The Baha'i Studies Listserv On 10 Apr 2010 at 9:57, HUSA wrote: > number of believers live). with respect to the dogmas and rituals; for > the popular vocabulary of Hispanoamericanos, these words have a > derogatory connotation, and evoke mental images a set of discredited > and corrupt priest
As it happens, the idea of Bahais having no rituals recently came up on the comments section of my blog. http://senmcglinn.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/grace/#comments I wrote: ------- "When people become Bahais, they bring with them a lot of baggage and mix it in with the Bahai Faith. We then have to critically examine our own understandings of our faith, to sort out what is really scriptural from what is just assumptions introduced from other sources. Around the beginning of the 20th century, the weaking of organised religion in the West, and big changes in the class structure of society, led to a devaluation of ritual in religious and public life. People who were becoming Bahais around that time introduced these ideas into Bahai belief, and boasted that they, unlike `old religions´, had no ritual. Larousse Encyclopaedia picked this up, in its article on the Bahai Faith in the 1907 supplement, and that encylcopaedia article was translated into English and used by the Bahais as an objective description of the Bahai Faith. It says "Ritual holds no place in the religion." What the Encyclopaedia says is nonsense: we have heaps of rituals, and some of them should have been known even in 1907. There´s daily obligatory prayer, the washing before the daily prayer, pilgrimmage, fasting, 19-day feast, giving to the Fund, naming a child, marrying, burying a believer (from washing and wrapping the body to a special form of ritual prayer at the burial), electing a local assembly, or the Universal House of Justice, collective devotions, private meditation, reciting the greatest name 95 times per day, reciting the `Remover of Difficulties´ together, Holy day observations, and on and on. The Bahai Faith is rich ! On this blog, see `It´s Friday, thank God.´ http://senmcglinn.wordpress.com/2009/04/11/its-friday-thank-god/ For a general discussion of the peculiar American attitude to rituals in relation to Bahai, see Rituals: An American Baha´i dilemma, Linda Walbridge, Bahai Studies Review 5.1, 1995. For a sociological approach, with a description of contemporary Bahai practices in Atlanta, see Michael McMullen, `The Baha´i", chapter 5. For a text-based study see MacEoin, Rituals in Babism and Bahaism (can be partly examined on the Amazon and Barnes & Noble sites). On obligatory prayers see http://altreligion.about.com/od/bahaifaith/a/obligatory_pray.htm On fasting see http://bahai-library.com/encyclopedia/fasting.html and lots more on the bahai-library site about ritual observances in the Bahai Faith: just use the search engine on the front page to search for a particular ritual observance. [email protected] senmcglinn.wordpress.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Sen McGlinn *** All is to be yielded up, save only the *remembrance* of God; all is to be dispraised, except His praise. Today, to this melody of the Company on high, the world will leap and dance: `Glory be to my Lord, the All-Glorious!' (Selections from the Writings of `Abdu'l-Baha, p. 93) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- -- __________________________________________________ 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]
