If you are someone who is thinking of joining the Baha'i Faith you should make yourself as fully aware of the prime importance of the Baha'i Bureaucracy in official Baha'i life. In the opinion of Baha'i Angst, the official Baha'i Faith run by the Universal House of Justice in Haifa is a religion which worships its own institutions, and those institutions will try to control your thoughts and behavior and will hit you up with endless appeals for money. As we've said elsewhere on the Baha'i Angst website, ask your Baha'i Friends to let you read the American Baha'i, a glad rag from Baha'i officialdom that comes out about 10 times a year. It will give you some insights.
Also, you should read the paranoid statements issued from time to time by the Universal House of Justice. Bear in mind too, that rank and file Baha'is believe this House to be "infallible." Whatever they say is divinely guided and is true. In Baha'i doctrine, the individual members of the House are just normal folks, subject to error like anyone else. It is only as a body that they are "infallible." However, statements by individual House members can be very revealing about what those members think and no doubt what they think plays a major role in each members contributions to the House's infallible communications to the faithful.
Here I want to focus briefly on a talk given last year by Peter Khan, a member of the Universal House of Justice. It's was a long talk, we will only focus on a couple of its more troubling aspects. JRIC has posted a commentary on the entire talk. In the commentary below, Dr. Khan's remarks are in blue, Baha'i Angst's comments are in red. (Links will also appear in blue.)
During part of the talk Dr. Khan discussed the days when he was an Auxiliary Board member in the U.S. and the techniques he used to get new believers to accept the infallibility of the UHJ. Most Baha'is don't seem to understand this concept, or really know of it at all, when they join. Dr. Khan seems to think it was part of his job to get them to buy into this after they had already been formally enrolled in the Faith. Some of these knew believers clearly knew little, he referred to one who barely knew who Baha'u'llah was. In this context, Dr. Khan said:
Saturday afternoon we got to know each
other, talked about progressive revelation and the manifestation and so on and
so forth. Saturday evening, we got into the covenant. And these were friends
who had been brought into the Faith but hadn't been taught as much as we want
to teach people these days, so a lot of it was new. And somewhere around 8.30
or 9.00pm on a Saturday evening, I'd break to them the news that we have at
the centre of our Faith a body called the Universal House of Justice, which
they would accept fairly readily, it didn't particularly worry them what it
was or what it was called. But then I laid on them the fact that it was, that
we regard it as infallible, divinely guided and freed from error.
Note that he clearly had an agenda. Even the wording used here gives us angst. It appears that the Saturday afternoon session was just pro-forma unimportant stuff, the sort of stuff you read in the Kitab-i Iqan, not the really important stuff. But Saturday evening, he'd get down to business and start talking about the "Covenant." Warning, Warning - Whenever Baha'is start talking about the covenant, you are going to be told something you won't want to hear. And sure enough, he would then tell them, and we love the term he used to describe it, he "laid" it on them, that the UHJ is infallible, divinely guided, and freed from all error. (By the way, the phrase "freed from all error" is taken from the Will and Testament of Abdul-Baha and he was talking about the UHJ when he wrote this.) Now Mr. Khan continues:
And whenever I said this and read the passages from the Guardian's writings on this
subject, one could see alarm and distress in their eyes.
"Whenever" is a good word. He must have been doing this regularly, meeting with new Baha'is and then making sure they were going to bow down and worship the Faith's administrative order. And, of course, Dr. Khan notes that people didn't find this pleasant. Be ready to bend over once you sign the card.
They'd rather not know about it, generally, and also, you could see they were saying to
themselves: I have joined this very modern, this avant garde, this 21st
century religion, and now having penetrated to the core of it, I find it's
saddled with a medieval concept of infallibility. Where did that come from and what's it doing in the middle of my religion?
Yup. And if you are seeking to enroll in the Faith, then you better think about this. You will be joining a religion where many of the rank and file and many in positions of high authority believe that the UHJ is literally infallible and that you are going against God's will if you don't do what they say. So be careful.
