Cultish: The Baha'i Faith: A Critical Examination , Pt 1

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Thanks guys. All right, welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to Coltish, Entering the

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Kingdom of the Colts. My name's Jeremiah Roberts, one of the co -hosts here. I am riding solo today on a

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Saturday, but I'm here with Steve Matthews. Good to have you in the studio, my friend. Great to be around.

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Awesome. So, real quickly, we're going to be talking about a group that's always had a little interest in me. I've driven by maybe the

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Baha 'i Faith. Now, I've driven by their centers every now and then over in Scottsdale. I'm here in Arizona.

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I know that they had an appearance in Walter Martin's book. Besides that, I literally barely know anything about them.

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I know we've chatted back and forth. We've done some other episodes together. But yeah, so just where's the starting point?

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Like who are they? Well, first of all, tell them just a little about yourself and like what's your interest in this subject on the

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Baha 'i Faith? So I have studied the Colts for a long time and I'm finally doing more and more with it. Tune in to the website,

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ExamineTheColts .com, soon to be launched. We'll be doing, there's already an Examine the

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SCJ on Xinjiang Ji, Examine WMSCOG on the World Mission Society Church of God. Soon coming is

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Examine the Baha 'is. So watch out for that where it'll be a whole bunch of responses and exploration of history and some of the problems with Baha 'ism.

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It'll all be under the rubric of ExamineTheColts .com, under the umbrella. So I have spoken a lot on some of the more recent groups that I'm concerned about because nobody else is doing them, so if nobody's going to do them,

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I have a saying, I don't want to write the 5 ,000 or first book on Mormonism when there's already 5 ,000 books out there and there's nothing on Burning Man or the

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World Mission Society Church of God or Xinjiang Ji or the International Christian Church. These are groups that I've been super concerned about.

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I've studied Baha 'ism for a long time and it's definitely time to get this information on this group and many more groups which we'll be doing on Examine the

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Colts and there'll be a podcast on that as well. So the official name of the

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Baha 'is is called the Baha 'i faith. Sometimes they call it the Baha 'i world faith. Baha 'i means follower of Baha 'u'llah who's the founder of the

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Baha 'is. They're all about creating a one world religion with the Baha 'is being over everything and you were saying about how you don't hear about them that much.

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Well here's an interesting statistic is that outside of Christianity the Baha 'is are the most widespread religion on the planet geographically in the sense that they're in just about every country in the world maybe except for like Vatican City in North Korea but they're the most geographically widespread outside of Christianity.

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I believe it's in South Carolina they're the second biggest religion outside of Christianity. In a bunch of countries in you know

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South America and Africa they've also kind of got statistics like that. It's difficult to say how many members they have they're not really always open with membership but it's expected that there's somewhere close to six to seven million people.

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The thing is there's a lot of inactive members who've left the faith or the cause as they will say they'll do a declaration to become a

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Baha 'i it's like a little pledge card they do and then they don't always send it in just like a Mormon you know they won't always say oh no longer

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Mormon they'll kind of be on the rolls well that's kind of the case with Baha 'is a lot of people who obviously left there too.

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Yeah well just we're going to mention one religion I know that one area that's just interesting is sometimes within our podcast there'll be a documentary that'll come out or there'll be a movie that will come out in relation to a specific cult and we'll start getting

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DMs about this specific group. Well it just so happens I started getting these videos from Rainn Wilson aka

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Dwight from The Office and he was talking it was some interview some podcast he was on where he's talking about the distinction between the soul and the body and I didn't really know to equate it with except oh it's just his own foreign spirituality

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I guess but then I realized oh he's actually Baha 'i faith. He's so committed I mean Rainn Wilson's whole point pretty much every day is getting up to spread the

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Baha 'i gospel I mean he is active in so many places and pushing it he's got a new book out he does podcasts he's his whole point he's very very involved as a pretty dedicated

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Baha 'i. Yeah and let me ask you this because we're talking about the origins and the history and I'll let you just elaborate too and is that I think recently one of his social media posts he was talking about some persecuted subsex in Iran and specifically women he was making a big point sort of the human rights activist point about it so I'm just wondering is that connected to the history about it or what's the story?

