The Elders

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In 1992, British rock musician Peter Gabriel founded Witness, an organization that uses video to advance human rights. In 1999, he began a conversation with media mogul Richard Branson about The Elders, a new gathering of world leaders who would pool their wisdom to guide and support our global village. For their model they looked to traditional village elders, trusted by people for millennia around the world to resolve conflict within their communities. In 2001 Gabriel and Branson took their idea to Nelson Mandela and Graça Machel, who were enthused and assembled Ella Bhatt, Mary Robinson, Desmond Tutu, Gro Bruntland, Fernando Cardoso, Aung Saan Suu Kyi, Kofi Annan, Lakhdar Brahmini, Jimmy Carter, Li Zhaoxing, and Muhammad Yunus.

Nelson Mandela: “This group can speak freely and boldly, working both publicly and behind the scenes on whatever actions need to be taken. Together we will work together to support courage where there is fear, foster agreement where there is conflict, and inspire hope where there is despair.”

Desmond Tutu: “Despite all the ghastliness that is around, human beings are made for goodness. The ones that ought to be held in high regard are not the ones who are militarily powerful, nor even economically prosperous. They are the ones who have a commitment to try and make the world a better place. We- The Elders – will endeavour to support these people and do our best for humanity.”

Their very first mission was to Sudan to intervene in the Darfur conflict. From September 30-October 4, 2007, they met with as many officials and groups represented in the conflict, down to the powerless and displaced villagers. Their mandate, in their own words, was: “We act only as individuals and a group of men and women who have lived long, learned much, and are united in the belief that we must do everything in our power to contribute to bring peace where it is absent, justice where it has been denied, and dignity where it is under attack. We want to amplify the voices of people who are not heard and give hope to the marginalized and help to the peacemakers.”

They released their report in November 2007, which described the fragile peace as on a “knife edge.” Their recommendations included an immediate ceasefire, inclusive peace, a peacekeeping force, freedom of humanitarian agencies, and of course, democracy.

Laudable as this initiative has been, I am disappointed and unimpressed by this initial salvo. Any reasonable commission could have come up with these conclusions, even before going there. Since the departure of The Elders, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005 has continued to be violated, and the brutal inhumanity of war continues. It might lead one to the painful realization that not only are the temporal and religious leaders of the world impotent to stem the cascading torrent of the age, but even such a collective of the wise are chaff in the wind – it’s too big even for them. So shall we throw up our hands in despair and submit to our gloomy fates? Bahá’ís are not so inclined. In the Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, Bahá’u’lláh wrote: “Religious fanaticism and hatred are a world-devouring fire, whose violence none can quench. The Hand of Divine power can, alone, deliver mankind from this desolating affliction.” (pg. 13)

And what did the Hand of Divine power ordain? “O ye the elected representatives of the people in every land! Take ye counsel together, and let your concern be only for that which profiteth mankind, and bettereth the condition thereof . . . Regard the world as the human body which, though at its creation whole and perfect, hath been afflicted, through various causes, with grave disorders and maladies. Not for one day did it gain ease, nay its sickness waxed more severe, as it fell under the treatment of ignorant physicians, who gave full rein to their personal desires, and have erred grievously. And if, at one time, through the care of an able physician, a member of that body was healed, the rest remained afflicted as before . . . We behold it, in this day, at the mercy of rulers so drunk with pride that they cannot discern clearly their own best advantage . . . And whenever any one of them hath striven to improve its condition, his motive hath been his own gain, whether confessedly so or not; and the unworthiness of this motive hath limited his power to heal or cure.

