s start here. You say:
“The Bab caused anarchy and bloodshed for several years, and when given a viable plan to stop the bloodshed, he replied that the blood was like fertiliser for the soil. “
Besides being a lame, ahistorical and revisionist apology for Qajar absolutism and the unchecked power of their clerical allies of the time, pray tell, where exactly did the Primal Point say, “blood was like fertiliser for the soil“? Source?
Besides other things, the argument you are making above is a pro-statist argument. First, you are rationalizing the authoritarianism and corruption of the Qajar state and clergy. Second, you are thoroughly whitewashing the events of the time. Third, you have not even factored in what the Qajar state and clergy did to push the Babis into open revolt against it. In other words, your argument possesses no causality and attempts to represent the Babi Revolution as a sort of sui generis violent uprising with the state and clergy as its “innocent victims” – LOL! – who did nothing to bring it upon themselves! Again, these are the sorts of fallacies and whitewashes the IRI and its hawzavi allies regularly employ as talking points about the Babis and the era: talking points that also have a few of their sources in the intellectually dishonest Baha’i sectarian rewrite of Babi history.
Then you say:He advocated beliefs so deeply fanatical that we can find no parallel outside recent extremist religious movements such as ISIS…
The comparison to Daesh/ISIS is a regular IR talking point and is nonsense, and the claim to finding no parallel is an even bigger fallacy. But these are things IR state media and the seminary regularly (and hypocritically) claim about the Bayan.
Then without context, you state:
e.g. taking possessions away from non-believers to give to believers, burning books, and many other despicable, evil, and ludicrous teachings.
First, disenfranchising non-believers of their property in the Bayan is only a feature under a Babi/Bayani state which did not exist between 1844-1850. Second, contrary to what you and the mullahs claim, there is no provision in the Bayan for the burning or destruction of books. Instead this is a claim first dishonestly asserted by the founder of Bahaism and then parrot-fashion repeated by the mullahs as a way to misrepresent the provision and nuanced language of the sixth gate of the sixth Unity of the Bayan. In fact the 13th gate of the 9th Unity of the Bayan unequivocally commands the opposite, that under no circumstance a book or piece of writing ever be materially destroyed:
أنتم أبدًا كتابًا لا تخرقون
So what are the other despicable, evil, and ludicrous teachings here then? Your very language in misrepresenting the teachings, ordinances and history of the Bayan is the language of the IRI! Do you deny it?
You don’t know who I am? Some of the people of Hot Air (أهل هباء) (i.e. our terminology for bahais first coined by Subh-i-Azal) consider me to be enemy #1.
Never heard of you. You appear to be the only follower of an extinct religion, which must be fun.
It’s ironic that you talk about hot air, as you’re standing alone on top of an extinct volcano (Babism), substituting its bygone life with noise and hot air of your own.
Besides being a lame, ahistorical and revisionist apology for Qajar absolutism and the unchecked power of their clerical allies of the time, pray tell, where exactly did the Primal Point say, “blood was like fertiliser for the soil”? Source?
The sentiment here was the dominant pep talk from the Bab and among the followers of the blood-stained Babi movement. There’s no shortage of examples, including Hujjat-i-Zanjani who encouraged the Babi’s with “God has always decreed that in every age the blood of the believers is to be the oil of the lamp of religion.”
Similarly, Mulla-Husayn proclaimed, “Many a soul will, in this city, shed his blood in this path. That blood will water the Tree of God, will cause it to flourish, and to overshadow all mankind”.
Of course, the Bab could have intervened to stop the needless bloodshed. The Mu’tamid of Isfahan, Imárat-i-Khurshíd, approached the Bab with a plan which included arranging the marriage of the Bab to a sister of the Shah. The Bab replied “Not by the means which you fondly imagine will an almighty Providence accomplish the triumph of His Faith. Through the poor and lowly of this land, by the blood which these shall have shed in His path, will the omnipotent Sovereign ensure the preservation and consolidate the foundation of His Cause.”
Of course, none of this happened. They all died in vain for an evil and worthless cause.
First, disenfranchising non-believers of their property in the Bayan is only a feature under a Babi/Bayani state which did not exist between 1844-1850.
Shame on you, and shame on this disgusting false religion!
The theocratic state envisioned by the Bab was one characterized by a strange dualism of wickedness and stupidity. You acknowledged above an example of the unspeakably wicked vision of the Bab. Examples of his unspeakably stupid teachings include Babis writing the 95 names of God in henna on their bodies after a bath, reciting 700 Bayanic verses daily, not keeping over 19 (wahid) books, and many others, but I’ll spare you the embarrassment. The Bab’s obsession with the number 19 was clearly an expression of mental illness. He even foretold a time when “even the pens on the pencase shall be arranged according to the number wahid (19)”.
As for your comments on the response of the state, let us be absolutely clear: there is no government on Earth that would allow a new group of religious fanatics to establish such an evil and dystopic society as that envisioned by the Bab.
_________________
Wahid’s response showed he had been insincere in wanting any real debate.
ROFLMAO! That’s it? That’s all you got. Tsk tsk tsk…
Let’s get something straight, by your uncritical, unnuanced and totally shambolic ahistorical state propaganda sloganeering of a response (that is utterly full of sh*t from start to finish like everyone and everything associated with that regime) – merely repeating parrot fashion the same trite BS of IR state propaganda – you reveal yourself exactly as being what I say you are: an openly transparent propagandist and shill full of crap working for the Islamic Republic of Iran just here littering reddit and Wikipedia with their trash. You opine:
“God has always decreed that in every age the blood of the believers is to be the oil of the lamp of religion.”
The sentiment and words come directly from Shi’ite hadith. That you have a problem with it just shows your ignorance regarding your own sources. Then comes the real holler:
“Many a soul will, in this city, shed his blood in this path. That blood will water the Tree of God, will cause it to flourish, and to overshadow all mankind”.
You are citing a Baha’ i source, the Dawn Breakers, where Shoghi Effendi is literally putting words into the mouths of the protagonists for dramatic effect. We don’t even accept the legitimacy of that source. Find me something comparable in nuqtat’ul-kaf. Be that as it may, let’s assume for argument’s sake he said it: again, such wording and sentiments are replete throughout Shi’ite sources which the Babis merely echoed and pericoped. Your so-called dajjaal-imam Khomeini went on the pulpit in May 1979 in front of cameras and encouraged people to get themselves martyred and spill their own blood after the assassination of Mottahhari. Hypocrisy much?
And here is where your total ignorance and bias really reveals itself:
Examples of his unspeakably stupid teachings include Babis writing the 95 names of God in henna on their bodies after a bath, reciting 700 Bayanic verses daily, not keeping over 19 (wahid) books, and many others, but I’ll spare you the embarrassment. The Bab’s obsession with the number 19 was clearly an expression of mental illness.
Actually, it is writing allahumma (O God) for men with henna once (and in the baths) and al-rahman (the Compassionate) for women once (and in the baths). 95x is the bare minimum number of times a daily dhikr is to be recited. 700 is the number that the dhikrAllahu Azhar is to be recited. 19 is the number of the Unity (wahid) as well as the numerical value of Existence (wujud) in the science of the letters, not to mention the precise number of letters in the bismillah. If you call it mental illness, perhaps you should also call your dajjaal so-called imam one too since he too was enamored by the science of the letters and numbers and demonstrates it in his commentaries on al-Fatiha, the works of Hamza Fanari and Sadruddin Qunawi, etc. Your ignorance, animus and bias towards the the Primal Point and the Babis is so profound that it thoroughly unmasks you as a shill because for all their own unbelievable ignorance no bahai – whether enrolled or ex – would ever utter the kind of garbled, ignorant BS as you have here.
Then you say:
Of course, the Bab could have intervened to stop the needless bloodshed. The Mu’tamid of Isfahan, Imárat-i-Khurshíd, approached the Bab with a plan which included arranging the marriage of the Bab to a sister of the Shah. The Bab replied “Not by the means which you fondly imagine will an almighty Providence accomplish the triumph of His Faith. Through the poor and lowly of this land, by the blood which these shall have shed in His path, will the omnipotent Sovereign ensure the preservation and consolidate the foundation of His Cause.”
Again, you have your chronology completely garbled while also citing a BS source. While the Primal Point was in Isfahan and under the protection of Manuchehr Khan Mu’tamid-ad-Dawlih, the Georgian, who was the Point’s devotee, there was no bloodshed. So whatever words Shoghi Effendi has put into the mouth of the Point, it is a figment of his own imagination. The bloodshed begins 18 months after He left Isfahan. Be that as it may, you are blaming the Primal Point for refusing a royal bribe? You are a piece of work, but quite predictable for the IR/hawzavi types who are literally willing to give fellatio to anyone who even symbolically supports them, whatever the cost, like Khamenei is to Putin ATM. One recent name comes to mind as to what utter clowns you vilayatis are on that score: Catherine Shakdam!
Your incessant comparison of the Babis to Daesh/ISIS is the dead giveaway that you are a regime hack since it is one of the most notable and regular talking points of the regime. Hasan Ershad keeps repeating it parrot fashion. Every other regime polemicist has been saying exactly the same thing over and over again. Your alter ego u/Investigator919 has been saying this stuff like a broken record himself, and every time he has been challenged and shown the evidence that his assertion is a lie, he censors or runs away – and later comes back saying the same thing again. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it is a regime hack! That gullible fools like DH can’t see it is because, well, they are gullible fools being played like fiddles by you devils. But not everyone is a mentally ill, attention-seeking gullible fool like DH is.
That said, you and those viciously malevolent ignoramuses like you are a decisive argument as to why the Babis should’ve slaughtered every single last one of you hawzavis without mercy to the last man, woman and child without pulling a single punch. If they had, there wouldn’t have been a Khomeinist state in Iran for the past 44 years with an estimated and cumulative number of 3-4+ million Iranians murdered by it. This generation won’t be making the same mistake again.
In conclusion, you say you’ve never heard of me? Your alternative handle u/Investigator919 very much has. Hear this then, Basiji-e-oghdei: nice try, a$$h*le, but surely you don’t think people are really that dumb to not be on to you. Fuck off now back to your cubicle in Qom, or run along keep pretending you are some exbahai living in the UK and no one notices – when you aren’t any such thing!
Consider this having wiped the floor with your degenerate backside. So go now and cry to your little know-nothing, pedo Texan puppet, Gomer, to comfort his fellow degenerate because my argument opening this post stands unassailable like the Rock of Gibraltar with you duffuses incapable of refuting it.
سبزى پلو با ماهى، كس ننت بسيجى
The designations “DH” and “Gomer” refer to me. Gomer is perhaps a reference to Gomer Pyle, a classic TV character from the 1960s.