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Yeah well I mean as you know there's not a lot of religious freedom in Islamic countries and the

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Baha 'is have been terribly persecuted right from the beginning you know in Iran it's pretty horrible and Baha 'is do rally to that cause but I'll also say

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Rainn Wilson is not the only celebrity out there in the world of Baha 'i you know they have a lot of other celebrity members as far as actors

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Justin Baldoni, Carol Lombard you know the old school musicians like Andy Grammer, Seals and Croft back in the day were

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Baha 'is they'd be promoting a lot there. Victor Mone, Dizzy Gillespie I mean there's a whole bunch of guys back in the day yeah absolutely who are the

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Baha 'is that you might not know about. They do claim to be like the fastest growing religion in the world but then again like so many cults claim to be the fastest growing religion world

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Scientology says we're the fastest and Shin Chan Ji and the world mission site Church of God they all claim to be the fastest growing religion in the world but they're not you know so it's just a really interesting group they say that Jesus is one of nine great manifestations throughout history but now we're under the you know era the cycle of Baha 'u'llah yeah so this is like what

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Walter Martin would talk a lot about we can't do a show without paying homage to Walter right of course it'd be wrong

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I love Uncle Wally we'd have to we'd have to do an edit right so Walter would talk about who is the Jesus of Mormonism well

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Jesus is one God out of millions of gods God the Father had sexual relations with Mary to have Jesus the spirit brother

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Lucifer who sweat in the garden and get 74 sins and who's and you know in our sometimes you know his blood is not enough for us so we have to atone for our own sins through blood atonement who's the

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Jesus the Jehovah's Witnesses Michael the Archangel the first and greatest creation of Jehovah God who came here invisibly present 1914 he was killed on a torture stake and arose as an invisible spirit creature so that's the

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Jesus the Jehovah's Witness who's the Jesus of the Baha 'is he is one of nine great manifestations through church history you know they have these

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God's acts to men in different cycles when we need he needs to send a revelation so they have nine different ones they had

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Abraham Krishna Zoroaster Moses they had

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Buddha Jesus Muhammad the Bob who is like the former of the John the Baptist we're going to get into right of Baha 'u'llah and today we're all under Baha 'u'llah when you say church history is that their version of church history well it's not even what they call they don't use the word church but they say in God's history so basically in they say that you know all religions are from the same

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God they're just basically updates and they're all from the same religion all religions are basically you know from the same

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God so God at that one time he sent Buddha to man to show man the way to live and then

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Buddha came outdated then he had Jesus Jesus got replaced by Muhammad Muhammad's you know after he was around for a thousand some years he got replaced by a messenger in Iran called the

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Bob the Bob means gate or door in Persian Farsi and after that or actually in Arabic sorry because there's a lot of Arabic and Farsi back and forth in Baha 'is you gotta keep track and then today now we're under Baha 'u'llah and he is that God's newest manifestation we'll get into what manifestations are so in other words this would be like on my iPhone right now

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I've got my settings I think there's one or two updates I have to do that I've been putting off and I'm probably just gonna do the update just because I need this is the religious up I'm tired of the notification so if I did the iOS update there'll be the the be the

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Baha 'i version of going from like Islam to Christianity so basically well it's the other way around yeah yeah from Christianity Islam because Jesus got to get replaced by Muhammad in this in the new cycle the new dispensation yeah and now we're under the newest under the era of Baha 'u'llah so they're they're an offshoot of Shia Islam they're out of they're from Iran which is

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Persia you know this same thing they call that the cradle of faith you know the land and they have suffered terrible persecution there as we've covered their spiritual administrative headquarters not

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Iran it's in Haifa Israel and they have a lot of you know memorials huge buildings back to those guys the largest population of Baha 'is in the world is in India where they have about two million members wow yeah how many how many members in total as I said it's kind of hard to pinpoint somewhere around six to seven million they have beautiful temples all around the world all those fancy buildings in Israel and they have a really big temple outside of Chicago and Wilmette Illinois okay nine is a big number nine and nineteen are huge numbers in Baha 'i it's like sacred numbers so the

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Baha 'i temple will have like nine sides with nine gardens the number nine appears all the time it's a mystical number we're going to come across nine on their calendar uh 19 yeah it's a huge thing what's up everybody it's the super sleuth here and I've got a snack that you're absolutely going to want to try it's called

