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As to the slogans.. bestowed on the Baha'i Faith: religion "made to measure", religion "without any logical difficulties, without mysteries or paradoxes, religion deliberately modern, sensible and rational." This judgment shows once more how he (the critic quoted) judges a religious system alien to his own according to the concept of religion obtained from neo-Protestant theology.. The phrases.. ("all too harmonious, all too conflict-free, all too lucid") are meaningless and unintelligible for anyone who does not share his premises. Quite a clever trick perhaps: to turn a good epithet into its opposite by a dialectical manoeuvre, using the words "all too" without good cause (and indeed without possible good cause). As if one can add "all too" to 'any' epithet? Something can be too easy, too dangerous, too frivolous, but not too true, too correct, nor "all too lucid" and "all too harmonious." To say "all too lucid" is a form of pseudo-argument which the uncritical reader accepts at its face value, but logically the phrase is nonsense and it also exposes its user: anyone who has resort to such "reasons" shows that he lacks real ones.. (61:2) But this criticism shows something else: that.. (he) does not know the Baha'i Faith well enough and has not grasped its essential features. Human reason is certainly given a different value than it is in the Protestant Church (Martin Luther spoke of "that whore, Reason"). This, however, is not because the Baha'i Faith is " a deliberately modern religion" in the sense that in order to enhance its attractiveness, everything is geared to plausibility and effect; but quite simply because the divine truths do not run counter to human reason. Paradox is by no manner of means an indispensable element in original religion. Judaism and Islam-- to mention only these two religions-- get along without it, and, after all, even Protestant theologians will agree that the God who spoke in Judaism was the same God who revealed himself to man in Jesus. (62:1) But the Baha'i Faith with all its rationality is more than a dry rationalism, more than a late product of Western "enlightenment." The irrational, what Rudolf Otto called "the numinous," is also its innermost being. The Baha'i Faith is a religion of law, and its revealed laws are "irrational" in that they acquire validity primarily through the Founder's statement, not through their special wisdom and rationality. The recognition that ethics has its ultimate source in revelation and can only be discovered 'from' it, the refusal to admit the possibility of objective value judgments and therefore the rejection of "natural law"-- these are further evidence against.. (his) theme. Nor is it true that the Baha'i Faith is without mystery. The status of 'Abdul-Baha and the short duration the Bab's mission are regarded by the Baha'is as hidden mysteries.
(62:2)
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