Not exactly the media coverage that the Administrative Order was hoping for, unless you go by the argument that any media coverage is good.

"Why you should think twice before taking a picture of you at the Bahai Temple in Santiago"

Maybe the Bahai religion and its temple to the Game of Thrones is a contribution to generate more tastes in your social networks, but not to that you find the inner peace that - supposedly - you look for.

As on Instagram everything happens suddenly and in mass - first were photos of people at the top of the hill Manquehue and then, from the drinks made with Aperol Spritz - I could see how since last year the trend was around the Bahai temple of Santiago.

I went to Peñalolén thinking that I would find inner peace in a religion with a very positive background unlike what I experienced in my religious childhood filled with guilt.

Through various pamphlets that deliver you at the entrance to the compound, it is explained that the Bahai religion rejects all kinds of prejudices and blindly trusts in the inherent goodness that every human being has in his heart; It also encourages marriages between different races and promotes the empowerment of women. As if the picture could not be better, there are no masses or priests and therefore there are no confessions or punishments imposed by guilt.

In a generation like ours, Bahai faith seems to fill the spaces that the dogmas imposed by our fathers could not fulfill and it seems that finally we are facing a credo of universal union of tolerance and love.

But it's not like that.

The Bahai faith is full of contradictions that try to fill the spaces of intolerance that other monotheistic religions like Judaism, Christianity and Islam present with a discourse that lacks logic and common sense.

Let's start with the first purpose and teaching of the creed, where in addition to the development of spiritual qualities, respect for and conservation of the environment is encouraged. How is it explained then that for the construction of the temple literally had to destroy half a hill precordillerano to fill it of cars and buses besides introducing plant species with the only and egoistic purpose of making the environment more comfortable for its visitors?

The guide of the place told me that the Bahai faith indicates as a basic principle the elimination of extremes of wealth and poverty and that the temple was built by anonymous donations from the parishioners themselves. However, the mole that looks like a set of Games Of Thrones and that clearly cost millions of dollars is located in the community of Peñalolén where 10% of its population is poor and presents other priorities quite obvious and not worth mentioning Yes its basic principles are to ensure that equity would not have been opted to contribute to the commune then?

The same guide who spoke to me about the advantages of not having a priest, or rites or masses, commented that although there is no equivalent to a Bible or a Quran, different texts compile the teachings of its leader, Bahá'u'llálah. One of these texts is the Aqdas, which specifically indicates that premarital relationships are discouraged and that the purpose of the union between two people is to have children, clearly rejecting same-sex couples. In fact, the counselor said that she had "many gay friends" and that it does not pressure the person, but the lifestyle. Just like that.
Within the Aqdas also instructions are given for the month of fasting that none of the Chileans would be willing to perform and therefore within the tour is not mentioned; the empowerment of women also has flaws since the system of inheritance is different for them. Marriages must be approved by all members of the family and divorce is valid one year after completion because this space is left in case of possible reconciliation (for whatever reason).

The Bahai religion indifferently criticizes what other religions should do by implementing rules that ultimately, and not being governed by a leader, are impossible to apply.

Many people told me that they visited the sanctuary for value architectural of the place but inside the temple I saw many couples enjoying themselves, people carrying their cell phone, three blessings running and two others crying. Outside the building there were more people, about 40 people. All of them taking photos with sticks selfies and even saw some guys in the parking lot eating hand roll and smoking weed.

The Bahai religion is aware of the attraction of its temples as a method of attracting new parishioners (and hence taxpayers). Being a new religion, it understands the different sociological currents of the present where the beautification of our social networks is much more important than to look for our spirituality (cause that is technically given as lost today).
So think twice: maybe a selfie in this place goes against what you really believe, or you just do not care about the above.

Source : https://pousta.com/templo-bahai-santiago/

Automatically translated with http://translate.google.com

Baha'i activities in DRC

This is being circulated by Baha'is on social media, not sure how true this is!

The ability is being raised to go into neighborhoods and villages to engage the population in an intensive way to raise up large numbers of core activities (not just for a group of people, but serving the whole village).

