One Common Faith - Univ House of Justice
 <<   <-   >   >>
Page 37 of  56

Been the Same in All Religions (37:0)

So it has been throughout all of the religious dispensations whose origins have survived in written records. Mendicancy, slavery, autocracy, conquest, ethnic prejudices and other undesirable features of social interaction have gone unchallenged - or been explicitly indulged - as religion sought to achieve reformations of behaviour that were considered more immediately essential at given stages in the advance of civilization. To condemn religion because any one of its successive dispensations failed to address the whole range of social wrongs would be to ignore everything that has been learned about the nature of human development. Inevitably, anachronistic thinking of this kind must also create severe psychological handicaps in appreciating and facing the requirements of one's own time (37:1)

The issue is not the past, but the implications for the present. Problems arise where followers of one of the world's faiths prove unable to distinguish between its eternal and transitory features, and attempt to impose on society rules of behaviour that have long since accomplished their purpose. The principle is fundamental to an understanding of religion's social role: "The remedy the world needeth in its present-day afflictions can never be the same as that which a subsequent age may require", Bahá'u'lláh points out. "Be anxiously concerned with the needs of the age ye live in, and centre your deliberations on its exigencies and requirements." (37:2)

Get Next Page

  One Common Faith
  Citation Source List
: see