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have a great day guys so in the sense that i mean i'm thinking about just from my general understanding of them that are they sort of a spin -off then of of islam or does that come from islam shia islam yeah yeah i'm gonna i'll just say first a few of the high level things what they believe um we'll get us some history and really see the islamic connection there oh interesting so the concept is they want a one world government they want a one world religion which they call and all you conspiracy people take off your aluminum foil hats here but they they call it the new world order oh dear yeah my voice just got a little raspy here i know who you're talking about yeah so they're looking to create establish a spiritual kind of millennial reign of the baha 'i faith okay but they want to create this one rule government so bahá 'u'lláh uh was the founder his name in arab means glory of god okay um to be a bahá 'í it's a follower of glory follower bahá 'u'lláh that's what it means to be a bahá 'í you're following you know bahá 'u'lláh um and one of his most famous sayings in relation to this one world government idea is the earth is but one country and mankind its citizens that's a huge bahá 'í saying you're gonna hear all the time um and it's it really in a sense i mean with this liberal age now of wokeness and unity and brotherhood and peace i mean a lot of those things are really good that we love each other and everybody eliminate prejudice and all you know a harmony of mankind a lot of that's very altruistic yeah but the spirituality behind it so kind of in a sense is a religion for our times you know it's like a united nations kind of feel all religions loving each other kumbaya it's it's very big of that that reminds me when barack obama was sort of becoming of age i mean we're both both of us were little so remember so remember like when he was running for president even when he was a senator i remember he was doing some speech over in germany even before he was president and he said something in the sense like i'm coming to you as a citizen of the world and i was like hmm that could be a high sentence yeah yeah i just i just immediately just came to mind when you said that yeah i mean i mean you know whether we're now we're into like multicultural multiculturalism social justice yeah you know we want the unity of all religions equality men and women um you know uh one one p one world language one world one world religion you know we want to push science education so they want all of that stuff but there's a catch it's got to be done under them and then you got to be a follower by how a lot it's not good enough just to be like a person who wants all these great causes but you're actually buying into the spirituality that's kind of the way that i get most people get in it's not a very i don't want to say an intellectual religion it's a very feelings -based religious sense because people join baha 'ism not because they have you know it's like because i'm convicted that you know jesus rose from the dead his resurrection i based my faith on that fact it's more like i like the idea of the harmony and the equality and the hyper inclusive so it'd be almost it'd be very congruent with the cultural aesthetic of we are the world and imagine absolutely all that stuff so they have basically what they call three primary principles and you hear this one all the time behind and the ideas of the oneness of god the oneness of religion and the oneness of mankind so basically this the one god who's part you know over all the human family and we're all part of that one world religion which is baha 'ism the rest of the principles kind of fall into line with this so there's different ways they're worded but this is the ideas are the equality of men and women the harmony of science and religion the independent investigation into truth huge the they want a universal compulsory education elimination of all forms of prejudice elimination of extremes of wealth and poverty altruistic but again how's that going to happen they want spiritual solutions to economic problems a universal auxiliary language like an esperanto you know like one language for all countries and universal peace upheld by a world government which is enforced by an international tribunal now that raspy voice guy can have fun with that one oh yeah but i mean we're gonna get into that so they'd love to portray themselves as a world religion they say just like christianity is a world religion we're a religion just like buddhism or islam we are a legit even though they started like 107 years ago you know it's not like you know mormons will say yeah we're the restoration of christianity but they say we are a legitimate world religion but i call cult you know more anybody can say that they're a world religion mormons say they're you know the mormon jim jones whoever they could all say that you know they're the real deal but i'm calling cult here because there's cults of christianity like the jehovah's witnesses there's cults of hinduism like hari krishna there's cults of the rajneesh buddhism like soka gakkai uh cults of judaism like the kabbalah center cults of islam the nation of islam yeah is one and these guys so there's cults of different world religions they all have their cults hey what's up everyone we love that you are enjoying our content on a weekly basis but this program cannot continue and wouldn't be possible without your support so if you want to go to the cultist show .com

