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Baha'i and Messengers

Audie

Veteran Member
The only thing then is that covid will continue to infect until all the world is vaccinated. That might involve much more unnecessary death and suffering.

Vaccination does not prevent or cure.
It usually lessens the severity, but some die anyway.

Anyone who has had flu after getting the shot
is familiar with this.

Vaccinate everyone and covid wont go away.
 

It Aint Necessarily So

Veteran Member
Premium Member
to me, every atom in existence is proof of a God.

You didn't use those atoms to arrive at a god belief, which is what you could do with them with the application of valid reasoning to arrive at that conclusion if the atoms were evidence of a god. You chose to believe in a God by faith, and now see everything as confirmation of that choice. Had you chosen to believe that there was no God by faith, then those atoms could be used the same way to "prove" to you that there is no God.

To you it’s fallacy to me it’s truth.

The opposite of fallacy is not truth, but rather, valid reasoning. The opposite of truth is false. Note that in both cases, nothing can be both. Nothing can be both valid reasoning and fallacy at once, and nothing can be both true and false in the same sense at the same time. That means that at least one of you is wrong. Either one's reasoning is valid, and another is wrong calling it fallacy, or one's reasoning is fallacious, and considering it "true" (valid) is wrong. Are you aware of that? If so, do you have any interest in knowing whether it is him or you that is wrong?

Would you agree that addition is pure reason? Going from addends to sum is a rigorous logical process. Do it properly (valid reasoning), and you arrive at a correct sum. Use an invalid step anywhere, such as adding 8+3 and getting 12, and now you will generate an erroneous conclusion. Your comment above is like the two of you discussing an addition problem where you have arrived at different answers, and you saying, to you it's an error, to me it's correct.

what Baha’i books have you read? I think to judge another’s belief one should be very well versed in it.

I don't think that too many of us skeptics are interested in religious literature. It doesn't really matter what is written. The material you have posted recently looks like poetry to me, which is art, not guidance. It all does. It's in lofty language with no specific meaning.

When we judge believers, it is for the soundness of their reasoning. When we judge their religion, it is based in its rendering in humanity, not its claims for itself, and not words on paper. So, there is no reason to read such books. It's enough to read these posts on RF. It is here that I get my best understanding of what secular humanism and each of the religious denominations are based on how they manifest in the writings of such people. The Baha'i seem to be a pretty homogeneous group, writing in a similar polite and upbeat demeanor about similar topics, especially human unity, which is nice, but more helpful to them to say than to me hear.

There is nothing there for me. I already have a worldview that works well, secular humanism, the inevitable result of rejecting faith as a path to truth. As a result, the humanist develops critical thinking skills to his utmost, where the theist either never learns how to think critically, or else is willing to put it aside at times. You can see the difference in the rendering of those two ways of understanding reality right here in this thread.

If one does not pray, meditate and reflect on the Words of God regularly how can he expect his spiritual senses to be healthy. From lack of use our spiritual senses deteriorate to the point we think we do not possess them. But to those who regularly study the Word of God , reflect on it and act virtuously their spiritual senses are fully functional.

I don't think that most of the religious or the spiritual-but-not-religious have a clear concept of what they are pursuing here, or how to find it. Your method was sterile for me. I am a former Christian, and participated in those activities for years. It generated nothing of lasting value. These isms that distract your attention from what is all around you and what is really important are anti-spiritual in my estimation.

Do you have a clear concept of where you are trying to be? What does a good day look and feel like? I never pray or read holy books. People expecting to reach some higher plane or transcendent knowledge are searching in vain. Look at the people in these threads that post like that. What have they accomplished? What have they learned of value? If you want to see higher understanding in these threads, you'll need to look to other kinds of posters.

There is no higher plane than ordinary life lived mindfully and in harmony with one's self and surroundings. You won't learn about love, for example, in any holy book. You have to approach the matter mindfully, attentively, even scientifically. The senses you call spiritual senses are simply the external senses, the moral sense, and the reasoning sense. The "secrets" they reveal can be stated simply in plain language easy to understand. They are ordinary words, not arcane knowledge.

