The discrepancies in the guardianship disprove and invalidate the entire Baha'i religion

There are many discrepancies in Baha'i teachings, but none so glaringly exposes the falsehood of the Baha'i religion as the controversies surrounding the Guardianship.

From its very inception, the station of Guardianship was on shaky ground at best, and a complete fraud at worst.

This did not go unnoticed during the guardianship, but those who attempted to call attention to it were overwhelmed by those who held power in the religion. Eventually, their protestations, never answered, were simply ignored.

Once the institution of Guardianship had been established and widely accepted, the duties of this station were incumbent upon a man known as Shoghi Effendi, great grandson of the central figure of the religion, Mirza Husayn Ali, known as Baha'u'llah.

Among the Guardian's critical duties was the appointment, in his own lifetime, of a successor. The successor was supposed to be a male descendant of Shoghi, or perhaps any blood relative. But there is sufficient unclarity about this to leave open at least the possibility that any male successor could have been selected.

Surely, whomever Shoghi would have designated as his successor would have been accepted by the vast majority of Baha'is, and the institution would have continued.

But Shoghi died, and there was no clearly designated successor. There was at least one claimant to the succession, but the claim was not credible to the great majority of Baha'is.

And so the institution of the Guardianship was deemed by the majority of Baha'is to have ended. A small minority disagreed, and split away from the main body of believers to form other groups calling themselves Baha'is. They had neither power nor money, and soon came to exist only in the shadows of the main movement.

However, to anyone closely examining the history of the Guardianship, it quickly becomes clear that there is a very serious discrepancy between the claims of the religion prior to Shoghi Effendi's death, and the claims after.

During the guardianship of Shoghi Effendi, the station had been touted as crucial, vital, even central, to the institution of the religion. The guardianship was comparable to the papacy of the Roman Catholic religion. The Guardian was the sole and authoritative interpreter of Baha'i teachings, and it was said that the religion could not exist without that position being occupied by an actual guardian.

Every excuse was offered for the vacancy and voidance of the station. Earlier teachings about the importance of a continuing guardianship were downplayed, reinterpreted, or simply ignored altogether.

But to the objective observer, the truth is unavoidable. The guardianship had been regarded as indispensable, a divinely appointed institution. The responsibility of the Guardian to appoint a successor had been clear and unambiguous. It had also been relatively easy to accomplish, even if only on a contingency basis. Given the enormity of this responsibility, a notarized document (updated as needed) should have been deposited in various secure repositories in multiple copies. Indeed, even a simple, handwritten note would have sufficed.

But nothing. So far as anyone knows, not a single thing was done by the Guardian to meet this unspeakably important duty. (Some claim that he did, but the claims are entirely unverifiable.) Moreover, there had been absolutely no guidance given, concerning any eventuality, in which a clear successor would NOT be appointed. The slightest possibility of that had never been considered until the actual fact of death without succession.

At the very least, all of this screams out at the impartial researcher as blatant negligence, and incomprehensible dereliction of duty, on the part of the most important single leader of the religion at the time.

Worse, it strongly suggests that the guardian himself never believed anything about the teachings of the Baha'i religion, nor took his post seriously in any spiritual sense. If he did, he was inexplicably sloppy in fulfilling his duties, hardly a man to be revered as a representative of divine truth.

In my personal view, the discrepancies in the guardianship disprove and invalidate the entire Baha'i religion in all its forms.

From TRB