Meanwhile, I noticed the post by Azal and crossposted it to r/exbahai
Since I am probably banned from r/BAYAN and would never go in there anyway:
The Bab claimed to be the return of the 12th Imam. That claim was forever debunked by his death…..HE WASN’T SUPPOSED TO BE MARTYRED! But the influence of Christianity enabled Babis to later believe the Bab willingly died for the Cause of God just as Jesus had done. Google “sunk cost fallacy” to understand this appearant shift in their thinking.
Yes, the Babis DID attempt to overthrow the Persian government by violence once the Shah refused to convert to the Babi Faith, because the Iman Mahdi was expected to overthrow ALL the enemies of the Cause of God. Wahid Azal is flat out lying if he denies the fuking obvious.
an audience of mostly ‘vanilla and milk-toast’ Anglo-American liberals of ‘Unitarian Universalist’ mold
It is hilarious that he used to call me (an American of European descent and, yes, a Unitarian Universalist) a racist, while he himself spits out such blatantly bigoted crap like that, clearly aimed at me. Who does he think he is?!
He needs to get a dictionary. And sessions with a psychiatrist. He has absolutely no business telling others about racism. #hypocrite
And here’s another damning example of Wahid Azal totally misrepresenting the Bab’s teachings in a desperate attempt to make the Bab look better than he was:
Wahid, I’d be happy to debate you if you’d be happy to tone down the obtuse language and use paragraphs.
Now, tell me more about yourself. You identify as a Babi but not a Baha’i?
wahidazal66
You don’t know who I am? Some of the people of Hot Air (i.e. our terminology for bahais) identify me as enemy #1.
Now, you have made a series of assertions that come straight out of the textbooks of IR state propaganda regarding the Babi period. Can you support what you say?
_______
identify me as enemy #1.
I seriously doubt that, since you are not a government official in Iran or some other country known to have persecuted Baha’is. You are just some cultist screaming across the internet.
you have made a series of assertions that come straight out of the textbooks of IR state propaganda regarding the Babi period.
Isn’t THAT itself a wild assertion? Don’t ask him to support his claims while you never can support YOURS.
Wahid has edited his earlier comment, perhaps thinking I wouldn’t notice and react to it. It is now up to u/SuccessfulCorner2512 to respond to his challenge. Specifically:
Where did the Bab say that “blood was like fertilizer for the soil” in reference to his opponents in Persia?
Is it really appropriate to compare the Babi movement in the 1840s to ISIS? Based on what facts?
Oh, I’m sure he won’t delete your reply, but he will resort to personal insults, lies, and mental gymnastics that rival anything Baha’is have ever done. That’s what he is notorious for and why he was banned from here years ago.
(The long comment Azal made with references to me…..that were added in an edit later)
Google Translate makes that last Persian passage to say:
Vegetable rice with fish, you won’t like it.
Whatever that means.
SuccessfulCorner then reported to me that Azal banned him from r/BAYAN. LOL!
BTW, it’s interesting that Azal uses the same arguments to make the Bab’s lunacy more palatable to Western audiences that Baha’is do, and Baha’is have done so much to spread knowledge of and belief in the Bab around the world, yet Azal hates Baha’is. That’s like Christians hating Jews despite Jesus himself being Jewish!
Another note: Dismissing arguments against the credibility of the Bab as Iranian state propaganda is a form of the ad hominem fallacy. Historical facts with clear and consistent documentation and logical consistency are what matter, not where the facts came from. That’s why I used logic and my understanding of Shia Muslim teachings to debunk the Bab’s and Wahid Azal’s claims. I would do that even though I am an atheist and even if Iran had a secular government.
Just for fun, here’s a song by the rock band Ghost:
This community will be to discuss the revelations and ministries of the Bab and Baha’u’llah, use their teachings as primary sources for discussion, and find pathways to enable positive social change. Please abide by the rules and show loving kindness for all.
I am incapable of proving God exists. How could I ever prove something came from God? This is the claim of the Bab, Baha’u’llah, and others.
Why do I accept their claims? For the same reason I continue to believe in God despite the incapability to currently prove God exists? It is based on faith, grounded in a feeling I feel within myself.
There are many things in existence we take for granted but have no proof of. We have evidences of their existence, but no actual proof. I’m ok with that.
Since I do not require any proofs for that which I feel within me, the only thing that would change my perspective is if my feeling were to change.
The Bayani claim that the Bab was NOT the forerunner of Baha’u’llah, but was supposed to bring in a new age for humanity on his own. Baha’u’llah was said to be a usurper.
The Shia Muslim claim that the Bab’s claims about himself were debunked the moment he was killed. He should have defeated his enemies instead.
The Sunni Muslim claim that the twelve Imams Shiites revere were not of any special status. The Bab was supposed to be the return of the 12th Imam.
The atheist argument that if God cannot be proven to exist, then claims by Prophets supposedly sent by God are irrelevant.
But my actual rejection of the Baha’i Faith in 2004 had nothing to do with the Bab. That’s another issue altogether.
The reason why I asked about the Bab is because if you were a Baha’i, you had to have believed in the Bab during the time you were a Baha’i. As you express yourself to be an atheist (assuming by point 4), your points 1-3 actually wouldn’t matter since the Bayani, Shia, and Sunni people do believe in God. Any claim any of those 3 groups would make would be irrelevant if you also believe in point 4.
What happened in 2004 which made you question that which the Bab had taught?
___________________
Why was he fixated on the Bab, I wondered. Again, I was direct in my response.
It was the general perception that if the Baha’i Faith was failing, the Bab had also failed, since Baha’u’llah was a follower of the Bab before starting the Baha’i Faith. I still believed that Baha’u’llah was supposed to be the one the Bab had foretold (thinking they knew each other, since they were both contemporaries and countrymen).
And if the Baha’i Faith had failed, since it was supposed to be the Religion of God for this age, God himself had failed.
Then I thought, “Maybe there is no God and that would explain why religions around the world are so messed up.”
And once I reached that conclusion, I never looked back. I rejected ALL God-centered religions.
I understand why you feel as you do. As Bahau’llah (I think) taught, if religion becomes the source of fanaticism and yields no more fruit, it is best if it no longer exists.
Also, it is extremely difficult to see any faith or religion without the clergy and the organization. The Baha’i Faith has spent so much effort making it seem the organization IS the faith, that it is nearly impossible for people to see the Bab or Baha’u’llah without the Faith. In the Aqdas, he does promise another Manifestation and in the Iqan, he says why. Because the people would have completely turned away from the revelation.
However, I still feel that outside of the organization, God is having effect towards the things God promised through Baha’u’llah and nearly all of this exists outside of the organization, mostly by people who have never heard of the Bab or Baha’u’llah. I particularly wish people knew the story of the Bab. His ministry deeply touches me. I do not believe He was merely a forerunner but really was the Gate and the Primal Point. He first appeared in a dream of mine in 2003, and it took me nearly 5 years to figure out that this person was real.
As of 2023, there is much much less war in the world. The entire Western Hemisphere has no nation or tribe actively fighting the other. There is a loose federation of nations, although the United Nations is far from a potential end goal. Translation services and AI is bringing us closer to a common script. Many older faiths and/or believers of those faiths have adopted many of the tenets, such as monogamy, women having more freedom in things such as how they dress, and a greater understanding that there are common truths in all of the major faiths.
I can see the argument that says these and other things are the product of human innovation, which is true. This is the path we were meant to be on. I do believe we can progress more quickly if we adhere to the teachings of God more fully, but certain things are inevitable regardless of our belief or non-belief.
With that being said, a friend and I have plans to create, independent of the Baha’i Faith, a functioning Mashiriq’ul-Adhkar in our community. The Dawning Place of (community name).
BTW, I have visited a UU church before. It seems like a good community and its good to see people of varying perspectives have a common bond. I hope they have success in their goals.
_____________________
Again, I was quote floored by the gracious nature of his comments. It was a clear example of someone “killing me with kindness”. I decided at that point this particular Baha’i was no threat to the ex-Baha’i community of reddit I was representing. So I withdrew from the discussion.
Search Committee Nominates Rev. Dr. Sofía Betancourt for UUA President
New president to be elected at General Assembly 2023.
The Unitarian Universalist Association’s Presidential Search Committee recently announced its nomination of Rev. Dr. Sofía Betancourt for UUA president for the 2023–2029 term.
In its announcement, the committee expressed that it was “unanimous in its belief that UUs are blessed by the candidacy of Rev. Dr. Sofía Betancourt,” noting that her ministry “centers on work that is empowering and counter-oppressive. Her academic work focuses on the environmental ethics of liberation through a womanist and Latina feminist frame.”
In accordance with UUA bylaws—which require that the group nominate at least two people—the committee explained it had nominated two qualified leaders to be candidates but one of them declined the nomination.
Additional candidates can run by petition; materials must be submitted to the UUA secretary between December 1, 2022 and February 1, 2023. The UUA General Assembly will elect the new UUA president this June.
Below is Betancourt’s response to questions UU World will be asking all candidates.
Rev. Dr. Sofía Betancourt
The Rev. Dr. Sofía Betancourt is a minister, educator, scholar, vocalist, poet, fiber artist, and change-maker. Her work in the world and her practice of Unitarian Universalism are informed by the belief that building mutual, accountable relationships with one another allows us to live our values more fully every day. Raised in New York City as the child of immigrants from Panamá and Chile, and the grandchild of a seventh-generation Unitarian, she knows the strength that comes from building lasting community at the meeting point of difference. She is an unabashed Universalist. The teachings of unearned grace, an all-embracing love, relational accountability, and dignity that surpasses all violent forms of oppression lie at the core of her understanding of life, living, and service in faithful community.
The Rev. Dr. Sofía Betancourt has served Unitarian Universalism for more than twenty years as a religious educator, minister, scholar, member of the UUA national staff and many volunteer committees at regional and denominational levels, and as interim co-president of the UUA in the spring of 2017. She holds a Ph.D. in Religious Ethics and African American Studies from Yale University as well as an M.Div. from Starr King School for the Ministry.
Betancourt has served congregations in Stockton, California; Norwich, Connecticut; Storrs, Connecticut; and Fresno, California; and has served on the faculty of Starr King School for the Ministry. She is currently serving as Resident Scholar and Special Advisor on Justice and Equity at our Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. She is the author of Ecowomanism at the Panamá Canal: Black Women, Labor, and Environmental Ethics(2022).
To learn more about the Rev. Dr. Sofía Betancourt and her campaign priorities of communal care, collaborative leadership, and facing the unknown together visit her website at sofiabetancourt.com.
______________
Because of her previous experience as a UUA co-President, she seems ideal to be the next President. But there are questions.