“That which the Lord hath ordained as the sovereign remedy and mightiest instrument for the healing of all the world is the union of all its peoples in one universal Cause, one common Faith. This can in no wise be achieved except through the power of a skilled, an all-powerful and inspired Physician. This, verily, is the truth, and all else naught but error.” (Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, pg. 254-255)

Not only did He ordain it, but gave instructions on how it was to be accomplished: “The Great Being, wishing to reveal the prerequisites of the peace and tranquillity of the world and the advancement of its peoples, hath written: The time must come when the imperative necessity for the holding of a vast, an all-embracing assemblage of men will be universally realized. The rulers and kings of the earth must needs attend it, and, participating in its deliberations, must consider such ways and means as will lay the foundations of the world's Great Peace amongst men. Such a peace demandeth that the Great Powers should resolve, for the sake of the tranquillity of the peoples of the earth, to be fully reconciled among themselves. Should any king take up arms against another, all should unitedly arise and prevent him. If this be done, the nations of the world will no longer require any armaments, except for the purpose of preserving the security of their realms and of maintaining internal order within their territories. This will ensure the peace and composure of every people, government and nation . . . The day is approaching when all the peoples of the world will have adopted one universal language and one common script. When this is achieved, to whatsoever city a man may journey, it shall be as if he were entering his own home. These things are obligatory and absolutely essential. It is incumbent upon every man of insight and understanding to strive to translate that which hath been written into reality and action . . . That one indeed is a man who, today, dedicateth himself to the service of the entire human race . . . It is not for him to pride himself who loveth his own country, but rather for him who loveth the whole world. The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.” (Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, pg. 249-250)

And since He ordained it and told us how to do it, will it happen? "Once . . . asked Bahá’u’lláh, 'How will the Cause of God be universally adopted by mankind?' Bahá'u'lláh said that first, the nations of the world would arm themselves with infernal engines of war, and when fully armed would attack each other like bloodthirsty beasts. As a result, there would be enormous bloodshed throughout the world. Then the wise from all nations would gather together to investigate the cause of such bloodshed. They would come to the conclusion that prejudices were the cause, a major form being religious prejudice. They would therefore try to eliminate religion so as to eliminate prejudice. Later they would realize that man cannot live without religion. Then they would study the teachings of all religions to see which of the religions conformed to the prevailing conditions of the time. It is then that the Cause of God would become universal." (Adib Taherzadeh, The Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh, Volume 4, pg. 56)

The one criticism of the Faith I hear with any consistency is the cynical one that its ideals are too high, they’ll never work. For over a century now, Bahá’ís around the world have been working to establish these realities, and have been building up institutions to implement these ideals that will be in place as the old world order crumbles. They are doing so at every level, mostly at the grassroots, but on high diplomatic levels as well. Anyone who wishes to investigate the chronicle of this amazing process is referred to the document Century of Light, online at http://reference.bahai.org/en/t/bic/COL/col-2.html, which will explain the astonishing happiness and purposefulness of the Bahá’ís in the face of the world caught whirling in a maelstrom.

Stuck in a Cheese Grater?

I love puzzles of all kinds, and am a crossword puzzle addict, er, I mean cruciverbalist – yeah, that’s the word. I solve them by the truckload and am irresistibly drawn when I espy a naked one or someone else solving one, and have often met interesting people that way, though I can’t claim I’ve met my best friend, the love of my life – one can have fantasies, can’t one? -- or had a career break by this form of contact.

I first started doing them in earnest when I would take my daughter to Hungarian school on Saturday mornings and would have over two hours at the library before I picked her up again. At first I did it desultorily and unsuccessfully, but on a trip to Halifax to audition for the Atlantic Symphony, my host’s roommate walked around the house with a copy of the New York Times, vowing that she would solve it before the week was out – did I know a seventeen letter word beginning with ow for when your elbow gets stuck in a cheese grater? Intrigued, I helped her out and found I could do it, and in the process I was initiated into the world of crossword puzzle words, actual words (unlike bogus words in a Scrabble dictionary that start with Q but are not followed by U) though not in common usage, like ort and erne and yegg, and began a lifelong relationship with Estes Kefauver.

So every Saturday for the next 20 years I did the weekend crosswords in the Toronto Star, and once I began to see certain patterns of language peculiar to them, I would complete two of them at a single sitting in under an hour. I never used dictionaries or other aids, but would occasionally ask my wife when I got stuck on a certain clue, and though she had no confidence in her own language skills, surprisingly often supplied a recalcitrant word, a movie title, disease, or colloquialism.