So they were prone to make all kinds of extreme statements, such as: I don't
believe this, this is wrong, it's not right, and things like that.
So, a new Baha'i saying that he does not believe that the UHJ is infallible is making an "extreme" statement. This is very revelatory of Baha'i thinking. Indeed, Dr. Khan's statement is an accurate one. A Baha'i who does not believe that the House is infallible will be considered an extremist by the AO. Now, there's been a very vigorous debate among Baha'is as to what infallibility means and a wide range of views have been expressed. However, Baha'i Angst feels that what the term basically means within the Haifan Tradition in general is "whatever the UHJ says is basically revelation from God and to go against it means you are going to get kicked out or declared a covenant breaker."
And what one had to do was to stay calm, and not get hot and bothered and upset, and
just deal with it as it comes.
Yes, AO'ers, just stay calm when a normal person looks at you funny and says he doesn't the the UHJ is infallible, stay calm. You'd think this kind of advice would be reserved, say, for someone like Jackie Robinson when some dirt bag would call him a nigger and he'd have to restrain himself from the natural urge to belt the s.o.b.
And so I'd say: OK, OK, let's not get tooWe interrupt this programming to bring you the time. It's 11 p.m. and they are still being brainwashed.
worried, let's sit down and let's read some writings and see what Baha'u'llah
has said about it, and what Abdu'l-Baha has said about it, and what the
Guardian has said about it, and we'd work on this. And the evening would
finish typically at about 11pm
and people would go to bed somewhat troubled,
some of them were feeling OK, a lot of them weren't feeling so great about it.
You'd find by the next morning, they'd sorted it out in their minds. They
would think: OK, I accept Baha'u'llah's the Manifestation of God, he has
clearly said this about this institution of the Faith, I accept Baha'u'llah,
therefore I accept this and I'm with you, I'm part of it. And they would pass
the test and go on to become very strong believers. But the point is that one
cannot accept the institutions of the covenant and their authority without
this sense of spiritual consciousness.
And there you have it. Get people to make a commitment, put it in writing by signing the card and then re-affirm it by meeting with the local assembly, and then lay a Baha'i big wig on them to put on the squeeze for hours. The math is simple, you believe in Baha'u'llah, so you must accept the current AO as it is, with it's infallible UHJ at the top.Dr. Khan continues, and it only gets worse. Please make sure you have a barf bag ready, I don't won't you puking all over your keyboard and monitor and then blaming Baha'i Angst.
It gives us also insight to Baha'i strategy.
Yes it does.
For example, consider the Baha'i
strategy to spend a vast sum of money on beautifying Mt Carmel at a time when
the world is crying out for hospitals, for schools, for more effective means
of agriculture, for scholarships for bright kids to get a good education.
Baha'i Angst is glad to see that someone on a body with the gonads to call itself the Universal House of Justice is at least willing to address the issue of why the Faith does nothing in a world filled with people in pain. It makes us feel queasy.
If you and I were running the world, the beautification of Mt Carmel, a
construction of an elaborate series of terraces and a bunch of marble
buildings would not be our highest strategy at a time of inadequate material
resources. Yet this is the Baha'i strategy; it is best appreciated, can only
be appreciated, from a spiritual perspective.
Reaching for that barf bag yet? Yep, you are not spiritual enough to understand that the infallible UHJ doesn't give a damn about suffering in the real world and that God wants them instead to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a big mountain in an Israeli tourist city to be a show case for tourists and jet setters - a set many UHJ members belong to.
If you look at it from a material perspective, it's either megalomania or some distorted sense of priorities.How about, "if you look at it from a 'rational' perspective, it's either megalomania or some distorted sense of priorities." At least he knows what it really is. But evil, when covered in the cloak of spirituality, suddenly becomes good.
From a spiritual perspective, it is none of those things, it is
the fulfillment of the millennia-old prophecies of the establishment of the
seat of God's administrative order on God's holy mountain and all the
spiritual forces that are attracted by that accomplishment.