In one of the villages in the DRC such intense process is underway, everyone trusts each other and everyone is trustworthy, they feel like 1, even the livestock is not locked up at night. So when a new person comes into a village he’s told that if anything goes missing, they know it’s him.

In another village everyone’s saying Allah’u’Abha to each other, coming from outside one doesn’t know who’s Baha’i and who not. And when the Baha’is speak about Baha’is vs. friends of the Faith, the friends ask why they aren’t considered Baha’is too. So we need to catch up with our language use.

For the Bicentenaries the NSA is arranging a month of observances. The first week of October will be dedicated to friends and family, gatherings will be held in the close circles; in the second week activities will be organized for neighborhoods; in week 3 the LSAs will arrange observances for whole localities; week 4 will be on cluster level. The NSA sent a letter to the RBC asking to invite 17 million people to participate. Even if not so many people come, but 17 million invitations should be sent out. In Lubumbashi the friends booked the local football stadium for the event.

Baha'i Faith: Teaching vs. Proselytizing

Baha'u'llah's activities in the Ottoman Empire and the Political conditions during that period.

Mehmed Emin Ali Pasha

On September 7, 1871, Mehmed Emin Ali Pasha, the Ottoman Grand Vizier, died. He was the recipient of three Tablets from Bahá'u'lláh, including "Lawh-i-Ra'ís" (not to be confused with "Súriy-i-Ra'ís").
Juan Cole describes some of the political atmosphere in the Ottoman Empire in his "Lawh-i-Fu'ád: notes by Juan Cole".
Of note,

