Sasha Chislenko writes:
> After having several discussions with local Bahai, and failing to
> see what exactly God is doing in this relatively decent set of
> social notions, I came to the conclusion that this teaching was an
> attempt to sneak the modern secular ideology into the Moslem world
> under the guise of religion. While providing a good alternative
> to fundamentalism and a somewhat hypocritical excuse of "staying
> religious" to those who need this, for people with already open
> minds it looks like a particularly convoluted way of wasting time...
Old-fashioned "big religion" used to be, among other things, for
the function of bringing together people of dissimilar economic
and cultural interests, and it's hard to see how small sectarian
religions can do this very well.
As small sects go, I've always been much more impressed by the
Religious Society of Friends (http://www.quaker.org) than by the
Bahai, though I am prejudiced, since my mother was raised within
that sect and my father was convinced to it. I'm particularly
impressed by the Friends' teaching of the ministry of all believers
(women have been recognized ministers among Friends since the very
beginnings in the English Civil War of the 1640s). There are,
however, some evangelical Friends with hireling ministry who are
not nearly as impressive to me.
Also, they aren't bibliolaters. In First Day School I was
taught to sing "For the Book it will perish, and the steeple
will fall, but the Light will be shining at the end of it all."
Is that Tiplerian enough for you? :D
Most of the people on this list who will have problems with the
Friends will, I suspect, be those distressed by the Friends'
persistent habit throughout the last century of harboring suspected
Communists. And mainstream Christians consistently suspect Hicksite
Friends (like my parents) of Unitarianism or worse.
-- Eric Watt Forste <arkuat@pobox.com>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:02:41 MDT