My halcyon days were when the local paper printed the New York Times Sunday puzzle (a week later, so what?), but eventually advertisements ate up its space. In case you don’t know, most large or sophisticated puzzles have themes, or quips from comedians’ one-liners, and part of the fun is cracking the code of the theme. Puns, palindromes, and conundrums are the mainstay of clever clues, and you should know that puns are followed by questions marks in the clues. For instance, from Jan 5/03, entitled Bonus Rounds, you have to add an “O” to a well-known phrase to come up with a new one: the clue “Dentist’s Jazz band?” produces “FineToothCombO,” and “I think, therefore I wrestle?” yields “CogitoErgoSumO.” Ha ha. One of my favourites is a St. Patrick’s Day special in which the centre black square is surrounded by four white ones, or rather green ones, as the colour green completes each of the solutions around it, forming a four-leafed clover. Particularly tricky are those that have more than one letter or even a full word in selected squares. However, what makes difficult crossword puzzles more challenging is usually not the solutions, but the clues, which get more abstruse and deliberately misleading the higher the degree of difficulty. The clue is always in the same tense or part of speech as the solution, but the part of speech itself is not easy to decipher. And it is true that, unlike many other types of word puzzles, you do have to have a fairly wide knowledge base that spans cultures, topics, and generations – if you don’t know who Yma Sumac and Mel Ott were, you’ll have a tough time beyond the moderate level.

Sure, puzzles and games are largely a source of amusement, but I believe all enduring games contain something valuable. Word puzzles and trivia games make your brain’s search engine skitter around your neural pathways like a frightened rodent, lighting up dusty corners, finding alternative routes unimagined by Mapquest, shrieking the wrong way down streets marked One Way, and creating new constellations. I’m told that it’s a prophylactic against Alzheimer’s, and thank God for that. For me, it performed an indispensable service when I was going through a major crisis that consumed my life: once I had said all my prayers, done all my work, and dumped my woes on my good friends, crossword puzzles kept my mind off fretting over sorrows which only time had the power to heal and change. Little could those little men and women fussing in solitude over the construction of these anagrammed squares have imagined.
In my pre-crepuscular years I have become one of those little men, creating puzzles, not professionally but as supplementary learning materials for various courses I teach. One of these is the Ruhi Institute, and the puzzles help the participants return again and again to the Scripture they are studying, expanding their vocabulary and even deepening their insight as they scour the passages again and again.

And I continue to meet interesting people on trains and in cafés who are poring over crosswords, erasing and scratching their heads, but I doubt that I will ever attend any conventions – I presume they exist – or travel thousands of miles to meet Will Shortz, the Grand Imperial Wizard of cruciverbalism. Yeah, that’s the word.

The God Gene

The geneticist Dean Hamer’s book The God Gene examines the possibility that our predilection or lack thereof towards spirituality is “hard-wired into our genes.” To those of faith the very idea may seem preposterous or absurd, but Bahá’ís would welcome this, as embedded in the Teachings is the principle of the essential harmony of Science and Religion, setting aside the fallacious disputes between the two. Perhaps on the relative success in locating a “gay gene,” the question arose as to whether a similar detective search would yield information that will rock our world.

The studies that fed this report were a mix of biochemistry, neurology, and anatomy, citing new research such as brain imaging during meditation to the application of previous methods such as Temperament and Character Inventory and studies of identical twins. The former gave rise to the Newberg Scale, eerily parallel in scientific terms to The Seven Valleys, a mystical document from the Pen of Bahá’u’lláh. Various religious groups were studied: particularly interesting were the genetic congruity of the Jews, and to some extent the Hindus. Some of these investigations gave rise to curious and bizarre speculations on the part of some scientists, such as that the mystical visions of St. Paul, the Prophet Muhammad, Joan of Arc, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky were all a result of temporal lobe epilepsy. Another curiosity is that spiritual ecstasy lights up the same spot in the brain that hallucinogens do, giving some credence to those who assert that their drug trips are transcendental.