The Tablet of Fuad was written to commemorate the death of Kecicizade Fuad Páshá in Nice of heart trouble, in February, 1869. Therefore it was presumably penned in late winter or early spring of that year, during Bahá'u'lláh's close confinement in the fortress of Acre (Akká). Fuad Páshá was the son of a famed poet, and he himself studied medicine. Although Fuad Páshá is presented in this tablet as a despot, he is remembered in Turkish historiography rather as a reformer. Born in Istanbul in 1815, he was among the foremost planners and implementers of the Tanzimat or reorganization of the Ottoman administration in the nineteenth century so as to bring it closer to modern Western standards. Because of his fluent French, he was able to enter and rise high in the foreign ministry. In 1840 he was first secretary of the Ottoman Embassy in England.
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Fuad Páshá was intimately involved in decisions affecting Bahá'u'lláh. He was grand vizier in 1863 when Bahá'u'lláh was brought from Baghdad to Istanbul, presumably to remove him from close proximity to his followers in Iran and also to investigate whether Babism under his leadership might be politically useful to the Ottomans in the relations with Iran. (In this regard the summoning of Bahá'u'lláh to Istanbul prefigures Abdulhamid II's attempt to use Iranians such as Sayyid Jamálu'd-Din al-Afghani and Mírzá Áqá Khán Kirmani for political purposes vis-a-vis Iran during his campaign for pan-Islam during the 1880s and 1890s). Fuad Páshá must certainly have taken the decision to rusticate Bahá'u'lláh to Edirne (Adrianople) in November of 1863. He was also involved, as grand vizier and then foreign minister, in making the decision to send Bahá'u'lláh to Acre nearly five years later. As a defender of the more secular values of the Tanzimat reforms, Fuad Páshá was probably suspicious (as we know his colleague Mehmet Emin Alí Páshá was) of Babism as an old-style theocratic Mahdist movement that attacked modernity. In 1866 Alí Páshá told the Austrian ambassador in Istanbul that Bahá'u'lláh, then in exile in Edirne, was "a man of great distinction, exemplary conduct, great moderation, and a most dignified figure" and spoke of Babism as "a doctrine which is worthy of high esteem." He went on to say, however, that he still found the religion politically unacceptable because it refused to recognize a separation of religious and temporal authority. From the reformers' point of view a messianic movement such as Babism, whatever its virtues, threatened the achievements of the Tanzimat by seeking to put all authority, religious and secular, back in the hands of a charismatic spiritual leader. I would argue that, ironically, Bahá'u'lláh was moving away from a theocratic model toward one that acknowledged the autonomy of the civil state, and that there was a convergence between his thought and the Tanzimat that, tragically, the Ottoman state was unable to grasp because of Babism's previous reputation as a vehicle for radical theocracy.
Around the fall of 1867, Bahá'u'lláh in Edirne wrote a letter (The Tablet of the Kings or Súrat al-Mulúk) apostrophizing the world's rulers, in which he addressed Ottoman cabinet officials and to Sultan Abdulaziz. Bahá'u'lláh therein disavows any theocratic or mahdist pretensions, denying that he wishes to lay hold on the worldly possessions of these high officials, and insisting that he is not in rebellion against the Ottoman Sultán. He does say that Sultán AbdulAzíz should be grateful to God for having made him "Sultán of the Muslims," and calls him the "shadow of God on earth." He thus underlines that the civil state derives its ultimate authority from God, but that Bahá'u'lláh's coming does not challenge in any way its authority, since he wishes only to give ethical and spiritual counsel.
We do not know if the Tablet to the Kings actually was sent to the Sublime Porte, though that seems likely. Its attempt at conciliation, in any case, failed. By spring of 1868 Sultan Abdulaziz and his cabinet, in reaction to AzAlí complaints and the importuning of the Iranian ambassador, had decided to exile Bahá'u'lláh and his companions from Edirne to Acre. Grand Vizier or First Minister Alí Páshá and Foreign Minister Fuad Páshá were intimately involved in this decision, which had implications for the Ottoman Empire's relations with Iran and also had the potential to raise protests from the European ambassadors concerned about freedom of conscience. But the motives for taking this step among the high Ottoman elite probably differed. Fuad and Alí could have cared less about Islamic orthodoxy, but they wanted to please Iran for reasons of Realpolitik. Ironically, they may also have worried about the Bábís as Muslim critics of their autocracy. The Islamic backlash against the secularizing Tanzimat reforms had taken two forms. One was the reactionary critique by the conservative Ottoman Muslim clergy (ulema), which had been implicated in the 1858 Kuleli revolt against the Westernizing government. Many of Bahá'u'lláh's statements in his letters to the Ottoman state, calling it back to God, and critiquing its secularizing principles, could have been read as belonging in this reactionary tradition. The other Islamic response was that of the Young Ottomans, a society founded in 1865, who combined an interest in Islamic mysticism and culture with an Ottoman nationalism and a commitment to parliamentary governance and civil rights. Many of these individuals were government translators and had a good knowledge of European languages and of the Enlightenment tradition of thinking about government and rights. One of these was named Sadik [Sadiq] Effendi, and he almost certainly met Bahá'u'lláh and `Abdu'l-Bahá in the fortress of Acre (Akká).
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This fascinating glimpse into the cultural and political situation of the Ottoman empire in 1868 provides obvious further context to Bahá'u'lláh's Tablet of Fuad. It suggests, for one thing, that predictions of the Sultán's downfall, such as Bahá'u'lláh made in that Tablet, were not unusual but rather were commonplaces of the religious discourse of the time. Second, it shows how a mosque preacher at the time might get enough Western education to be considered a member of the effendi (Westernized secretary) class, and how such men were mixing an Islamic critique of what they saw as Fuad and Ali's extreme Westernization with an Enlightenment critique of their top-down, highly authoritarian approach to government. I suppose there is a parallel between the `republicanism' of these Muslim Young Ottomans and the similar pro-republican stance that the American Baptists took during the 1776 revolution. Third, and most suggestive of all, the French periodical describing Sadik Effendi's exile to the Fortress of Akká is dated Feb. 28, 1869!! It seems to me almost certain that he interacted with the Bahá'ís also imprisoned in the fortress, and while Bahá'u'lláh had his own reasons to condemn Fuad Páshá, his likely dialogue with Young Ottoman thought of the time is probably part of the picture. Note that at that moment, Young Ottomans like Namik Kemal were in exile in London, calling for British-style parliamentary governance in the Ottoman empire, and that Bahá'u'lláh's Tablet to Queen Victoria, written in Akká sometime 1868-1869 also did. It is not impossible, in fact, that Sadik Effendi was able surreptitiously to correspond with other Young Ottomans who reported developments to him.
