The non-believers I meet, think that to believe you have to have a thing called faith. They say they wish they had it, but you know they don't; in fact, while they are talking, their faces and hands are telling you how superior they feel in their non-believing, and how immature, how naive they find you. They discovered some time back that Santa Claus is only a device to sell the goods in a store, and they say that God is only a device to keep you quiet; a way of shutting your mouth so that you will let the world go on. Then if 227 you stir them, they turn on you, and rage against God (in Whom they do not believe) for allowing such things as venereal disease and poverty and war.
I don't know why some people have faith and others don't. The Báb says, 'The difference which separates believer from non-believer is knowledge.'[1] If present-day intellectuals are often unbelievers, it is because they see religion in its decay. Religion to them is strange clothing, robes and trappings, hocus-pocus; and strange ideas, complicated and irrelevant. However, in the ages of faith it is the intellectuals who believe, and lead the others: Augustine, Rumi, Dante, for instance; highly sophisticated, highly intellectual.
[1. The Persian Bayan 6:4; excerpt translated by M.G.]
My grandfather in New England gave a stained-glass window to his church, and my grandfather in Kashan went daily to his mosque. One hoped to be saved by the Blood of the Lamb, and the other to cross over the bridge that spans hell -- the bridge narrow as a hair and sharp as a knife. One lived in the salt New England weather, against the white houses and the leafy streets; the other lived where the Wise Men came from, Kashan with its heat and scorpions and its fields of roses. According to family records, this latter was in the mosque one day, and the Báb came in, and my grandfather saw Him and believed; he heard that voice which afterward people could never describe, 'except with a kind of terror.' Well, this may be one reason why I am a Bahá'í.
Although I believe in Christ, I could not be an orthodox Christian, because the Church rejects Muhammad. Personal study, which is the only legitimate basis for my thinking, has convinced me that a being of Muhammad's dimensions could not be less than what we call a Prophet of God. For what He was, for what He said, for what He achieved, I believe in Him. For Islam's centuries of culture, when the West was in darkness; for Islam's solution of problems which drove Christian minds to madness and with which the West is still tortured -- the problem of the nature of God; the problem of faith versus good works; the problem of celibacy and puritanism; for Islam's insistent promotion of science, which the Church suppressed; for Islam's statement of the rights of women -- for all these I accept Islam.
Another reason why I am not an orthodox Christian is this: if I read my eyes out, I still couldn't decide which denomination is the 228 true one. Conservatively there are hundreds of divisions in Christianity; I don't have time to become entangled in all that theology. Besides, the New Testament is two thousand years away from me, and scholars are not decided as to what it says. I can't overlook the fact that the Gospels were not written by the Apostles but by another generation of men; that the earliest, the Gospel of Mark, was set down thirty or forty years after the Crucifixion; that the oldest extant manuscript of the New Testament dates from the fourth century; that they have counted no less than 175,000 variations in the available texts; that in short, as one author says, 'Jesus never heard of the New Testament...' I cannot even read Shakespeare, who wrote in my language only three hundred years ago, without glossaries and commentaries and learned disquisitions -- how can I judge the Greek and Aramaic of two thousand years back? They tell me I must reconstruct that period, know those times to understand the teaching -- well, I am busy with my own times.
Nevertheless, I believe in the Christ. His breath is on those pages. Besides I have seen Him in hospitals and breadlines, in some art forms and in some people's eyes.
All right, why am I not a Muslim? The text of the Qur'án is clear; it is not hearsay, it is the revealed work of Muhammad, brought down to us across thirteen hundred years. Well, I do not find my century in the Qur'án, any more than I found it in the Gospels. The spiritual problems, yes. The command to work and pray, to be humble and to fear God, yes. And the Golden Rule. But I do not find my century there. What should we do with a world in arms? What about the machines displacing the men? What about women, with their new, disruptive, agonizing equality? What about the ends of the earth brought close together? I do not find these things in the sacred books of thirteen hundred or two thousand years ago. I am not satisfied when a mujtahid reads them into the Qur'án, when a priest reads them into the Gospels.
(Marzieh Gail, Dawn Over Mount Hira, p. 226)
2006-12-12 13:01:19
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answer #5
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answered by GypsyGr-ranny 4
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