The goal is equanimity, a peaceful life relatively shame-, guilt-, and conflict-free, one surrounded by beauty, and sense of purpose in the world. Wisdom comes from understanding what to pursue to achieve a satisfying life. Intelligence is knowing how to make it happen. Use your own faculties, reason and conscience, to discover what those are, not holy books. I know this from experience. I've tried both. I've learned what a good day looks and feels like, and how to achieve it.

If you'd like some "scripture" to "study," watch Groundhog Day. You probably already know that it is about a man who awakens every morning into the same day, with all of the same events happening each day, beginning with the alarm going off to a Sonny and Cher song. He's a snarky man with no social graces, no friends, and no love or beauty in his life, who is allowed to see how his choices affect outcomes and whether they lead to happiness or not. He gets to tweak his approach to life each day to further perfect his worldview and it's ability to help him find happiness. In the end, he learns how what matters - what makes him happy (wisdom), and how to get it (intelligence).

Another great American movie that teaches a similar lesson is Regarding Henry, where a high-powered, narcissistic attorney, who yells at his daughter for spilling her juice from behind his newspaper at breakfast, is later shot in the head, becomes somewhat retarded (think Forrest Gump), and everything changed for him, including his personality. He learns wisdom, once again, not from a holy book. In his new state, he's once again at the table with his daughter, and if I recall correctly, she nearly spills her juice again, winces in fear at her father's remembered response, and he just smiles and knocks the juice over himself. Look what's become important to him and what has ceased to be.

The universe has neither beginning nor end. It always existed. By beginning and end I’m referring to bodies such as stars and planets which are born and die not the entire existence which always existed. The universe may have had a beginning but other universes always existed. The world of creation has had no beginning and will have no end (Abdul-Baha)

Is this Baha'i doctrine? If the universe has always existed, it needs no God to create it.

Cause and effect applies to that which is created but not God Who is eternal.

Are you getting into the cosmological argument here? It's incompatible with your previous comment that the universe has always existed. It is based in the idea that universe had a beginning, one of its premises.
 

F1fan

Veteran Member
Evolution is a fact of life.
Right, and science explains that it is how the human brain evolved that has resulted in the vast majority of humans believing in religious concepts, including gods, devils, higher powers, spirits, angels, demons, etc. There is no evidence that any of these religious ideas correspond to anything in reality. We can trace the histories of cultures and civilizations as to why primitive people believed in these ideas, and did so religiously (ha) until the age of reason and science. But this has only meant that many religious people accept science and religious ideas, while a small percentage have the freedom to disbelieve. The age of reason has only been a thing for several hundred years and religion is still important to the meaning of many cultures and the citizens. So we can't expect religion to decline terribly fast, with some nations and cultures seeing declines faster and others see religiosity rise.

God always existed.
This is not a fact. Even the ideas of the many thousands of gods did not exist until civilization rose among tribes of humans. these ideas formed from primate rituals to become more complex as language and art developed. The rise of religion corresponds with permanent settlements and food surpluses, as this allowed people the free time to be creative and reproduce. The increase in population meant a need to build coherent cultural frameworks to unite, organize, and manage more and more people living together. Religion was the most common approach, with leaders using the authority of their gods to maintain order and discipline.

Look at the Jewish laws in the Old Testament as an example of how tribes created rules for the people with misconduct being offensive to their gods.

Cause and effect applies to that which is created but not God Who is eternal.
This is a religious claim and not factual. It has no application to reality or knowledge about what is true.

But from a religious perspective, we can say the fall of humans and the prevalence of sin meant God decided to create Jesus and then sacrifice him to itself to pay the sins of mankind (a terribly odd Rube Goldberg process), so this act by God was certainly caused by how humans fell from grace. Creating Jesus was the effect, but did it really fix anything? Not really. Of course, that failure was a flawed design by God in the first place. After all, if a perfect God wanted to make obedient humans, wouldn't they BE obedient? People can have free will and still be obedient to the rules. Most of us manage to follow the rules, yes? That Adam and Eve failed in the Garden was either planned by God, or an indication of an incompetent God.
 
