Baha'i
Readers, for information on Bahá’í, I direct you to the long comment after Religious training and the comment here. They are wonderfully wise, thoughtful, and instructive, a response to my invitation to inform us about the Baha'i faith. They also express valuable thoughts about religions and spirituality.
Happy reading and happy Easter. More on Easter and Good Friday soon.
Happy reading and happy Easter. More on Easter and Good Friday soon.
Comments
As for Easter, it is always humbling to become aware of the sacrifices others make on the behalf of the unaware - I'm a new parent and keep thinking to my own parent's struggles now that I see them myself, and of the saintly personalities across history that made sacrifices because that's exactly as far as we were wiling to tolerate them - to teach us the virtue of their and our lives and of the Founders of the religions who more than any other deserved respect and care and were universally condemned, opposed, marginalized, and not a few times actually had their lives ended by our need to protect our little piles of dust that burden our lives and we find totally absent from any eternal benefit. Fortunately eternity is still there and warmly welcomed them. Would that Pharaoh had just done the right thing, or Nimrod, or Pilate, or others of other histories. And it's not just these kings - it's the systems they represented that opposed the real Kings. No mass non-violent demonstrations against the suffering of Jesus broke out. No trade embargo was forced on Egypt for their enslavement of neighboring peoples yearning to breath free. But compare each of these kings with those that did indeed do right - Cyrus the Great was Zoroastrian in all likelihood and yet he conquered Babylon and freed peoples and built temples of other religions. There were Buddhist Kings of like mind. And Constantine set up hospitals and care for widows. There were kings who refused to lesson suffering and those that embraced the weak and worldly poor. Kings who built up armies and weapons vs those that engaged the social condition and marshaled our humanity to the task - and the virtue of our humanity is that it is first to bow the knee when we finally became aware of what has been done for us when we were negligent. Last night a close friend of mine spent the night in a hospital with his troubled son. It may be years before that son recognizes what is being done for him, and the father will again have too little sleep, worried his efforts will come to naught. My first words to him before he left, trying to find a way to encourage him, were "Nobility calls us to go to where we must( in a kind of dharma, or law of God,) go." and we embraced. Then I gathered the rest of his family and took them to my birthday dinner.
Jeanette