One of Hamer’s basic premises is the separation of religion and spirituality. Spirituality he deems as the impulse to worship, of “self-transcendence,” the experience of the mystical and the personal apprehension of worlds beyond the physical, whereas religion he sees as learned – the teachings, doctrines, dogmas, and practices of a belief system. His research focuses chiefly upon the former.

Did he find the gene? In a word, no. However, he still has his hopes set on the gene VMAT2, looking for the fire in that cloud of smoke. I especially had to laugh at his explanation of the results of a twin study: “The remainder of the variation for each trait could be ascribed to that mix of events, serendipity, and measurement uncertainty called unique environment.” Serendipity is now a research factor? -- Cool! And early on in the book (pg. 16), he all but negates all his scientific inquiry by his own assertion: “Spirituality is ultimately a matter of faith, not of genetics.” And, like his colleague Francis S. Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, he quotes Einstein, in a famous statement virtually identical to a well-known Bahá’í dictum: “Religion without science is blind; science without religion is lame.”

I wrote to Dr. Hamer, offering him to research Bahá’í communities, which are small, but readily available, willing, and a much wider gene pool than any he quotes in his book. I hope he takes us up on it.

The Varqá Legacy

September 22, 2007 brought to a close the ministry of the Hands of the Cause of God with the passing of Dr. ‘Ali-Muhammad Varqá in Haifa, Israel. 50 known Hands were appointed by the Central Figures of the Faith to protect and propagate the Cause. They included some family relations, but none match the 3-generatioin legacy of the Varqá family of Persia.

1. Mírzá’Ali-Muhammad Varqá (c.1856-1896)had a dream as a child in which God came and threw the dolls he was playing with into a fire and told him to cast away his vain imaginings. His father was a Bábí and an eloquent speaker who was flogged, then exiled with his two sons for holding a meeting of 200 Bábís in Yazd.

His own fame was as a poet, but he was also a doctor. In Tabríz, Varqá prescribed a remedy to an employee of the Crown Prince which helped his wife to conceive a child. In gratitude Varqá was given the Prince’s daughter in marriage, which began a very complicated family life filled with dangers. He had to finally leave Tabriz with his son Rúhu’lláh, divorcing his wife after a plot on his life. Later in Zanján he remarried, but later his first wife became a Bahá’í.

"Once Varqá asked Bahá'u'lláh, 'How will the Cause of God be universally adopted by mankind?' Bahá'u'lláh said that first, the nations of the world would arm themselves with infernal engines of war, and when fully armed would attack each other like bloodthirsty beasts. As a result, there would be enormous bloodshed throughout the world. Then the wise from all nations would gather together to investigate the cause of such bloodshed. They would come to the conclusion that prejudices were the cause, a major form being religious prejudice. They would therefore try to eliminate religion so as to eliminate prejudice. Later they would realize that man cannot live without religion. Then they would study the teachings of all religions to see which of the religions conformed to the prevailing conditions of the time. It is then that the Cause of God would become universal."*

In 1896 Varqá managed to get precious Bahá’í archives out of Zanján, but he himself was arrested and taken back. 16 days of pressure failed to make him recant his Faith, so he and his son were sent to a Tihrán dungeon. Násiri’d-Din Sháh was assassinated May 1, 1896, on the eve of his jubilee celebration, and the steward of the prison took revenge on the innocent Bahá’ís. He himself stabbed Varqá in the belly and ripped his body apart. He then turned to Rúhu’lláh and offered to take him and give him an allowance, but the 12-year old boy just sobbed that he wanted to be with his father, so the boy was strangled with a rope.

2. Rúhu’lláh’s older brother Valíyu’lláh Varqá (1884-1955) learned the Faith from an uncle; in his spare time he learned English and Arabic. In 1911-12 he accompanied ‘Abdu’l-Bahá on his trips to America and Europe, as treasurer and interpreter, and was dearly loved by him. Back in Irán he worked as a translator at the Turkish Embassy in Tihrán.