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Now Bahá'u'lláh turns to a prophecy similar to but more specific than his jeremiads in the Tablet of the Premier (Súrat ar-Ra'ís) addressed to Alí Páshá. Speaking with the voice of God (using the royal "we"), Bahá'u'lláh predicts that Alí Páshá, then grand vizier, will be deposed (the verb is 'azala, which is used of deposing kings). He says, too, that God will "lay hold" (the verb is akhadha, to take, seize) of Sultán AbdulAzíz (he is called amiruhum, literally, "their prince" or "their commander"). Although Bahá'u'lláh was correct that neither of these powerful men had long at the top in 1869, his prophecy, if taken literally, actually reverses their true fates. Alí Páshá was never deposed, but rather died in office in 1871. It was Sultán AbdulAzíz who was deposed, in the Constitutional Revolution of spring, 1876, shortly after which he committed suicide. Obviously, if Bahá'u'lláh had merely meant to predict that eventually these two men would die, then the prophecy was not very remarkable. Rather, he seems to have believed that Alí Páshá would fall from the Sultán's favor, and that some dramatic event would overtake the Sultán. Even contemporaries such as Mírzá Abu'l-Fadl Gulpaygani, who became a Bahá'í in 1876 on hearing of the Sultán's fall, had demanded that the latter meet some extraordinary fate before he would accept that the prophecy in the Tablet of Fuad had been fulfilled. Taken together with Bahá'u'lláh's prediction in the Tablet of the Premier that turmoil would overtake the Ottoman empire and his advocacy from his early Acre years of parliamentary democracy, he does seem to have been prescient about the imminence of the First Constitutional Revolution). Indeed, the matter of Alí Páshá never being deposed seems minor in comparison.
It is important to note how political Bahá'u'lláh's statements in this tablet are, and how candidly seditious. Any published or openly circulated criticism of the Sultán and his ministers, who still presided over an absolute monarchy despite their moves toward cabinet government, was strictly forbidden and punishable by death. Had the Tablet of Fuad fallen into Ottoman hands, it could well have led to Bahá'u'lláh's summary execution. As noted above, the only other group that engaged in a similar critique of Fuad Páshá and Alí Páshá, charging them with being overly authoritarian and arguing that the Tanzimat abandonment of spirituality had gone too far, while working for British-style parliamentary governance, was the Young Ottomans (as noted above). This group of intellectuals, many of whom had a Western education and who were well aware of the U.S. Bill of Rights and the French Rights of Man, had a more mainstream political style than did Bahá'u'lláh. But despite his Miltonian imagery, his prophetic rhetorical style, and his Bábí passion, by 1869 Bahá'u'lláh was advocating a political program in the Ottoman Empire and Iran that differed very little from that of Young Ottomans such as Namik Kemal. (In his Tablet to Queen Victoria of 1868 or 1869, he advocated parliamentary rule, another value that was strictly prohibited in Ottoman political discourse). The stark Bahá'í turn to political quietism from the 1930s has resulted in a view of Bahá'u'lláh that reads back into his period the later skittishness about politics, a view made possible only by ignorance of Ottoman imperial policy of the time with regard to politics and censorship. The Tablet of Fuad is as radical a document in its own time as Tom Paine's revolutionary pamphlets were.
The last part of the Tablet of Fuad appears to contain a condemnation of Mírzá Yahyá Subh-i Azal (d. 1912), Bahá'u'lláh's half-brother and a widely recognized leader of the Bábís, with whom Bahá'u'lláh was in competition for the leadership of the Bábí community. Despite the disadvantages of his confinement in the fortress of Acre, Bahá'u'lláh appears to have been already well on the way to winning over most of the Bábís by his assertion that he was the promised one of the Báb. Finally, there is a passage about God having seized or taken "al-Mahdi." The Mahdi is, of course, the Islamic promised one who is expected to fill the world with justice after it had been filled with injustice. I am not sure whether this is an ironic way of referring one last time to Fuad Páshá, or whether it is the name of an enemy of Bahá'u'lláh's who had recently died. "Mihdí" is a common Iranian personal name. Khazeh Fananapazir has wrote to me that this Mahdi was in fact an Azali, and was the recipient of the Kitáb-i Badí` (The Book of Wonder), Bahá'u'lláh's major apologia to the Bábís. This Mihdí was in the circle of Sayyid Muhammad Isfahani, and had written a fierce denunciation of Bahá'u'lláh.
The Tablet of Fuad was called by Baron Rosen a "victory hymn" in celebration of an enemy's death. This is an apt description, but this short piece is much more than that. It condemns the autocratic leadership style of the Tanzimat men, with their vision of modernization dictated from above. It playfully pokes fun at their increasing secularization by depicting one of them at the gates of hell surrounded by vengeful angels, who strike him down for his impudence, taunt him for his unbelief and his despotic deeds, and unceremoniously dump him into the inferno. Fuad Páshá is lambasted as more of a tyrant than Pharaoh, and the entire Ottoman state is thus painted with the same brush. The issues of rights and due process are also key to this tablet. Fuad's crime is to condemn the Bahá'ís to imprisonment without proof of any wrongdoing on their part. Because of their iniquity and despotism, the top three officers of the Ottoman state are here consigned to unpleasant ends. Fuad Páshá suddenly dies at a relatively young 53 or 54, far from home and from his loved ones. The deposition of Alí Páshá is predicted. And it is said that God would lay hold upon the Sultán. The correspondence between their mistreatment of Bahá'u'lláh and his companions and their actual or predicted fates posited in this tablet recalls the conviction among Sufi leaders that the fates of kings and dynasties depend upon how well they treat the mystic masters, and, of course, it echoes the sermons and newspaper articles of progressive Muslim Ottoman dissidents who also predicted an early end to the reign of Sultán AbdulAzíz. But in going on to specify actual mechanisms for the redress of such injustices, such as adoption of a rule of law, the safeguarding of individual rights, and parliamentary governance, Bahá'u'lláh makes his jeremiads against the Ottoman pharaohs much more than mere theological gloating, imbuing them instead with importance for the history of thinking about human rights and democracy in the modern Middle East.