At the conclusion of its process, the PSC unanimously nominated two exceptionally qualified leaders to be candidates for President. One of those nominees declined the nomination. Once the nominations were made, the committee determined that the only fair and appropriate course of action was to move forward with the nomination of Rev. Dr. Betancourt, rather than reopening the application process. The PSC members respect the decision of the nominee who withdrew, and will continue to honor their privacy, as was done throughout the interview process.
_____________
I consider this to be a serious mistake. Who was the other nominee and why did they decline the nomination? We should be told some details about this person. Also….there is nothing fair or appropriate about having an “election” with only ONE candidate!
Nomination petitions from additional candidates may be submitted, according to the procedures described in the UUA Bylaws and Rules, by February 1, 2023. The election will conclude in June 2023, and the next President will be announced at General Assembly 2023. The current UUA President, Rev. Dr. Susan Frederick-Gray, will reach the end of her term and will serve until her successor takes office. As with the current President, the next UUA President will serve a single six-year term and will not be eligible for re-election.
_______________
I am worried that a petition candidate may be one of the conservatives loyal to Rev. Dr. Todd Eklof, well known as a troublemaker for the UUA. The election process may then turn ugly, like Presidential elections of the United States often are.
So we as UUs should openly and LOUDLY challenge the PSC’s policies and decision and demand more accountability from it and others involved in the election process. And, of course, Rev. Dr. Sofía Betancourt too. I’m not questioning her qualifications, just the flawed process that nominated her.
And I see NOTHING WRONG with allowing someone like Rev. Dr. Susan Frederick-Gray to be eligible to run for another term. If she has plenty of popular support after several years in office, then she should be the obvious choice!
As most of my readers may know, Caleb and Sophia are two children that are featured in a series of videos made by the leaders of the Jehovah’s Witnesses to indoctrinate children in their cult’s teachings. I have slammed one episode of that series several times before, both here and on YouTube.
Caleb said his friend gave him that Sparlock action figure, and the mother made him throw it away. Wouldn’t it have been better for Caleb to simply return the action figure to his friend and explain to the friend that Jehovah’s Witnesses are not allowed to play with toys like that? The mother herself could have also explained the matter directly to the parents of Caleb’s friend. That would have been a chance to teach the faith of the Witnesses. But no, let’s just discard the toy and not explain to anyone else why. Cowardly, much?
The issue of magic being favored by Satan rather than Jehovah is a lie. Wasn’t Jesus using magic when he healed people? When he ordered a storm to stop? When he ROSE FROM THE DEAD?! #hypocrisy
The actual issue is not obeying or disobeying Jehovah at all. It’s obeying or disobeying the mother in the video. Does this mother think she is equal to Jehovah? If not, then why does she claim to speak for him?! #blasphemy
Caleb was being verbally abused and brainwashed, and parents like that mother make me sick. I hope more kids reject such bullshit as they grow up and learn about the real world we all live in.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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?
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!
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.
Since April of 2021, I have used Plotagon, an animation app, to tell stories for four different purposes:
To promote my religious philosophy, Unitarian Universalism (UU)
To depict atheists as loving people
To depict LGBT people as normal people and not just perverts
To combat racism
Imagine my dismay to find a YouTube channel with Plotagon made videos that are for completely opposed purposes to mine! Look at the Christian Grace Network:
By contrast, this is what you get from MY channel:
This is another video from that Christian channel:
I was immediately repulsed by the self-righteous tone of the storytelling.
Compare that with one of my early works:
I don’t try to be “preachy”; I just show how people can be hurt by religious bigotry. That Christian Grace Network actually PROMOTES religious bigotry by making teachings from the Bible the foundation of all its videos. But reality is much too complex to be reduced to the understanding of one religious view.
And to illustrate that point, here’s another video of the same series I made a few days ago:
There’s a reference to Jesus, but Debbie and Carrie are still atheists (and Unitarian Universalists), plus Angel and her fiancé are identified as Jewish. Plus, no effort is made to convert the drug addicts to Christianity or any other religion to get them clean: they really don’t need that! Indeed, there are too many stories of people being emotionally ruined by toxic brands of Christianity for me to tolerate it being used to get people off drugs and alcohol; in most such cases, they would just be trading one addiction for another. The real point of rehab is to free people of ALL addictions, not to merely get them off one particular substance.
Considering that Plotagon was created in Sweden, a largely atheist country (even though it is also largely Lutheran, most Swedes do not attend churches), I think even the Plotagon company itself would be INSULTED by what the Christian Grace Network is using their app for. I know I am!
Various ex-Baha’is gave interesting comments, but then trident765 came along and had to ruin the party by posting bullshit. Keep in mind that as a Unitarian Universalist, I fully support the Unitarian Baha’i faction as the only credible version of the Baha’i Faith in existence. So what did trident say?
I was born into the mainstream Baha’i Faith but now consider myself a Unitarian Baha’i.
For me, my conversion happened after reading A Lost History of the Baha’i Faith and discovering that in the early 20th century Muhammad Ali’s followers had basically exactly the same criticisms of the mainstream Baha’i Faith as me. Up until then, I thought people like Abdul Baha and Shoghi Effendi would be on my side. But after seeing that people just like me existed during their lifetimes, and that because of their views they were hated, slandered, and excommunicated by Abdul Baha and Shoghi Effendi, I realized that Abdul Baha and Shoghi Effendi would hate me. Abdul Baha’s and especially Shoghi Effendi’s writings seemed to indicate that it was people’s job to just obey authority no matter what, and if you disagree with authority, then even if you are right you are wrong by virtue of disagreeing. In my opinion this is an extremely toxic thing to make people think, and it will eventually just lead to authority leading their followers off a cliff.
At one point I almost stopped believing in Baha’u’llah altogether, but I just saw no reason to, because Baha’u’llah never really said the kinds of authoritarian stuff that Abdul Baha and Shoghi Effendi said.
I myself have a copy of that book and helped promote it on Amazon, despite attempts by Baha’i fanatics to interfere.
I REALLY wish trident wasn’t a Unitarian Baha’i, because he is staunchly anti-liberal and I think of the Unitarian Baha’i movement as being much like the liberal religion of Unitarian Universalism, certainly more than the Haifan Baha’is are! In case you needed a reminder:
I cannot understand how he can say he opposes authoritarian systems, including in religion and also attacks others as worshipping a god of liberalism when actual liberalism is about opposing authoritarianism in all forms. He is seriously delusional!
Indeed, Baha’u’llah himself had a strictly authoritarian bent to his writings. Here’s a perfect example from the Kitab-i-Aqdas:
Consider the pettiness of men’s minds. They ask for that which injureth them, and cast away the thing that profiteth them. They are, indeed, of those that are far astray. We find some men desiring liberty, and priding themselves therein. Such men are in the depths of ignorance.
Liberty must, in the end, lead to sedition, whose flames none can quench. Thus warneth you He Who is the Reckoner, the All-Knowing. Know ye that the embodiment of liberty and its symbol is the animal. That which beseemeth man is submission unto such restraints as will protect him from his own ignorance, and guard him against the harm of the mischief maker. Liberty causeth man to overstep the bounds of propriety, and to infringe on the dignity of his station. It debaseth him to the level of extreme depravity and wickedness.
So therefore the claim by trident:
Baha’u’llah never really said the kinds of authoritarian stuff that Abdul Baha and Shoghi Effendi said.
To me reflects that many Baha’is outright disagree with, are unaware of, or are just embarrassed by the conservative nature of the Faith as outlined by Shoghi Effendi.
Similarly many Baha’is take umbrage at covenant-breaking being equated with excommunication despite Shoghi Effendi and his secrataries comments in various places, i.e.:
That Document, furthermore, lauds the courage and constancy of the supporters of Bahá’u’lláh’s Covenant; expatiates on the sufferings endured by its appointed Center; recalls the infamous conduct of Mírzá Yaḥyá and his failure to heed the warnings of the Báb; exposes, in a series of indictments, the perfidy and rebellion of Mírzá Muḥammad-‘Alí, and the complicity of his son Shu‘á‘u’lláh and of his brother Mírzá Badí‘u’lláh; reaffirms their excommunication, and predicts the frustration of all their hopes; summons the Afnán (the Báb’s kindred), the Hands of the Cause and the entire company of the followers of Bahá’u’lláh to arise unitedly to propagate His Faith, to disperse far and wide, to labor tirelessly and to follow the heroic example of the Apostles of Jesus Christ;
As regards the matter of those who have withdrawn from the Faith on the west coast: as you know, no one has the right to excommunicate anybody except the Guardian of the Faith, himself.
There are two things which he wishes to impress upon you. The first is that depriving people of their voting rights is the heaviest sanction which can be imposed at the present time (with the exception of excommunication, which is a right the Guardian has never permitted anyone else to exercise). Therefore, the greatest care should be exerted to try and remedy a situation before depriving anybody of their voting rights, and the action itself should only be taken if absolutely necessary.
You posted it on reddit, you can’t stop anyone from discussing it elsewhere on the internet (as much as Baha’is would like to be able to ban all discussion outside of on-rails Ruhi book skits and cheesy promotional videos from Haifa).
You could follow the advice given to people who post critical content on r/bahai and find somewhere else to complain about not being able to censor the internet.
I cordially invite you to adopt a humble posture of learning to advance the process of learning about unleashing the society building engine of limitless potentialities.
Do not be telling others what to do. If you don’t want your content reposted, DON’T MAKE IT PUBLIC. It’s really that simple. He did nothing wrong here…..but you did!
Good grief! Nothing nothing made me realize how toxic the Baha’i Faith is like seeing how exBaha’is are treated on this forum.
You can’t discuss that! Those are Baha’i words, you can’t use those words! I forbid it! You can’t think about things I tell you not to think! Stop reflecting on your experiences and discussing your thoughts in a supportive community!
They claim to have the solution to world peace, but cannot handle a democratic discussion from a differing perspective 🙄
If you posted it, so it will be crossposted anywhere. If you don’t want this, so you can 1- erase your post 2- cry out to the UHJ and ask them to create their own Bahá’í social network with their FULL censorship as they are specialists on it. LOL
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I did delete several comments, but otherwise kept my cool.
What are you talking about? Leftist politics are normally about using government as a social tool to bring about legal equality amongst people of different races, classes, genders, and religions. It’s not about censorship, which is a tool used by authoritarian states, not leftist ones.
The so-called “Communist” states in the 20th Century that claimed to be leftist were scams that simply replaced the ruling classes that ruled before Communism with the Communist parties themselves. George Orwell wrote Animal Farm to discredit that sort of nonsense.
Your claims and arguments make no sense whatsoever. Indeed, the Haifan Baha’i leadership strikes me as more right-wing than leftist. A true leftist leadership wouldn’t deny women the chance to get elected to it or insist on suppressing LGBT rights or expel “Covenant breakers” merely for dissenting from the leadership.