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F1fan

Veteran Member
Vaccination does not prevent or cure.
It usually lessens the severity, but some die anyway.

Anyone who has had flu after getting the shot
is familiar with this.

Vaccinate everyone and covid wont go away.
Well, actually there was a point early in Covid where it could have been eliminated globally IF enough people, about 70-75%, got the vaccine. Of course there wasn't enough vaccine to go around soon enough, and there were plenty of people who refused to get vaccinated when available, so Covid had plenty of hosts to replicate and mutate to different versions.

Yesterday in the USA nearly 2000 people died of Covid, with the vast majority being unvaccinated. The plus with the newest version is that it is less severe but more contagious. And what could happen is if more and more get this version in a short time frame there will be a possibility of the herd immunity that will help knock out a pandemic. A virus needs a number of viable hosts to infect and spread, and if that number declines it will essentially become pretty dormant.

The thing is world citizens will have to remain boosted over time. Covid can bounce back quickly if enough people don't have antibodies to fight the infection.
 

loverofhumanity

We are all the leaves of one tree
Premium Member
You didn't use those atoms to arrive at a god belief, which is what you could do with them with the application of valid reasoning to arrive at that conclusion if the atoms were evidence of a god. You chose to believe in a God by faith, and now see everything as confirmation of that choice. Had you chosen to believe that there was no God by faith, then those atoms could be used the same way to "prove" to you that there is no God.



The opposite of fallacy is not truth, but rather, valid reasoning. The opposite of truth is false. Note that in both cases, nothing can be both. Nothing can be both valid reasoning and fallacy at once, and nothing can be both true and false in the same sense at the same time. That means that at least one of you is wrong. Either one's reasoning is valid, and another is wrong calling it fallacy, or one's reasoning is fallacious, and considering it "true" (valid) is wrong. Are you aware of that? If so, do you have any interest in knowing whether it is him or you that is wrong?

Would you agree that addition is pure reason? Going from addends to sum is a rigorous logical process. Do it properly (valid reasoning), and you arrive at a correct sum. Use an invalid step anywhere, such as adding 8+3 and getting 12, and now you will generate an erroneous conclusion. Your comment above is like the two of you discussing an addition problem where you have arrived at different answers, and you saying, to you it's an error, to me it's correct.



I don't think that too many of us skeptics are interested in religious literature. It doesn't really matter what is written. The material you have posted recently looks like poetry to me, which is art, not guidance. It all does. It's in lofty language with no specific meaning.

When we judge believers, it is for the soundness of their reasoning. When we judge their religion, it is based in its rendering in humanity, not its claims for itself, and not words on paper. So, there is no reason to read such books. It's enough to read these posts on RF. It is here that I get my best understanding of what secular humanism and each of the religious denominations are based on how they manifest in the writings of such people. The Baha'i seem to be a pretty homogeneous group, writing in a similar polite and upbeat demeanor about similar topics, especially human unity, which is nice, but more helpful to them to say than to me hear.

There is nothing there for me. I already have a worldview that works well, secular humanism, the inevitable result of rejecting faith as a path to truth. As a result, the humanist develops critical thinking skills to his utmost, where the theist either never learns how to think critically, or else is willing to put it aside at times. You can see the difference in the rendering of those two ways of understanding reality right here in this thread.



I don't think that most of the religious or the spiritual-but-not-religious have a clear concept of what they are pursuing here, or how to find it. Your method was sterile for me. I am a former Christian, and participated in those activities for years. It generated nothing of lasting value. These isms that distract your attention from what is all around you and what is really important are anti-spiritual in my estimation.

Do you have a clear concept of where you are trying to be? What does a good day look and feel like? I never pray or read holy books. People expecting to reach some higher plane or transcendent knowledge are searching in vain. Look at the people in these threads that post like that. What have they accomplished? What have they learned of value? If you want to see higher understanding in these threads, you'll need to look to other kinds of posters.