In 1934 he was elected to the National Spiritual Assembly of Irán, sometimes serving as Chairman, and In 1938 Shoghi Effendi appointed him Trustee of Huqúqu’lláh. Upon being appointed a Hand of the Cause in 1951, like most other Hands he traveled extensively to Bahá’í conferences and on teaching trips to Uganda, Stockholm, Chicago, New Delhi, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Germany, and South America.
In 1953 he fell ill in Einstein’s home town of Ulm, but continued to travel and serve; he finally succumbed to his illness in 1955 in a German hospital.
On his death his son ‘Ali-Muhammad was appointed both a Hand of the Cause and Trustee of Huqúqu’lláh in his place.

3. Dr. ‘Alí-Muhammad Varqá (1912-2007) was born while his father was traveling in America with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. He studied economics and history in Tihrán, completed his doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris and became a professor at Tehran and Tabríz universities.
On his father’s death in 1955, he was appointed to replace him both as a Hand of the Cause and as Trustee of Huqúqu’lláh. During his tenure, the Institution of Huqúqu’lláh expanded around the world, with the establishment of Boards of Trustees, deputies, and representatives.


After 1963 he represented the Universal House of Justice at inaugural elections of many NSAs, including such unusual places as Sicily, Central African Republic, the Windward Islands, and Greenland.

Because he was Francophone, he was often sent by the Universal House of Justice to French-speaking countries around the world, most notably to France in 1962 to strengthen the new NSA that replaced the one that had largely supported Mason Remey in his claim to be the next Guardian.

In the 1970s he was assigned to collect reliable accounts of the early days of the Faith around the world. He was away from Irán during the Revolution of 1979, never returned; he was accepted as a refugee in Canada.

My own last memory of Dr. Varqá was on May 27th of this year. Since one of his great joys was to have seen during his lifetime the Bahá’í Faith spread all over the world, he loved after his addresses to the pilgrims assembled in Haifa to hear prayers chanted, sung, and recited in their native languages. Among many others, even though I am Canadian, I recited a prayer in my mother tongue of Hungarian. All of us did so with added fervour to the beaming face of our beloved Dr. Varqá.

The Universal House of Justice is vigilant not to arrogate to itself powers and functions not mandated in the holy writings of the Bahá’í Faith, and they could find nothing that granted them the authority to appoint more Hands of the Cause. Since these functions nevertheless had to continue to be carried out, they instead appointed Continental Boards of Counselors that work as advisors to the elected Institutions of the Faith and circumscribed their duties in great detail in the document The Institution of the Counsellors.

Dr. ‘Ali-Muhammad Varqá is survived by three daughters.

*Adib Taherzadeh, The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh volume 4, pg. 56

Rumi at 800

September 30, 2007 marks the 800th birthday anniversary of arguably the world’s most beloved poet, Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273). If only the place of his birth were as certain as the date, for he is generally thought to have been born in eastern Afghanistan, but more likely in what is now Tajikistan. Notwithstanding this and the fact that his entire poetical career was lived in Konya, Turkey, he is Persian through and through, in the great tradition of the mystic poets that preceded him -- ‘Attar, Khayyam, Ferdowsi, Sana’i, et. al -- his contemporary Sa’adi, and those who followed, such as Hafiz.

His prodigious output, several times that of Shakespeare’s, is all the more remarkable in that he didn’t begin until mid-life. He had been following in the footsteps of his scholarly father until the arrival on the scene one day of a certain Shams from Tabriz, Persia, who challenged his whole approach to the spiritual life. Legends abound about how this took place, the most popular being that Shams burst upon Rumi reading to his students from his own father’s works, and knocked the book into the fountain behind him. More likely was the less melodramatic problem posed by Shams about the Prophet Muhammad and Bayazid. At any rate, the older Shams became a mentor/muse/axis mundi/sounding board and human incarnation of his spiritual beloved all rolled into one, a relationship unknown in the western world. Rumi was initiated into the mysteries of Sufism, with its attendant devotional poetry about yearning to be reunited with the Beloved, music, chanting, and ecstatic, trancelike movement. Rumi began composing verses, many of them while “whirling,” and rarely stopped until the end of his life.