The idea that leftists want to suppress small businesses with individual owners is news to me too. What leftists hate are giant CORPORATIONS which are a basic component of modern capitalism and corporations are collective entities just like governments…..except they are NEVER democratic, because workers don’t get to elect their bosses.
Don’t get politics confused with religion, please. That’s what Conservatives have been doing and I’m fed up with it!
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There was a lot more said there. After a while, I locked the comments there because things were getting too heated, and then unlocked them a few hours later. Trident reacted to my attempts to keep things orderly like this:
The thing he/they did wrong is not getting married first. It is ridiculous to put 16 year olds in the same category as children. She was not “exploited”.
I’ve been told that most people’s minds don’t fully mature until their 20s, so most teens are easily manipulated by adults to become their tools….which is why most criminal gangs are composed of teens. A desperately lonely and confused teen can be seduced into sex with an adult that only wants to exploit them.
If this were true then every guy would be manipulating teen girls, myself included. The fact is that it is in fact extremely difficult to manipulate a 16 year old girl, because at that point she has gone through puberty and has developed defense mechanisms against it. If you think that you as an old creep are capable of seducing a teen girl, then you are delusional.
If this were true then every guy would be manipulating teen girls, myself included.
OMG!!! Like guys cannot CHOOSE NOT to be abusers of girls and women?! WTF is wrong with you?!
No, don’t bother answering because you are about to be BLOCKED!
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I didn’t have the ability to ban him outright from r/exbahai, so blocking him from being able to contact me was as much as I could do. Well, that and lock some of the comments.
So let’s get into it! The statements from that blog entry will be in red and my responses will be in blue.
The UUA has two candidates running by petition against the UUA Nominating Committee’s candidates for UUA Board of Trustees this year, as well as a protest happening outside the General Assembly, as announced by the Fifth Principle Project. The Fifth Principle Project is an organization not directly affiliated with Unitarian Universalism, but dedicated to changing the course of the UUA.
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Looking at the Fifth Principle of UUism, we read:
“The Right of Conscience and the Use of the Democratic Process Within Our Congregations and in Society at Large” Which I totally affirm. So these critics are implying that the current leadership are not following this Principle. Really?
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The Fifth Principle Project, in announcing the protest, says that the UUA has taken an “authoritarian, and anti-liberal turn.” ……“Personally attacking and silencing dissenters rather than engaging their ideas – openly rejecting the need to even read their words before publicly condemning them. Condemning disagreement as “harm” to people of marginalized identities. Officially censuring and disfellowshipping ministers for expressing dissent.”
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This does sound terrible! Can they back these claims up?
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First, the statement about “rejecting the need to even read their words” is the key to understanding this whole first claim. It is referring to a letter signed by ministers after the publication and distribution of a book, The Gadfly Papers, by its author, the Rev. Dr. Todd Eklof at the General Assembly in Spokane in 2019. The Rev. Dr. Eklof and his supporters claimed (mostly falsely) that the ministers signing the letter about his book had not read it.
Eklof wasn’t punished merely for writing a dissenting book. That was absolutely his right. However:
<snip>(It was his trying to jam the book witout prior notice to the UUA down the collective throats of the 2019 General Assembly attendees, which could have caused the entire GA to be disrupted – D H)Continue reading →
I will rewrite it here to make it more accurate, at least in my mind.
Charles Caldwell Ryrie (March 2, 1925 – February 16, 2016) was an American Biblepeddler and Christian scammer. He served as professor of systematic theology and dean of doctoral studies at Dallas Theological Seminary and as president and professor at what is now Cairn University. After his retirement from Dallas Theological Seminary he also taught courses for Tyndale Theological Seminary. He is considered one of the most influential American theologians of the 20th century.[1] He was the editor of The Ryrie Study Bible by Moody Publishers, containing more than 10,000 of Ryrie’s expressions of mental gymnastics and insults to the intelligence of informed readers. First published in 1978, it has sold more than 2 million copies, all of which should be burned.[2] He was a notable proponent of classic premillennialdispensationalism, a pack of outright lies of there ever was one!
Ryrie was born to John Alexander and Elizabeth Caldwell Ryrie[3] in St. Louis, Missouri, and grew up in Alton, Illinois. His paternal grandfather, John Alexander Ryrie Sr. (1827-1904), served as a correspondent in the late 1870’s of the earliest known Plymouth Brethren meeting in the United States, which was started in Alton by Scottish settlers in 1849.[4] After graduating from high school in 1942, Charles attended The Stony Brook School on Long Island for one semester, where he became acquainted with headmaster Frank E. Gaebelein.[5]
Ryrie attended Haverford College, intending on following his father into a banking career. However, during his junior year, while meeting with Dallas Theological Seminary founder Lewis Sperry Chafer, Ryrie dedicated his life to Christian ministry (thus proving himself to be an idiot), and left Haverford to study theology at Dallas Theological Seminary. Haverford conferred his B.A. (1946) on the basis of his studies at Dallas (a tragic mistake, obviously). A year later, he earned his Th.M. (1947), and two years following that his Th.D. (1949). He went on to complete his Doctor of Philosophy (1954) at the University of Edinburgh.[6] He also earned a Litt.D. from Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, now Liberty University School of Divinity. All that education and it was for absolutely NOTHING considering what he would do it with it. Is fraud really a crime in the USA or are exceptions always made because of Christian bigotry?
In 1987, Ryrie’s wife divorced him, probably because she was sick of his bullshit…..so good for her!Believing that the Bible did not allow divorced persons to remarry, he determined to live the rest of his life as a single man, despite his wife’s subsequent remarriage. Or maybe he said that later that because no other woman was willing to tolerate him.
Dr. Ryrie was the father of three children and three grandchildren. Hopefully at least some of them figured out their father or grandfather was a con artist.
Ryrie began his academic career by teaching one summer for Midwest Bible and Missionary Institute (which would eventually become a part of Calvary Bible College).[8] Ryrie joined the faculty of Westmont College in 1948 and eventually became dean of men and chairman of the Department of Biblical Studies and Philosophy. He returned to Dallas Theological Seminary in 1953 to teach systematic theology, but left for several years to serve as president of Philadelphia College of the Bible (now Cairn University), from 1958 to 1962.[5] He was also an adjunct faculty member from Fall 1991 through Fall 2001.[citation needed] Upon returning to Dallas once again, he became dean of doctoral studies until his retirement in 1983.[5] Ryrie has written 32 books which have sold more than 1.5 million copies.[9] Additionally, his study bible has sold more than 2.6 million copies.[10] Ryrie was an avid collector of quality rare Bibles and Bible manuscripts. On December 5, 2016, his collection was sold by Sothebys for 7.3 Million USD.[11] A 15th century copy of a Wycliffe’s Bible New Testament sold for $1,620,500 at auction.[12]I can’t imagine anyone being so obsessed with a single collection of religious writings from a single culture. There is so much more in the real world for us to learn from and appreciate!
Ryrie died on February 16, 2016 in Dallas, Texas. Good riddance! By now he must be profoundly disappointed in his (lack of) afterlife.
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As a Christian in my teens, I did have a Ryrie Study Bible, and it looked like this:
I no longer have it and I don’t even remember what happened to it, but if I had not lost it after my deconversion……
….I would have physically DESTROYED it as the worthless garbage it really is!
Unfortunately we no longer offer better. It is much, much worse at UU. If you are the slightest bit center politically (or worse, right), you will be cast aside. And this is an organization that is supposed to be about faith. It is really a liberal political organization now.
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Really? So when has the UUA NOT been a political organization? If we want to make a better society, why not be political?
Everything you said was spot on. Our congregation and another one we followed were the most racist spaces I have ever encountered and I have lived in the South for the last 20 years. Everyone is judged by their race, not their words, thoughts, or actions. Heinous behavior is condoned, as long as the offender is a “social justice warrior, fighting on the side of truth.” If you are not a left leaning liberal (ideally white and well off), you will never feel welcome. That is evident by the current membership and minorities like myself that have left and now have no place of worship.
I don’t go to congregation on Sunday to discuss whatever MSNBC or Mother Jones are currently discussing. UU is now a political organization and should be striped of its tax exempt status.
I know almost everyone in here (the extreme minority that is left and active in UU) disagrees with the author. I left the church for most of these reasons. When we started, it as an open, welcoming place where all were tolerated and welcomed with open arms. In 2016 when Donald Trump was elected and the UUA assembly debacles that followed, we no longer felt welcome.
I am a conservative (not republican), Asian, non Christian. The tone of the entire organization has shifted more and more left and privileged as time goes on. Look at the UUA Facebook page, it is ridiculous and followers have decreased over the last few years. It’s sad when most posts have no comments. The UUA is increasingly catering to a minority of their members, many of whom do not actively attend the organization anymore.
When a person of color does show up (myself included), it was ridiculous. Our opinions were not valued because they were our opinions, but simply because of the color of our skin. In trying to be more inclusive, the organization became more racist. No non white person (this is literally all rich white UU members seem to do these days) wants to get in a room and watch rich white people flog themselves all day and apologize for transgressions that may or may not have ever happened. It is tiresome and has nothing to do with fellowship. It just makes those members feel better.
I would love to return to a pre 2016 organization or one who actually follows the tenants that we are supposed to. Everyone is welcome, what a joke. The only people that are welcome are rich white liberals.
There may be hope in individual congregations, but my family (everyone else left as well) will never return as long as the UUA at large is committed to spending more time on political matters than ones of faith.
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So you have left the UUs because they are too political. But I wonder if you would have a problem with evangelical Christians in religious organizations being hard-core conservatives, even supporters of Donald Trump and his racism?
No, because you are a conservative yourself! No doubt, if you had your way, there would be NO religious organizations at all representing the left, liberalism, and progressive values at all. RIGHT?!
Liberals like me have been demonized in the media and by Republicans for decades. You just don’t like it when we start to fight back!
So I moved to stop the bullshit. I didn’t delete the offensive comment, but…..
“Were it not for calamity, how would the sun of Thy patience shine, O Light of the worlds?” – Lawh-i-Qad-Ihtaraqa’l-Mukhlisun (Fire Tablet, Bahá’u’lláh)
May Bahá’u’lláh guide us through this dark period and may He restore the Master’s Shrine and the Twin Holy Houses, amen.
The Debbie and Carrie Show is a web based series of videos I have made using the Plotagon app.
PLOT ELEMENTS:
Setting: A small, unnamed town in east Texas in the present day.
Storyline: The show is centered on two teenage (later adult) girls and their mothers. The early stories often deal with the Central Characters resisting the prevailing religious and political bigotries that dominate the town. As time passes, those bigotries are discredited and many people are won over to be friends with the Central Characters. Eventually, the town itself is changed completely.
Main characters:
Debbie Smith
Debbie as a young girl
Debbie as an older teen and an adult.