Rainn Wilson talks about Baha'u'llah, his Life and Teachings at the National Bahá'í Center in Iceland. Here Are Some Errors and Gross Omissions.

By A35821361

At 17:30, he omits that the Babis led a violent, messianic insurrection against the government.

At 17:40, he says "They killed tens of thousands of Babis in Persia in the early 1800's in the most horrifying ways." In fact, Denis MacEoin concludes](https://bahai-library.com/uhj_mazandarani_number_martyrs) that the "number of early Babi/Bahá'í martyrs was not 20,000, as 'Abdu'l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi mentioned numerous times, but 2,000 to 3,000 (e.g. MacEoin, "A Note on the Numbers of Babi and Bahá'í Martyrs in Iran," in Bahá'í Studies Bulletin, 2.2, Sept. 1983, and "From Babism to Bahá'ísm: Problems of Militancy, Conflation, and Quietism in the Construction of a Religion," in Religion, 13, July 1983)."

At 18:00, he omits that Bahaullah, as one of the leaders of the Babi movement, was imprisoned after some Babis unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate the Shah of Iran.

At 20:15, Bahaullah was exiled and not executed due to heavy pressure from the Russian consul, who had some political authority over the Iranian state at the time. In fact, Bahaullah was escorted with an entourage of Russian horseman to his exile in Baghdad, which was part of the Ottoman Empire at the time. Bahaullah left Baghdad without telling his family to study with Sufi sheikhs in Kurdistan.

At 22:00, the Bab said the next manifestation would come in 1000 years, not a short time.

At 22:20, Bahaullah's followers were engaged in internecine fighting with the followers of Subh-i-Azal, which is why the Ottoman authorities moved him to Acre, Palestine.

At 26:18, he correctly quotes Bahaullah as saying, "That diversity in religion should cease."

At 47:30, he says "There are two choices about Bahaullah." No, in fact, there are many more conclusions that one can more objectively reach than those two.