There is no higher plane than ordinary life lived mindfully and in harmony with one's self and surroundings. You won't learn about love, for example, in any holy book. You have to approach the matter mindfully, attentively, even scientifically. The senses you call spiritual senses are simply the external senses, the moral sense, and the reasoning sense. The "secrets" they reveal can be stated simply in plain language easy to understand. They are ordinary words, not arcane knowledge.

The goal is equanimity, a peaceful life relatively shame-, guilt-, and conflict-free, one surrounded by beauty, and sense of purpose in the world. Wisdom comes from understanding what to pursue to achieve a satisfying life. Intelligence is knowing how to make it happen. Use your own faculties, reason and conscience, to discover what those are, not holy books. I know this from experience. I've tried both. I've learned what a good day looks and feels like, and how to achieve it.

If you'd like some "scripture" to "study," watch Groundhog Day. You probably already know that it is about a man who awakens every morning into the same day, with all of the same events happening each day, beginning with the alarm going off to a Sonny and Cher song. He's a snarky man with no social graces, no friends, and no love or beauty in his life, who is allowed to see how his choices affect outcomes and whether they lead to happiness or not. He gets to tweak his approach to life each day to further perfect his worldview and it's ability to help him find happiness. In the end, he learns how what matters - what makes him happy (wisdom), and how to get it (intelligence).

Another great American movie that teaches a similar lesson is Regarding Henry, where a high-powered, narcissistic attorney, who yells at his daughter for spilling her juice from behind his newspaper at breakfast, is later shot in the head, becomes somewhat retarded (think Forrest Gump), and everything changed for him, including his personality. He learns wisdom, once again, not from a holy book. In his new state, he's once again at the table with his daughter, and if I recall correctly, she nearly spills her juice again, winces in fear at her father's remembered response, and he just smiles and knocks the juice over himself. Look what's become important to him and what has ceased to be.



Is this Baha'i doctrine? If the universe has always existed, it needs no God to create it.



Are you getting into the cosmological argument here? It's incompatible with your previous comment that the universe has always existed. It is based in the idea that universe had a beginning, one of its premises.

Just to clarify…

Existence has neither end nor beginning. It’s possible that planets and stars come and go but existence is eternal.


“To be sure, it is possible for some part of creation—one of the celestial globes—to be newly formed or to disintegrate, but the other countless globes would continue to exist and the world of existence itself would not be disrupted or destroyed. On the contrary, its existence is perpetual and unchanging.”

Some Answered Questions
‘Abdu’l‑Bahá

I think Erich Fromm was also a humanist. I enjoyed reading his work the Sane Society.

There is a lot of truth and good in humanist views and I appreciate their and your insight.
 

Audie

Veteran Member
Well, actually there was a point early in Covid where it could have been eliminated globally IF enough people, about 70-75%, got the vaccine. Of course there wasn't enough vaccine to go around soon enough, and there were plenty of people who refused to get vaccinated when available, so Covid had plenty of hosts to replicate and mutate to different versions.

Yesterday in the USA nearly 2000 people died of Covid, with the vast majority being unvaccinated. The plus with the newest version is that it is less severe but more contagious. And what could happen is if more and more get this version in a short time frame there will be a possibility of the herd immunity that will help knock out a pandemic. A virus needs a number of viable hosts to infect and spread, and if that number declines it will essentially become pretty dormant.

The thing is world citizens will have to remain boosted over time. Covid can bounce back quickly if enough people don't have antibodies to fight the infection.

I dont think vaccine does anything but
usually limit the severity.
 

Audie

Veteran Member
Just to clarify…

Existence has neither end nor beginning. It’s possible that planets and stars come and go but existence is eternal.


“To be sure, it is possible for some part of creation—one of the celestial globes—to be newly formed or to disintegrate, but the other countless globes would continue to exist and the world of existence itself would not be disrupted or destroyed. On the contrary, its existence is perpetual and unchanging.”

Some Answered Questions
‘Abdu’l‑Bahá

I think Erich Fromm was also a humanist. I enjoyed reading his work the Sane Society.

There is a lot of truth and good in humanist views and I appreciate their and your insight.