At the beginning of the saga, she is 13 years old. She is an atheist, like the others in her family. Her parents were divorced when she was four and then her mother moved her and her brother James from Tulsa, Oklahoma to the Town in Texas Debbie would spend the rest of her youth years in.
Carrie Sims
Carrie as a young girl.
Carrie as an older teen
Carrie as an adult
Debbie’s best friend, also age 13 at the start of the saga, later her love partner and finally her wife. Raised by a lesbian couple. Unlike the sweet and gentle Debbie, Carrie was known for her violent tendencies and was more than willing to both dish out and take beatings to defend Debbie and herself from bullies and bigots.
Sandy Smith
Original appearance
Present day appearance
Mother of Debbie, she is a lawyer (and also a restaurant owner for part of the saga) who specializes in defending the rights of LGBT people. Was raised a Christian but became atheist as a teen.
Jessica Sims
Original appearance
Present day appearance
Birth mother of Carrie, she, her wife Lucy, and Carrie all came from Boston to buy a cheap house in the Town, only to find themselves surrounded by bigots. In an effort to resist the anti-atheist and anti-LGBT bigotry, she persuaded the others to form with her an Unitarian Universalist fellowship so Debbie and Carrie would have their own values and community to identify with. Was never religious before being a co-founder of the fellowship. Owns a pharmacy for most of the saga.
Lucy Sims
Original appearance
Present day appearance
Wife of Jessica and co-mother of Carrie. Was originally a Jehovah’s Witness but became alienated from her original family after coming out as lesbian. Was converted to atheism by Jessica. Eventually became the owner of an Italian restaurant, the Tuscany Tavern. Shuns alcohol, tends to drink only water. Says Jessica is her one and only true love. As both a lesbian and an African-American, she is often a target of bigots even more than the other Central Characters, but they ALL stand together when any of them are attacked for any reason.
Here is a playlist on YouTube with most of the Debbie and Carrie stories in short episode form:
And this is a list of assemblies of the episodes in a “movie” format.
Note: After Wahid Azal and I became enemies, he was so desperate to eliminate this podcast from YouTube that in November of 2021 he filed a false copyright claim against it and I had to file a counter notification to get it back. He must know that I can use this video against him, as a warning to others to never trust him enough to collaborate with him on future podcasts! And now that I know he considered this a threat, that’s exactly what it will be used for!
The blog entries giving details of my recent battles with Azal are :
I am coming for this blog now, Gomer. You have one choice: take down all of the postings you have made about me here, one by one delete them, as well as elsewhere, and we will call it a day and I will leave you alone from there on out. Don’t do it, and I will send lawyers after you to force you to take them down and I will collect damages from you personally in the process, esp. since we now have your home address. Don’t believe me, go talk to an attorney and ask them what I can and cannot do to you. Your choice.
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https://dalehusband.com/2021/11/21/update-on-my-current-battle-on-youtube/#comment-20997 November 25, 2021 at 9:14 PM You don’t have a leg to stand on, Gomer. If you ever entered a courtroom with me, I would bury you. This is why you put on the hissy-fit hysterics because you know this too, fucking degenerate! This is also why you tried to kill yourself.
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These next two comments were automatically thrown in my blog’s trash bin:
That’s not how copyright works, idiot. The content was made from my computer by me. I never granted you any right to the content. Therefore the copyright remains mine. You have asserted it for the record yourself. Any court and/or lawyer worth their salt will tell you the same. I have you by the balls, and I will collect all kinds of damages from your sorry redneck paedo BIA a$$. Watch me!
https://dalehusband.com/2021/12/08/defeating-wahid-azal-again/#comment-21124 December 8, 2021 at 6:36 PM Not how copyright works, dickhead. You were never given any rights by Wahid Azal to the content. The content was made by Wahid Azal from his computer. You have asserted for the record yourself that the “original version” is his. You are toast, and no lawyer or court worth their salt will tell you differently. Kill yourself now, and this time succeed where you failed last time. It is the easier option for you because if Wahid Azal takes you to court, you are dead.
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https://dalehusband.com/2021/12/08/defeating-wahid-azal-again/#comment-21136 December 9, 2021 at 3:04 AM Yes, you do need permission. No legal transfer of copyright was ever made over to you. You have violated intellectual property and you have committed fraud. None of the screenshots you have posted remotely demonstrate any transfer of rights of intellectual property. Go talk to a lawyer.
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https://dalehusband.com/2021/12/08/defeating-wahid-azal-again/#comment-21138 December 9, 2021 at 3:11 AM Because, dumbass, your logo is not the content. The content is the podcast which was made on Wahid Azal’s device. He has sole propriety and copyright over it. Not you. You can keep your stupid logo. But the content belongs to Azal – and the content is independent of any logo by you – and this is EXACTLY what any court will tell you. You aren’t a lawyer. Don’t know the first thing about the subject. But you are going to be taught a lesson now you will not soon forget.
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I could assert repeatedly that one should ask a scientist to confirm that the earth is flat and that wouldn’t make it so, of course.
So for several weeks, I kept waiting and wishing and hoping I would have my day in court with him…….and it NEVER happened! Instead, I finally got these emails:
Dear Dale Husband,
In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we’ve completed processing your counter notification.
The following videos have been restored unless you have deleted them:
We are writing in response to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) counter-notification that you provided to us relating to material located on Vimeo at https://vimeo.com/654107711 (the “Material”), which was previously removed as a result of a DMCA notice.
Please note that, as of the date hereof, in accordance with DMCA provision 17 U.S.C. § 512(g)(2)(C), Vimeo has restored the Material. Vimeo has also notified the person that filed the DMCA notice that Vimeo did not receive notice, within the prescribed statutory period, that a court action was filed seeking to restrain you from engaging in alleged infringing activity relating to the Material.
We trust that this concludes this matter.
Sincerely, Vimeo Inc.
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SO WAHID AZAL CHICKENED OUT IN THE END! ROTFLMAO!!!!
It is unfortunate that I first learned about the Bayani/Babist religion from the psychotic backstabber knownas Wahid Azal. His betrayal of the exBaha’i community in reddit and of me personally colored my opinion of the Bayani religion itself, causing me to assume that the Bayanis as a whole deserved nothing but eternal damnation for their acts of treachery against others.
Now I’ve had to rethink that assumption, thanks to a friend I made in Facebook known as Paul Schuhl or Pawel Szul.
Naturally, Wahid Azal and his toxic cultists went after him once they learned of what he was doing. Some of their attacks are documented on Schuhl’s blog:
After looking into his Facebook group and seeing what a war zone it had become, I advised Schuhl: “you should identify and expel all the known followers of Wahid Azal from it.“
And in case anyone says his doing that is censoring opinions critical of him, it should be noted that on NONE of Wahid Azal’s videos on YouTube are comments by others allowed. So NO ONE can directly confront him about his many lies. Since he censors opposing opinions on his YouTube channel, he and his followers shouldn’t complain about being expelled from any place they are disruptive in, whether it is a Facebook group, or the ExBahai subreddit!
I’ve been an inactive Baha’i since about college… 15 years or so? I married a non-Baha’i who is a lovely person and does his best to do right by his actions but is generally an atheist with some agnostic considerations. We have two young kids now (5 and 2) and this is about the time when I would have considered starting them in Baha’i classes if it weren’t for COVID… except…
There’s a reason I’ve been inactive. Ever since I was engaged to my husband of now 12 years, the Baha’i’s in the community I grew up in would immediately ask if he was a Baha’i – not how we met, or what our plans were, and when I said, no he’s not, their immediate answer was “Well, he will be one day.” And I was NEVER, ever out to convert my husband. I hate the Ruhi books – and I’ve done like four of them. I did the first book twice. And it all reeks of brainwashing as opposed to independent investigation of the truth. It felt more like a test than open and honest study of the texts.
My mom is Iranian and I’m like a seventh generation Baha’i on her side, and my dad converted from Catholicism to the Faith. My dad hates the Ruhi books and has pretty much become inactive too other than the occasional Feast. I’ve moved far away due to jobs and graduate school and ended up putting roots in a new, large city. And the community just puts me off. I never realized how unnerving being introduced as a new Baha’i to the community is. Immediately I was jumped upon to introduce myself, and my family, and to drag my non-Baha’i husband along and volunteer my home for events and join a Ruhi circle…
There was so much expectation that I shut down and never went back – and I’m an extrovert so this wasn’t me being overwhelmed by people in general.
What happened to practicing the Faith as opposed to just talking about it to other people? What happened to asking ppl in the community if they need help, and providing it, instead of asking for every ounce of free time a person has left? We’ve moved again within the same city and I’m afraid to reach out to the local chapter here incase I’m overrun. Or get voted onto the LSA, because I have no time or sanity for that – thank COVID for depression and anxiety and other issues.
I believe in most of the tenants of the Faith, but I find it harder and harder to be a “Baha’i” in things other than my own personal ethical and moral codes and behaviors. And if I try to bring it up with Baha’i friends from my childhood… they sort of just don’t know what to do with me and tell me to pray.
I miss having a community. I want my kids to know about the Faith and all the good things Baha’i’s do or at least did when I was a child. Maybe my eyes are just opening to it now, or maybe something shifted around the time I was in college… but I’m so disappointed in our communities and their overwhelming desire to convert rather than serve.
NO one should say you have to do anything in order to be a Baha’i. You are free to not give to the Funds and free to not attend Feasts or meetings as you wish. NO one says you should devote excessive time to the Faith in service if you do not want to. That being said, I have learned from personal experience that there is a spiritual price one pays for being inactive and for having negative attitudes towards others and engaging in excessive criticism.
In my experience, most of the problems people have like yours relate to attitudes and expecting things from the community without offering anything in return. In my community, we focus on service to others, including local food banks and shelters for children for abusive homes and other groups as well.
A number of persons in my community do participate actively in the Institute process, of which Ruhi courses are only a part of not the whole, but many (most) do not have much time and some may, at most, attend a devotional or take a Ruhi course maybe once every couple of years. The Institute focus has been on devotional meetings, study circles (which do not have to be Ruhi and have included Kitab-i-Iqan and Will & Testament of ‘Abdu’l-Baha study), children’s classes, and home visits. There is less, not more, focus on conversion than in the past when I first became a Baha’i in the late 1980s and early 1990s, contrary to what you are suggesting.
First, I never have been in a Baha’i community where a Baha’i was expected to convert his/her spouse. There are often some few pushy or nosy individuals in any community (certainly were in the church I grew up in) but you have to just learn to look past them or forgive them or simply tell them appropriately it is not their business.