Yup, biblical prophecies state that the ITC needs good offices spaces and elaborate terraces and tons of other things costing hundreds of millions of dollars need to be build in full view of the harbor in Haifa. These purely material things will somehow attract spiritual forces. This is, at best, magical thinking. At worst, well it's just what Dr. Khan said it is, megalomania and a distorted sense of priorities. Baha'i Angst thinks the Rev. Jim Baker, his horrible wife Tammy and other such phonies would have been proud of this sort of manipulation.
So, my point is that the most pressing need before us all over the world is that of acquiring
a heightened spiritual consciousness.
As I said, if you don't understand why the UHJ has to live as a parasite off of the rest of the Baha'i community, you just don't have enough spiritual understanding. We guess the only recommendation for you is to spend a weekend brainwashing session with Auxiliary Board members. If you still don't buy in, well they've got ways for dealing with the likes of you.Dr. Khan then has the temerity to tell the Baha'is of New Zealand that their moral conduct is not up to par. He's just finished admitting the techniques he uses to manipulate people to think like he does and said flat out that those who don't agree with what's going on are a bunch of materialists and don't have the spirituality necessary to understand what the UHJ is up to, and he's then going to tell the folks in New Zealand to improve their morals? One wonders if Al Capone ever talked like this?
In the course of his rant against the evils being foisted on the world by the New Zealand Baha'is, I mean we here at Baha'i Angst have had our Angst level go sky high worrying about the hoards of New Zealand Baha'is coming here raping our children, Dr. Khan gives us a perfect example of the fact that Shoghi Effendi for the Administrative Order is indeed the CFBF (Central Figure of the Baha'i Faith) and that Baha'u'llah, while cutesy, is really just an ABF (Auxiliary Baha'i Founder). Read this:
Finally, let me mention, associated with this, a need for a vastly greater
study of the writings of Shoghi Effendi.
Damn right. Get out Baha'i Administration right now and memorize it!!!. You can skip the parts about the mashriqul-Azkar though. :-)
People read Gleanings, people read
the Kitab-i-Aqdas, they read the Hidden Words, they read Some Answered
Questions, they read Seven Valleys and so on and so forth.
Oh, what bores these Baha'is must be who actually read Baha'ullah's works or Some Answered Questions by Abdul-Baha. Perish the thought that they might find the Seven Valleys of significance when they could instead be reading the immortal works of the CFBF. Keep reading.
What is not beingLet's just call him Shoghi'u'llah. If you are thinking of signing the card, this is the kind of thinking you'll be forced to buy into. So be ready for it. The CFBF has "profound wisdom." Let's say that he did. Fine. What did Baha'u'llah have? The point here is that the emphasis has shifted in the Haifan tradition to an obsession with it's own bureaucracy, a bureacracy that has become an object of Baha'i worship. Who needs the ABFs, the Bab, and Baha'u'llah, nor the AABF, Abdul-Baha, when one can sit down with a warm cup of tea and ponder Baha'i Administration. This, Dr. Khan says, will give those New Zealand Baha'is a "sense of holiness" among other great and wonderful things. We feel sick.
studied well enough, not nearly well enough, not a quarter well enough, are
the writings of Shoghi Effendi. We need people in this country to master books
such as The World Order of Baha'u'llah, the Advent of Divine Justice, God
Passes By, Messages to the Baha'i World, Citadel of Faith, Baha'i
Administration - all the books of Shoghi Effendi written in the 1930s and
1940s describing the events of the 21st century, which we are now about to
enter on. We need Baha'is to master these books, to study them, to almost be
able to quote them - although that in itself is fairly sterile if that's all
one does - but to have a deeper insight into the profound wisdom conveyed by
Shoghi Effendi in his writings.Now there's much more in this talk. You can find the whole thing here. As noted above, JRIC has posted a detailed commentary on it.