His relationship with Shams was fraught with turbulence and aroused the jealousy of his students. Shams disappeared at least twice, casing him untold anguish. He was once found in Damascus and brought back, but the last time he evaporated for good – rumours of his murder are unsubstantiated, and this last disappearance remains a mystery. Rumi eventually came to terms with this, reportedly discovering that Shams was somehow with him and he carried on.
Nevertheless two others in succession fulfilled Shams’ role, Salah al-Din, and Hosam al-Din, and the poetry showed marked differences in these periods. For instance, during the Shams period, his major work was the Divan – ecstatic poems suffused with longing, beautiful imagery, and mystical insights. These continued, but under Hosam’s prodding, he produced a no less-beloved work, the Mathnawi, full of instructional moral tales drawn from the Qur’an and the lore of the Middle East and Central Asia.

After his passing, his students established the Mevlevi Order in his honour and remembrance, famously known as the Whirling Dervishes, which have in these days been taken over by the government of Turkey as a cultural feature and export.

The present popularity of Rumi in America is largely attributable to the work of Coleman Barks, who has published several best-selling volumes of translations. Purists squirm at these, since Barks has taken all manner of liberties in trying to free them from their original context and make them contemporary and universal; notwithstanding Barks has struck a nerve, and the public is devouring them. Rumi has also become an icon himself, as films, stage productions, and musical works are devoted to his life and work.

Bahá’u’lláh quotes Rumi often in His own Writings, most notably in The Seven Valleys, an early mystical work revealed in Baghdad, ensuring that Rumi’s legacy will continue as long as the Bahá’í Faith endures, unforeseen in the wildest imaginations of the 13th century.

In 2000 Franklin Lewis published the most comprehensive scholarly work yet on the poet, the 686-page Rumi – Past and Present, East and West, and for this was invited to Iran for special recognition, all the more remarkable as he is non-Persian and a Bahá’í for good measure.

Here are the opening lines of the Mathnawi:


HEARKEN to the reed-flute, how it complains,
Lamenting its banishment from its home:
"Ever since they tore me from my osier bed,
My plaintive notes have moved men and women to tears.
I burst my breast, striving to give vent to sighs,
And to express the pangs of my yearning for my home.
He who abides far away from his home
Is ever longing for the day ho shall return.
My wailing is heard in every throng,
In concert with them that rejoice and them that weep.
Each interprets my notes in harmony with his own feelings,
But not one fathoms the secrets of my heart.
My secrets are not alien from my plaintive notes,
Yet they are not manifest to the sensual eye and ear.
Body is not veiled from soul, neither soul from body,
Yet no man hath ever seen a soul."
This plaint of the flute is fire, not mere air.
Let him who lacks this fire be accounted dead!
'Tis the fire of love that inspires the flute,l
'Tis the ferment of love that possesses the wine.
The flute is the confidant of all unhappy lovers;
Yea, its strains lay bare my inmost secrets.
Who hath seen a poison and an antidote like the flute?
Who hath seen a sympathetic consoler like the flute?
The flute tells the tale of love's bloodstained path,
It recounts the story of Majnun's love toils.
None is privy to these feelings save one distracted,
As ear inclines to the whispers of the tongue.

Civil Obedience

At a recent talk given at Transitions Bookstore in Chicago, Robert Stockman (pictured here with his family) coined the term Civil Obedience, a model of social change the Bahá’ís have used, and which he wistfully reflected the world in general may not yet be ready for. Bahá’ís are the supporters and well-wishers of every just government and are obedient to their own, and since only the Universal House of Justice has the authority to deem any government unjust and has never exercised this prerogative in the 44 years of its existence, the believers cannot agitate against civil authorities and can only use means within the laws of their lands to seek justice.