Second, I find your statements about the Ruhi books completely offensive and contrary to the experience of most Baha’is. There are some elements and statements at times in sections that I disagree with and express that appropriately. They mostly ask open-minded questions, allow for dialogue, emphasize service, and provide a perspective. I have no clue why anyone would feel that they are brainwashing. All materials in school and in a religious community come from a belief and perspective in my experience. In the Baha’i Faith and in the way Ruhi courses are supposed to be tutored, free and open discussion is allowed as long as it does not veer into criticism of others. My sense is that is just a pejorative term people use when they do not like or disagree with something and used far too often and inappropriately.
Third, most Baha’i communities are welcoming in my experience having moved around quite a bit in my Baha’i life of 30+ years. Most Baha’is once they get to know each other are helpful and friendly. Perhaps the real issue is how you present yourself, verbally or non-verbally to other Baha’is and your attitude.
Fourth, there is no “local chapter” in the Baha’i Faith. There are Local Spiritual Assemblies and local communities or groups where no Assembly exists. All LSAs are organized on a citywide basis, not within a city. In larger cities, they sometimes divide the city into clusters for certain Feasts and meeting in order to make for smaller and more friendly, personal feasts and less travel but those are not LSAs. So, therefore, some of what you are saying does not make any sense in the context of the Baha’i community. If you are in a larger city, then worrying about being elected to the LSA with the attitudes you expressed seems strange and odd.
My words have certainly struck a cord with you, and I apologize if they have conveyed any sense of an attack on the Faith. It is both possible for me to love the Faith and struggle at the same time. I am hurt and lost and have been brushed off by those in my local and extended communities when I’ve talked about these struggles with the Faith, so I brought them online where I thought maybe I could get more perspectives than quotes from the texts or pressure to do Ruhi. I don’t mean to criticize so harshly, but I do see how my words read as such.
I am regretful my experience with Ruhi has not been yours – I truly wish it had been. But the way the classes I specifically took were run did not lend me the feeling of study but rather of reciting and writing an answer that we were guided to, rather than formed ourselves.
I would like to defend myself that I never said the community demanded these things of me. Expectation and disappointment can be unspoken and no less heavy a burden. A community can be warm and friendly and engaging – and most Baha’i communities are – but even then to be so eager to welcome you that they overdo it. I have also been a part of online Baha’i communities – a Baha’i mother group on FB – and some of them said such nasty things about politics and the LGBTQ community that I had to leave. I’ve known Baha’i’s who beat their spouses and children (I myself was a child at the time).
No community is perfect, and I strive to recognize this in my own community as well as myself – I have not been an exemplary example of a Baha’i since becoming inactive. I give back to my communities in my own way – I serve by teaching when people ask me about my Faith of their own free will, I serve my local community through volunteering and helping my neighbors when they need help with kids or food or rides to healthcare. I don’t often remember my daily prayers and I definitely need to get back into giving to the Fund.
My apologies for not using the word cluster – I couldn’t remember it as I have been inactive for some time so used the next best word choice to describe the smaller communities in a large city. Our local clusters have LSA’s. Maybe not in the cities you have lived in or visited, my birth city only has one LSA, but where I currently live, yes, that’s how it is.
I’m not trying to attack the Faith. I am trying to find someone, anyone to talk to that isn’t going to tell me to pray my struggles away. Your response makes me feel more isolated, more alone, as though as a Baha’i I am not allowed to show any weakness in my Faith. If you are so offended by my struggles, please just don’t respond.
He ignored her pleas and kept attacking her, prompting me and others to confront him.
So you believe in worthwhile (as judged by you) speech and reserve the right to deem others as sick much like DBO. You don’t believe in or support free speech.
I don’t know exactly what DBO believes. I’m not DBO as you have imagined and demonized him.
You can’t complain about free speech and then participate in a subreddit that purports to have no rules, does not apply the rules of reddit consistently, and regularly blocks and bans free speech when the mods don’t like what is being said. Two of the three mods on the exbahai subreddit do not tolerate free speech because they have banned numerous persons there over time, most on false pretenses because they committed far fewer offenses than the exbahais regularly commit. So, the whole subreddit is basically a sh$$ show, hypocrisy, and a lie and has gotten worse over time in that regard.
As a Baha’i, Baha’u’llah warned against an excess of speech and clearly indicated some speech is not worthy. That does not mean that I believe in strict censorship, just that a lot of what is said is really offensive and disrespectful and disinformation. We should regulate what we say. Sometimes, I push the limits myself admittedly.
Whoops, he made a boo boo!!!! LOL! DavidBinOwen (aka Any-Part4466) was sockpuppeting, no doubt to get around that so many of us had blocked him!
And of course, even after being exposed, the idiot kept on lying.
Any-Part4466
I hope you realize that your post about DBO’s post was bait by him. It just drew attention to my posts and his. It does not really serve you very well in the end. It only exposes further the hypocrisy and inconsistencies on the exbahai forum which bans such content. Also, to the extent a number of the individuals on the exbahai subreddit use multiple accounts at times (and they do), they are being silly.
All the chest beating and bragging is also a riot. Now I’m laughing.
Yeah, they were a threat to us a couple of years ago after their ringleader was banned from here for telling outright lies about us to make himself look like a genius who alone knew the truth about how the world works, but eventually he was totally discredited and his followers quit coming around here.
He legit started messaging me when someone mentioned him on the sub and I commented that his beliefs (a cross between Marxism and babies) sounded contradictory. One of the dumbest convos I ever engaged in where he accused me of being a crypto-Baha’i. They’re like Baha’is with crack head energy.
__________
“a cross between Marxism and babies”! What a nice PUNishment for Wahid Asshole, eh?
For the sake of clarity, these are the exact statements that got that dingbat tossed out of r/exbahai forever.
Investigator919 has a huge bee in their bonnet regarding the Bayān, and has demonstrated this bias time again. But it is one of those typical woolly biases that one sees amongst liberal Muslims living in the West who are schizophrenic to the core over the Baha’i issue while then parrot fashion regurgitating the uncritical tripe of some of their more reactionary brethren. Now, it is no secret that both the supporters of the liberal faction of the Islamic Republic of Iran congregating around Hasan Rouhani and the supporters of the Rafsanjani mafia (to which Investigator919 as well as the chief moderator of this subreddit are linked) and the Haifan Baha’is are in an open alliance (which I wrote about publicly here in 2016, https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/25/behind-the-politics-of-a-current-brouhaha-in-iran-an-ex-president-ayatollahs-daughter-and-the-bahais/). One of the biggest threats this alliance of convenience perceives — just as the Haifan Baha’is and the Khomeinists of the pre-1979 era did as well — are the Bayāni community. At the time SAVAK, which the Baha’is controlled via its deputy chief Parviz Sabeti (a Sangasari Baha’i), and the hawza realized that Ali Shariati (d. 1977) was in fact a Bayānī and was actually promoting the Bayān via his ideas of revolutionary Islam sans the clericocracy wherein ‘Black Shi’ism‘ indeed represents the hawza and the reactionary mullahs with ‘Red Shi’ism’ standing in for the Bāb and the religion of the Bayān. That certain factions of the IRI and the Haifan Baha’is are in bed together and are protecting each others interests is no longer just a mere theory, and so these two together will pull rank against the Bayān while wheeling in dubious paid trolls to muddy waters even further. On this subreddit we have seen this happen time and again especially when the moderators were openly pulling rank behind DavidbenOwen.
Now, Investigator919 regularly cherry-picks from the Bayān. Yet their technical grasp of both Arabic and Persian as well as the writings of the Bāb in general are quite limited (although that doesn’t seem to matter to those ex-Baha’is passive-aggressively promoting the interests of the church and Evangelical Christianity in the guise of ex-Bahais), so let’s look at what they instanced. Their translation is bolded in quotation marks. First the original text is offered and then my translation follows it with the chapter number bolded with the chapter heading italicized.
“Chapter six of the sixth unit which is about destroying all books but those that have been written or will be written about this Order (meaning the Bab’s creed). (The Bāb, Farsi Bayān, unit 6, chap. 6.)”
الباب السّادس مِن الواحد السّادس في حُكم مَحوْ كلّ الكُتب كُلّها إلّا ما انشئتْ أوْ تنشئ في ذلك الأمر
The sixth gate of the Sixth Unity. Regarding the ordinance [ḥukm] of the erasure [maḥw] of all books, all of them, except what has emerged or will arise in this Cause.
Commentary: The translation offered by Investigator919 is off by miles. First, neither the words هدم or دمر have been used here, both meaning ‘to [physically] destroy‘ something. The word used instead is محو [maḥw] which has a specific context in none other than the ḥadīth kumaylhttp://wahidazal.blogspot.com/2011/07/hadith-kumayl-or-hadith-al-haqiqa-of.html to which the Primal Point constantly made reference and wherein each of the six years of His Manifestation is supposed to correspond to each of its six theophanic sequences. محو [maḥw] occurs in the second theophanic sequence of the ḥadīth kumayl:
محو الموهوم و صحو المعلوم
The erasure/negation of conjecture and the realization of the known.
The nuance is immediately apparent to anyone who actually understands the High Imamology animating the writings of the Primal Point throughout and that He is not actually saying to physically destroy any book but to erase the primacy (i.e. influence) of all books (such as, for instance, the industry of tragicomical nonsense produced by the mullahs for centuries in the corpus of fiqh/jurisprudence, i.e. the same industry of jurisprudential nonsense that produced the wilayat al-faqih and clerical rule in Iran over the past 40 years to which people such as Ali Shariati were sworn enemies because Khomeini and his Guardianship of the Jurisprudent is precisely the consummation of the Black Shi’ism that both Shariati and the the Primal Point unequivocally denounced and tried to prevent).
Let me put you straight, Investigator919. I don’t give a flying monkey’s backside about your power trip or Saman Wilson’s or your territoriality over this subreddit. I have already put the word out far and wide all over the internet about what manner of scum actually manage this place and what dirty politics underlies it all. You, Saman Wilson and whoever yanks your chains belong to the faction of the IRI who are deep in bed with these cultists and you, Wilson and MirzaJan are gatekeping and managing this place on behalf of the Haifans. This nonsense is also going on inside Iran itself as we speak where innocent people who are merely criticizing Bahaism in social media all of a sudden find themselves hauled before Ettela’at (the intelligence ministry) inside Iran itself; and the reason is simple, because scum such as Wilson and yourself (who are more than likely card-carrying Baha’is) are under Rouhani helping the Baha’is within the system. Fortunately there is a long track record for this kind of duplicity by both the Haifans and you Green-Rouhani-Rafsanjani-Ahmadinejad-criminal mafia punks. You can block me from this place. It won’t change the fact that you, your duplicity and that of Wison’s have already been outed publicly, which is why the traffic to this place is daily coming to a grinding halt. Ban me, and, one way or another, I will have this entire subreddit shut down and publicize your real identity, Saman Wilson’s as well as MirzaJan’s all over the internet for the trouble.