What is " existence"?
Plz cite source reference
 

Trailblazer

Veteran Member
Why should your "accusers" be convinced that is a fact to be faced?
My point was that the accusers should stop accusing Baha'is of not having any evidence because we have done our homework and our beliefs are based upon good evidence and research.

In other words, the accusers should not be speaking for us Baha'is and telling us what we have done, since they do not know what we have done unless we tell them what we have done. Then when we tell them what we have done we should be believed.
 

F1fan

Veteran Member
I dont think vaccine does anything but
usually limit the severity.
It depends how much of the virus is inhaled. Delta was a more deadly and severe strain. The vaccines only help the body fight off the virus in the body. If a lot of virus is inhaled then it can overwhelm the body's ability to fight it off. Imagine it like the number of troops that invade a country, the fewer that invade the faster it can be beaten. The more that invade the longer it takes to beat. This means some replicate and then will spread to others. This is why vaccines are better with more precautions. It isn't a cure.
 

F1fan

Veteran Member
My point was that the accusers should stop accusing Baha'is of not having any evidence because we have done our homework and our beliefs are based upon good evidence and research.

In other words, the accusers should not be speaking for us Baha'is and telling us what we have done, since they do not know what we have done unless we tell them what we have done. Then when we tell them what we have done we should be believed.
Believers always find out they are correct in their own research. The real test is if these results can withstand objective scrutiny. The answer is: no.
 

Trailblazer

Veteran Member
Go figure! :D

And awwwwww you both, alongside @TransmutingSoul, @Dawnofhope, @loverofhumanity, and @arthra have filled me with much enthusiasm over the few short years that I’ve been a Bahá’í. Even though I struggle, I’ll just say thank you from my heart and soul, and may my life be a sacrifice to the Blessed Beauty.
Let me tell you, I still struggle even after 51 years of being a Baha'i ;) and it is people like you and the other Baha'is who keep me going. :) It is not that I have ever lost my belief in Baha'u'llah, but I have many "issues" with God, and that is problematic to say the least. :(

Let me just say this..... I can see my life as a sacrifice to Baha'u'llah but I somehow cannot make the jump over to God, because I hold God responsible for much of the suffering in the world whereas Baha'u'llah is in no way responsible because He did not create the material world of dust.
 

Audie

Veteran Member
It depends how much of the virus is inhaled. Delta was a more deadly and severe strain. The vaccines only help the body fight off the virus in the body. If a lot of virus is inhaled then it can overwhelm the body's ability to fight it off. Imagine it like the number of troops that invade a country, the fewer that invade the faster it can be beaten. The more that invade the longer it takes to beat. This means some replicate and then will spread to others. This is why vaccines are better with more precautions. It isn't a cure.
I read that breakthrough is around 1% so i takr back the " ineffective"
 

Trailblazer

Veteran Member
Believers always find out they are correct in their own research. The real test is if these results can withstand objective scrutiny. The answer is: no.
How do you think objective scrutiny would operate to determine if a religious belief is true?
 

Trailblazer

Veteran Member
Ok. So everyone who claims that god really has spoken to them must be correct.
Fair enough.
I never said that so that is a straw man.
I said: Baha'u'llah knew that it was God communicating to Him, but we cannot know that since we were not the ones who were communicated to.

How Baha'u'llah knew is not something we are privy to since we are not Messengers of God chosen by God.
 

F1fan

Veteran Member
Let me tell you, I still struggle even after 51 years of being a Baha'i ;) and it is people like you and the other Baha'is who keep me going. :) It is not that I have ever lost my belief in Baha'u'llah, but I have many "issues" with God, and that is problematic to say the least. :(

Let me just say this..... I can see my life as a sacrifice to Baha'u'llah but I somehow cannot make the jump over to God, because I hold God responsible for much of the suffering in the world whereas Baha'u'llah is in no way responsible because He did not create the material world of dust.
This illustrates how tribalism works, and how the community of similar beliefs feeds and reinforces beliefs that are not personally sustainable.

This is also the uphill battle Baha'i has with trying to get other theists to convert. The internet helps believers stay in their current beliefs.
 
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