He cited a number of examples. In the Iranian city of Yazd, 150 families received a letter from the police, ordering the heads of the household to appear at the station on the morning of a given date. This kind of summons could only mean impending arrests, so the Bahá’ís held a meeting and at the appointed hour 150 women appeared in front of the police, as Bahá’ís maintain complete gender equality. Flummoxed, they let the women go.

In apartheid South Africa blacks were only allowed to enter the rear doors of homes, so the Bahá’ís placed heavy furniture blocking the front doors so everyone would have to enter through the back. When mixed-race meetings in public buildings were banned, members of Bahá’í committees were picked up in cars and the meetings were held while riding about the city, perfectly legal. When mixed-race Assemblies were outlawed, all the white members resigned, and the community was run by all-black Assemblies, a situation perfectly acceptable to the Bahá’ís, but not exactly what the government had in mind.

The Iranian Bahá’í community is rife with many examples. An ongoing dilemma is the systematic deprivation of Bahá’í students to a university education, a cat-and-mouse game in which, although books, computers, and records of a private Bahá’í university have been confiscated by the government, 500 students have obtained degrees and have been accepted into graduate studies in foreign countries. This year 800 students are enrolled, and all are studying English, as their online studies are administered by a computer network in Canada.

Bahá’ís continue to seek justice – never retribution or revenge – by diplomatic and legal means. They support UN Resolutions on human rights violations and encourage the local elected officials in their own countries to ask their national governments to support these resolutions as well by presenting them with unbiased, documented facts. And the students in Iran have garnered the support of campus and online organizations, Bahá’í and non- Bahá’í alike, so they might receive the education whose results will redound to the glory of their own nation.

Hatcher's Proof

There are certain existential questions that have never interested me. One of these is the proof of God’s existence. I have maintained for some time that you cannot prove nor disprove His existence through rational argument; rather it is a matter of either faith, or even better, a Reality once you have come face to face with either through experience, insight, or revelation that has removed all doubt forever. The challenge with this lack of doubt is to communicate it to unbelievers and convince them you are rational or sane. Yes, they might envy you your certitude or have their atheistic armour pierced by observation of your fine human qualities by virtue of your “irrational” views, but to convince them of the veracity of your view is an uphill battle.

There are traditional proofs of God, but they are existential and not scientific in the modern sense, and inadequate as arguments to a skeptical heart and mind. The Bahá’í Scriptures maintain that this has always been and will always be the way of the Almighty, for He places a high value on His creatures who will seek and find Him, which would simply be too easy if He were apparent for all to see without any hard-won spiritual insight.

Undaunted by attitudes such as mine, the late William Hatcher published several books on the subject, collating the best knowledge we have from the fields of mathematics, philosophy, physics, metaphysics, epistemology, and even linguistics to formulate his scientific proof of the existence of God, a proof which he calls Minimalism. Building on the classical Greek philosophers through Avicenna, Descartes, Gödel, and more modern thinkers, his approach seeks to debunk the excesses of reductionism and subjectivism, the fallacies of materialism and post-modernism, uproot the attitudes of atheism, agnosticism, cynicism, and skepticism, and tries to establish the invigorating breezes of rational thought over illogical dogmatism. [This has to be the worse sentence I’ve written since fourth grade.]

After a careful building up of parameters and methodology, in his last work: Minimalism: A Bridge Between Classical Philosophy and the Bahá’í Revelation, Hatcher has arrived at four metaphysical principles (as I understand them): first that Reality, the totality of existence, is composite; secondly, that every phenomenon is either caused by something else, or self-caused, but never both; thirdly, the cause of a phenomenon will also be the cause of its parts; and fourthly that a part of a phenomenon cannot be a part of its cause. From these principles he proposes a theorem that there can be only one universal cause and goes about proving it by arguments derived from the four principles.

Confused? If so, it’s not Hatcher’s fault, by mine, for he sets out these arguments with exemplary lucidity and relish. It should provide a colossal challenge for those who are predisposed to dismiss any introduction of a spiritual dimension into scientific inquiry as hokum, as it did in college milieu wherever he presented it. Check it out.