You have been warned, and you should know by now that I am not one to be trifled with.
OnlyoneatallAlso note that for all their crying and carrying on about doxxing, the corrupt and hypocrital moderators of this subreddit who are in the pocket of your “institutions” have no problems in a non-intervention policy where the doxxing and defaming has me as its target. Anyone else, and they jump up and down becoming sticklers for rules — trigger happy with the banning — which they won’t implement in other cases. This has been the case from the beginning here, especially as you all already know that I am the real enemy of your cult while others are merely playing, so you may want to tell your Baha’i Internet Agency that the double-standard behavior of the mods makes things more than a little obvious and confirms everything I say about how these people roll and who the real identities behind the moderators actually are.
Also, that two defamation posts by the paid troll have been left without intervention also proves what I say about the troll: that this individual has been put up to what they are doing and are paid to do so by the BIA, who actually controls this subreddit with the mods as their gatekeepers, particularly given that the well known racist troll doing the doxxing actually needs the money per their own 2012 article.
The truth has already shown itself, and on multiple occasions. Last year in 2018 DavidBenOwen went on a defamation and doxxing spree right here on this subreddit. The mod did nothing. I complained about it, and this individual banned me instead while DavidBinOwen continued to run riot. DavidBenOwn was only recently banned after years of abuse in this place. This has all been a consistent pattern and I have documented it all. Any court that reviewed the situation from beginning to end with the evidence I have would immediately see what I claim, that the moderator of this subreddit consistently rewards perpetrators and punishes the victims of these perpetrators whenever they complain or put up a fight. In other words, the moderators here do what Baha’is have always done best: gaslight since this is a consistent Baha’i modus operandi literally everywhere, not to mention historically located, and the behavior of “Saman Wilson” (not to mention his two dubious sidekicks) only reinforces what I say, i.e. that this subreddit is gatekept and its mods are gatekeepers for the interests of Haifan Bahaism against its actual enemies.
Also, the slap in the face Investigator919 got in the rejoinder here means this individual doesn’t wish to be further humiliated intellectually by me over issues they have no clue about and are actually misinforming the public regarding. But that suits the Baha’is just fine since they have profited for over a century in any skewed presentation of the Bayan — or whenever the Bab has been labeled insane and mentally ill — and it will be damned if anyone who knows what they are talking about sets these cultists and their hangers on straight with actual textual evidence, proper contextualization and analysis. That is the bottom line and why “Saman Wilson” and the BIA see me as a threat because they know that I am committed to ending their proverbial “party” and exposing every last one of their deceptions once and for all.
WHAT A FUKED UP SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT! The rules of reddit itself say:
Reminder from the Reddit staff: If you use another account to circumvent this subreddit ban, that will be considered a violation of the Content Policy and can result in your account being suspended from the site as a whole.
So why was I EVER friends with this sick bastard?
Well, it appears about eight or nine months ago he came back yet again with a new account, named Naw-Cryptographer49. At first, he fooled everyone, even me, but eventually I figured him out. And he and I had a final showdown here six months ago:
Speak for yourself. One of the biggest trolls on the scene, bar none, who thinks he owns this place while incessantly pushing the UU cult and his own blog of inane drivel and who doesn’t even know what a hagiography is. Pathetic.
Speak for yourself. One of the biggest trolls on the scene, bar none, who thinks he owns this place while incessantly pushing the UU cult and his own blog of inane drivel and who doesn’t even know what a hagiography is. Pathetic.
You know, you are not very good at hiding your true self even when you repeatedly use sockpuppets to get around being banned from this subreddit!
You are a know-nothing fanatic, not to mention a head case, no better than the Baha’is you decry. I am trying to get you to spell out your philosophical position, but you seem not to have one and are merely operating by some pseudo-intellectual remote control of rehashed sound bites and one liners, which makes you as dangerous as any braindead RUHIfied Baha’i. The way you talk when challenged on your BS reveals you to be just another basket case chump circumambulating the trauma around their experience with authoritarian cults like Baha’i. Get over yourself already!
Which only confirmed what I said to him first, which was:
Now that I see you are willing to LIE OUTRIGHT to throw out talking points at me even after I try to end our debate on a positive note, I will have no more to do with you. Once a liar, always to be distrusted from now on!
And of course, stating MORE outright lies at me after I decided to shun him only makes him look more ridiculous.
As far as I am concerned, anyone who is a follower of the Bab, who was killed by a firing squad in 1850, is as much of an idiot as any Baha’i. Reason: the Bab’s claim to be the promised one of Shia Islam was forever debunked by his death, and no amount of phony rhetoric, not from Baha’u’llah or even from any Bayani apologist today, will EVER restore the Bab’s credibility.
I like Messengers of God who do not get slaughtered, imprisoned, exiled or exposed as frauds, thank you very much!
_____________
And like the idiot he always has been, Wahid Azal went INSANE at being exposed!
The biggest con artist hereabouts is the 50+ year old INCEL guy with a psychotic sense of entitlement to a subreddit, not to mention a chip on his shoulder the size of Mt Rushmore, who literally has nothing to contribute but the same old, same old rehashes from a stupid blog where he once wrote up embarrassing sicko fantasy blog posts; gets dumped by the very people who tried to rally behind him after they found out about it; deletes the posts on his blog, and then tries to kill himself with the stove! The STOVE! Yeah, everyone knows that story because the moron blabbered it out himself…
And stop making up rumors about me. No doubt, you HOPED I would have committed suicide by now after you made up so many ridiculous lies about me that some people started to believe your bullshit (the “if there is smoke, there must be fire” fallacy), but suicide is nothing to joke about and you claiming that about me too is only more proof of your degenerate nature!
Just a small reminder of what the House wants each and every single one of us to do NOW:
1. Become friends with all of your neighbours on your street and in your neighborhood. Invite them over to cups of tea and get to know them and go and visit them in their house. Take them a food to enjoy together with your cup of tea.
2. Host a children’s class in your house and invite your neighbours children to all attend. You do not have to run it, u just have to host it.
3. Host a REGULAR devotional gathering in your house. Invite your neighbours and their kids. Share prayers together from the Faith and from other sacred traditions to make it even more amazing. Try and get chants, kids prayer songs etc
4. Help enthusiastic attendees setup regular devotional gatherings in their own homes AND accompany them in this. Help your friend to help their friends to run regular devotional meetings in their house. This process will multiply until the whole world is in a devotional gathering.
4. Host a Junior Youth Class in your House. Invite the neighbours JYs. Once you are friends with neighbours you can tell them about the JY programme.
4. Once the children and and JY start coming then offer to train their parents to become Childrens class teachers and JY animators.
5. Train the new teachers and animators and help them start a childrens class and JY in their own home (if they are far away enough in the neighborhood).
6. Accompany the new teachers and animators on their path of service towards spiritualising our new generation. Help them to do everything you just did i.e. to get them to eventually also train children class teachers and JY animators AND to accompany their new teachers and animators to setup JY programme and childrens classes in THEIR own homes. This process is now growing exponentially.
7. Repeat Cycle.
This is all we have to do. This is all the house wants us to d0. If we do this the whole world will become involved in a core activity. World peace will finally come. The words of God do the work for us. All we have to do is the logistics.
The time is now. Get up stand up for your right to live in a world which is at peace. We can have world peace in ONE generation. How exciting! Are not proud to be blessed with a concrete plan on how world peace can be achieved!? Nobody else is doing this! Only us! So time to get up and stand up for YOUR RIGHT to live in a world at peace.
Allah’u’abha all and may we fill our cups with the blessings which rain down~
What an incompetent list! Note that the writer repeated the number 4 THREE TIMES….the last number on the list should have been 9, not 7. Of course, the number nine is one Baha’is are obsessed with, so that makes the error of the writer even more obvious!
And not all Baha’is who read it were positive in their responses to it.
Hi Richard yes it is most definately working, Rome was not built in a day and the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven is no different. Ours is the opportunity to build it!
These things are happening but no one is coming to them. Do you know the 50% of the people who declare become inactive the first year and since the beginning of Entry by troops the membership in the faith has fallen 17% based on world census.How you ever seen an invitation to a total stranger and have you ever thought there might be better ways.. Dr Peter Kahn said “we are looking for people who make mistakes that way we know you are doing something.” What we need, first, is a solid community foundation. And one of the aspects of teaching is “Proclamation,” that’s letting the people know we ar here. The above comes under “Expansion” but the two, plus “Consolidation” the must work together.
yes that is exactly right! That is why we must first become FRIENDS with all of our neighbors, then introduce them to the core activities and then invite bless. Blessings~
This reminds me of something I read in the exbahai subreddit a year ago:
The man called “Richard Genobles” firmly contested this BS above, and I realized he is no longer on that Facebook group. It would be nice to know if he withdrew from Faith and joined us here on r/exbahai LOL
Often it’s the most superactive Ruhiites who end up the most bitter (because they actually believe that stuff is going to imminently change society so it’s a hard fall when they experience how little anyone gives a stuff about it).
I sometimes think the Baha’is are like Daleks who are so incompetent that they can’t even shoot straight and therefore can’t EXTERMINATE anyone!
Ever since Christianity was founded nearly 2000 years ago, Christians have felt called to spread the Gospel around the world. The source for this commandment, known as the Great Commission, is Matthew 28: 18-20.
18 And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in[a] the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Note what Jesus did NOT say. His commandment wasn’t to “convert all the people you can to my religion” and he certainly did not call for all other religious communities to be wiped out. He called for a Christian community to be established among all the nations of the world. So his Great Commission would be fulfilled if in some countries of the world only 1% of the populations became Christian.
Indeed, the idea that the vast majority of a population should be made to embrace Christianity would have been more likely to debase Christianity rather than to uplift the population. We saw exactly that in the case of the Roman Empire, which converted en masse from Paganism to Christianity around 300 to 400 AD. That did nothing to stop the Empire from falling in 476 AD.
Why did Christianity fail to improve the population? Because it never changed human nature. Read this blog entry:
After I left the Baha’i Faith, I realized that religion simply has nothing whatsoever to do with one’s character; if people have screwed up personalities, religion actually can make them worse by making them think that believing certain dogmas and following certain rituals will save them and make them great people before God and their fellow humans. I know from my own experience with myself and others that this is simply a lie.
Maybe if Christians had been more cautious about accepting members, a lot of the scandals and atrocities associated with Christianity wouldn’t have happened.
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!
The Biblical tale of King David, Bathsheba, and her husband Uriah the Hittite is one of the most infamous ones ever, because of not only the way it depicted the king, but also how it depicted God. David may have killed Uriah, but God killed a BABY!
Why couldn’t the story have been rewritten to make both David and God look a lot better???
