The Baha'i Studies Listserv Regrettably, it seems we are left in an ambiguous situation concerning door to door sales of the Bahai Faith.
In the nineteen eighties members of my community began teaching door to door without having first consulting with our LSA. This upset myself and others as these Bahai zealots refused to curb their teaching in this manner. It took our assembly some time to corral these people to even meeting with them. Their view was that we as a community were not taking teaching the Faith seriously. In the final analysis many of these zealots, in time, left the Faith for a variety of reasons. When I joined the Faith I was told that this form of teaching would not occur. Later I discovered that randomly stopping people on the street and asking them if they had heard of Baha'u'llah was found acceptable. Ultimately this proved to be unsuccessful. In fact it tarnished our reputation. For every person attracted to the Faith in this way, there were many others offended by this approach. What I hoped would not happen, but I felt probably would (due to my cynical nature.), was that Ruhi or some other teaching tool would create a separate orthodoxy wherein to justify ideas that would only serve to divide our communities. Because of our officially being asked to support Ruhi and to not criticize it, we are left with an inability to express what deserves to be expressed. Let us all say prayers for deeper understanding. Bill __________________________________________________ You are subscribed to Baha'i Studies as: mailto:[email protected] Unsubscribe: send a blank email to mailto:[email protected] Subscribe: send subscribe bahai-st in the message body to [email protected] Or subscribe: http://list.jccc.edu:8080/read/all_forums/subscribe?name=bahai-st Baha'i Studies is available through the following: Mail - mailto:[email protected] Web - http://list.jccc.edu:8080/read/?forum=bahai-st News (on-campus only) - news://list.jccc.edu/bahai-st Old Public - http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] New Public - http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]