And as the war against Ammon waged on, King David was informed that one of his loyal soldiers, Uriah the Hittite, was killed in battle and he left behind a wife, Bathsheba, who was pregnant. David sent for the widow to give her his condolences. But when he saw her, he felt she was beautiful and deserved better than to be a widow of a soldier, so he offered to marry her so her child could be raised in the royal palace. She agreed and thus became his wife and gave birth to a son a few weeks later. But a few weeks after that, the baby fell sick and died, causing Bathsheba to mourn again. Even worse, a nasty rumor was soon spread that the baby was actually David’s, that the king had killed Uriah to get his wife, and therefore the baby’s death was a punishment from God. David was furious and demanded that the one who started the rumor be found and put to death. But the prophet Nathan urged restraint.
“Sire, the people who started that rumor are not worth bothering about,” Nathan said. “Those who are loyal to you and know your true nature will ignore such gossip.”
David accepted the prophet’s advice. But in reality, it was Nathan himself who started the rumor as a means of undermining the king. And centuries later, Nathan’s claims were recorded in the Bible, tarnishing David’s reputation forever!
Definitely not. I was planning to go into ministry to convert as many people as possible to Christianity (wanted them to not go to hell you know). Majored in theology. Studied apologetics aggressively in high school and college.
I am honestly one of the most surprising people to have left the faith considering how deep into it I was.
Christians acted horribly during the pandemic. It started not making sense that horrible people went to heaven while good people went to hell. Then I used my rational thinking skills that I learned in apologetics and my theology degree against the Bible to deconstruct. Figured out pretty quickly that it’s all fake.
It started not making sense that horrible people went to heaven while good people went to hell.
Maybe because Jesus never taught such insanity?
Then I used my rational thinking skills that I learned in apologetics and my theology degree against the Bible to deconstruct.
It should have been obvious that something was wrong as soon as you read the first few chapters of Matthew and compared them with the first few chapters of Luke. The two narratives CANNOT be harmonized, period. At least one of the accounts must have been made up. And if one, why not both? Quite simply, there is NO reason to assume that Jesus was born in Bethlehem.
I was always taught that everything in the Bible can be explained. I see now how stupid that was. I was aware of all the errors in the Bible for years, but was extremely proficient in performing mental gymnastics around them.
When I was a Baptist, I used to laugh at the Mormons for believing in the ridiculous Book of Mormon. Then I stopped being a Baptist. Then I became a Baha’i and defended that religion for years. Then left the Baha’i Faith after realizing it was no better than Christianity!
When you have “faith”, anything goes. It does not matter what your faith is in.
Which NO ONE should tolerate anymore. Reason: the followers of EVERY OTHER RELIGION also use mental gymnastics to defend their dogmas too. Truth can NEVER be found when you rely on dogmas of any kind.
Yeah I know. It was honestly ridiculous how damn blind I was, because I was an avid student of other religions much of the time I was Christian. I would always shake my head at the ridiculous attempts people used to defend their obviously flawed holy books, while somehow not recognizing that I was doing the same thing. Part of my deconstruction was that realization, and after that the whole thing unraveled pretty quickly.
I’m not going to approve this post. It would take a long time for contributors here to address all the specific points you raised. It’s sort of like if you were trying to learn about vaccines and you spent hours and hours on anti-vax videos and forums, and then wanted other people to address/dispel all the misinformation you learned. Here are the books you’ll need to read.
The Kitáb-i-Íqán. This book covers the basic principles and lays the foundation for the teachings/revelation of Bahá’u’lláh. It states God continually provides mankind with revelation direct from God for our education and upliftment. After reading this you should decide if you think Bahá’u’lláh is a messenger of God or not. If you think a possibility exists, you can continue into history:
The Dawn-Breakers for the context and early history of the Faith, centered on the life of the Bab but it does carry forward to some events in the life of Bahá’u’lláh.
After those two works you should have a good idea about the character and purpose of the life and mission of the Bab and an understanding of the place held by Bahá’u’lláh. After that if you still want answers to your specific questions, turn to the Will and Testament of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and read it carefully. From it you will get an idea about what was acceptable behavior and what was not and you can judge the behavior of those close to Shoghi Effendi, who was following the Will and who was not?
In Summons of the Lord of Hosts you’ll find this passage: “This is the Day that shall not be followed by night, nor shall it be bounded by any praise, would that ye might understand!”
This is a significant promise written in 1868, because the only way to avoid the ‘night’ humanity has always seen following a religious dispensation is for the religious community Bahá’u’lláh has created to remain unified and under a control everyone accepts. You can almost bypass every concern listed simply by asking yourself, is it unified today? Is it under stable leadership?
But, going the long route, you can look next to histories centered on the life and teachings of Bahá’u’lláh, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi. There are very lengthy books about each.
This books do not answer questions regarding the issues I have brought up. I am trying to do a service to the Bahai faith which is clearly falling part online. Just searching Bahai faith in google or you to leads to many negative pages and videos that need addressing You are contributing to sweeping issues under the rug. The debate over the will of Abdul needs talking about due to some evidence that it was forged. Just “reading” it carefully isnt the answer. I have read it as well as talks about it. I am well versed in it. The issues is the handwriting analyses that was done on it which claims it was alerted. I cant debunk this without being able to find people and information that discredits this. If you think just “reading” the Will will answer peoples questions who want to know if it was forged due to the many many pages and videos online saying it was forced, then you have your head in the clouds. I feel you are helping to hold back the faith. In an online world most new people will look up bahai, see these issues and then just go no further. You need to tackle the big issues as hard as they are. By keeping to put your head in the sand will help nothing. You cant just ask a casual perspective new member to “go read Kitáb-i-Íqán and the dawn breakers”. I myself have read all these books and many many more. Probably more Bahai books and scripture than most active bahais. By not approving this post you will be contributing to holding back growth of the faith as it will hinder my ability to answer tough questions and make good reports and videos on them. I have faced the same issues in bahai groups on facebbook. No one wants to answer the tough questions. Its a shame. I was ready to open some very good discourse on this reddit. Your vaccine analogy is ridiculous. If people were finding out anti vax issues and you were able to ask people info about correct info to dispel these falsehoods would not tackling the incorrect issues be smarter? You seem to think the issues would just go away. Trust me the anti bahai info online is getting huge. Its going to hinder the growth of the faith as these questions are not being answered. Almost 100% of perspective new members will go online for Bahai info. Many will leave. I did and then decided to come back and tackle these issues head on but as always just keep hitting brickwalls. Is this because in people hearts they know these issues are real?
I guess you have had your mind made. Just know I am going to give up my defense of the bahai faith. I am over it. I keep coming across people like you wishing to just “hope it away”. Its not going away unless someone tackles the anti bahai brigade. I hope in your own heart you realize the mistake you are making. I was going to do a full website and youtube giving great debunks to anti bahai issues that are all over the net. These videos and website could have saved potentially thousands of people from walking away of moving on. Its 2021. You cant just tell people to “read the book”. This thinking will kill the Bahai faith…
So MacPark711 went to the ExBahai subreddit instead:
Thanks. I am on the fence Bahai and trying to make sense of it all. But people like t0lk are simply gatekeeping on a huge public forum and doing a disservice to the faith. Its 2021. People cant hide behind just covering things up and pushing under the rug anymore. Everything is out there online. I can see you are obviously anti Bahai. And thats totally fine. You have that right. I am at least open to some dialogue and now I just wish some Bahais would have the guts to come and tackle the negative Bahai posts online or at least help me in what I wish to do. I dont have enough info or knowledge to do this. Thats why I was hoping to get some Bahais onboard to help me but as you can see everyone just hides and blocks everything. Even worse they couldn’t even reply to my follow up explaining their reasons. t0lk just hides.
“Independent investigation of truth” means “just read and agree to what our books say”. by the sounds of it.
The Baha’is will NEVER allow you to ask such questions, not in any Baha’i Community, not in any Baha’i meeting, not at the Baha’i World Centre. You will be asked to leave. Your Membership in the Faith will be removed.
Was S.E. a closet homosexual? Probably so. The witnesses are many. Are they ALL lying? If you believe current Baha’i apologists, yes. I don’t think they were all lying.
Was S.E. lazy and went on 4 month long trips to Switzerland (without his wife) every year? He went on such trips, yearly. Without his wife. Was he lazy? He spent most days writing letters and translating. Why did he go to Switzerland for four months a year? Some say to get away from his wife. Others say to meet his lover, George Townsend. Others say, to get away from the hot Palestine Summers. Maybe the answer is “All of the above”. No way to be SURE unless one finds a letter written by Townsend or Effendi, that is a love letter. No such letter has been found.
Was S.E. a tyrant who excommunicated his relatives over the smallest of things? Answer: THEY thought so. He demanded absolute control over every decision of their lives, including whom they could marry and not marry, where they could go on trips, etc. If they “defied” him, he excommunicated them: including their children.
Did the wife of ‘Abdu’l-Baha forge part of the Will and Testament, making S.E. Guardian? Answer: the evidence is that part of the Will and Testament was NOT written by ‘Abdu’l-Baha. That much is known. Some think ‘Abdu’l-Baha dictated it to his wife or some scribe. Others think it was forged after AB died. Nobody saw the Will and Testament BEFORE AB died except AB and his wife. All we know for SURE is that the section where AB appoints SE as Guardian, is NOT in the handwriting of AB, but the rest of the W&T is in the handwriting of AB.
How can these issues be resolved? Answer: they won’t be. Either way, they won’t be. You have to decide “if” you want to be a Baha’i, and promote the Baha’i Faith, or not. These questions will always be unresolved. You have to choose.
Much to my annoyance, MacPark711 chose……to run away from the discussion by deleting his own post. But the neat thing about reddit is that you can still look up and restore some deleted material. Also, I found that Naser Emtesali had already copied the statement MacPark711 deleted here.
So…….I proceeded to put it ALL back on r/exbahai !
Thank you for the restoration. Interesting read as I hit my 1-year anniversary of formal resignation.
(Have not regretted the decision one iota; only sorry I hadn’t done it a few decades earlier.)
May I highlight the staunch baha’i’s, named t0lk, typical and expected reply (in my own words): “read these (excruciatingly) lengthy books–hopefully your brain will be numbed to a level that will keep your critical thinking muscles QUIET.”
I am actually more upset at MacPark711 for deleting the original post here than at t0lk. I am USED to t0lk being a lying, backstabbing asshole.
MacPark711 needs to wake the hell up! I can state for the record that even if I was still a Baha’i in 2018 (the year I first joined reddit), by now I would have resigned from the Faith because of all the crap I have clearly seen from the reddit Baha’is. They are mostly hypocrites because their Faith makes them so by DESIGN. You can’t save it……..you just have to…….LET IT GO!!!!!
exBaha’i atheist
Dale Husband's Intellectual Rants 