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and check out all the awesome merch back to the show yeah one distinction that just sticks out to me is that even when the conversations i've had with muslims that they're very sincere and they're very passionate about their beliefs but they're not they're exclusivists they are very i always appreciate they're up front like you're wrong like oh they draw a hard line yeah they draw a hard line but it's very interesting when when this is a a branch off uh it seems that if you're a versus at least the appeal to this is that they're saying we're all sort of one we're all kind of one in the same we're going to go to the back of the book here it's like a pendulum swing here's a spoiler bahai's kind of taco to two sides of their mouth on one sense they're saying come to us all you can you can continue to be a christian and a bahai yeah you can continue to be a jew and a bahai you can be part of this religion where we embrace everybody but the but at the end of the day you have to believe in you know baha 'u'llah abdu 'l -baha shoghi effendi the universal house of justice you have to kind of give over to that and then not embrace what you did anymore you can't believe when bahai's deny the bodily resurrection of jesus you can no longer hold on to that as a christian now you have to adopt the bahai view which will explain so in other words you would have to you there they what they would say is that you have you kind of it's syncretistic you can syncretize it with the two sides of the mouth yeah but when you actually if you put the weights and measures together it would tilt towards bahala regardless of whether it's hinduism christianity's been replaced it's done yeah yeah okay so i think history is the best way to go from here yeah i really understand it so this part's going to be a little long but it's going to be really valuable because i haven't heard a lot of people talk about this yeah just real quickly when you mention history you've got a also going to say you've got a couple books here too are these in relation to the history or do you want to talk about this later um i've got some stuff i've could recommend for other stuff this is going to be a powerful apologetic part and okay you know this is their scriptures the kitabi da capi kitabi acta sorry i'm coughing here yeah this is the scriptures so you know i got the kitabi egon these uh books have been translated into many many languages so there's four important characters in baha 'i ism so you have the bob like we said that's arabic for gator door yeah he his name was ali muhammad and he was the manifestation before baha 'u'llah they'll often call him like saeed ali muhammad or mirza ali muhammad side is a arabic word meaning master lord is used by those who claim to be descendants of muhammad yeah where mirza is more like an honorific title like sir so you often hear you know mirza ali muhammad but his name was ali muhammad so he will find out who he was in a minute um baha 'u'llah his name was hussein ali muhammad or nuri sorry hussein ali nuri his name is arabic for um glory of god as we said uh he's a current manifestation he wrote scripture and he had three wives but he never met the bob though the manifestation before him so those are called the twin manifestations in baha 'i in baha 'i ism you have three central figures uh i'll get that in a sec let's not run too far ahead here so yeah we got so after the death of baha 'u'llah um he passed on authority to his son abdu 'l -baha his real name was abbas effendi and his name means servant of glory like servant of baha 'u'llah abdu 'l -baha and um he was one of the he was the son of baha 'u'llah the second leader in baha 'i ism he was an infallible interpreter of the teachings and the writings of baha 'u'llah some of his titles were the master the exemplar the mystery of god and the center of the covenant so he had these like real lofty titles they really revere him and then his grandson became the next leader was a shoghi effendi his real name was his birth name was shoghi rabbani and he was the grandson like i said and the great grandson he was appointed as the guardian of the faith in 1921 at the death of abdu 'l -baha he was the infallible interpreter of baha 'u'llah he helped spread the faith around the world a lot and he did not have any children so he didn't have a successor um he died in 1957 he didn't leave a will which is a big no -no in baha 'is you're supposed to have a will and testament to appoint the next person and he never did there's a big controversy about that um so the central figures in baha 'i ism um the writings of or the central figures are the bob baha 'u'llah and abdu 'l -baha the writings of baha 'u'llah the bob and abdu 'l -baha are sacred and the writings of shoghi offended you're not sacred but they're authoritative but you know there's a difference between the four figures so the history where it came from is super interesting so muhammad you know he lived in arabia 570 to 632 and when he died the majority of his followers followed a guy called abu becker and you know he was basically a caliph who was going to you know lead um the followers caliph is arabic for vicar or successor um and along with three other leaders they became what they called the rightly guided caliphs in islam so during this time islam you know the centuries during these caliphs islam did spread around the world it went to iran where it took root in other countries and many of the people there rejected these caliphs muhammadist successors saying you know that these people shouldn't be appointed by man but they should be appointed by god yeah so they kind of had a split in islam and it became shiism the shiites and um shiites that means separatists you know in arabic um so they rejected the caliphs instead they started believing these imams in it so you have the sunni muslims and you have the shiites see they the sunnis believe in the caliphs the shiites believed in the imams and what happened is the the first imam was the uh was his name was ali he was um you know descended muhammad and he they had basically you know him and a bunch of other imams there's like 11 others they're all violently killed until there was a 12th imam so after 941 when this imam madi disappeared he is said to be continuing to communicate to mankind through his bobs the gates so he was hidden and that went on for like 70 years of his occultation and they said this imam madi they carried this whole eschatology in shiite islam that you know one day uh the imam madi would return to earth with his faithful 313 followers and they were also hidden all the time they never died so they think this imam madi figure is still alive for like a thousand some years and after the fourth bob died this gate this channel communication you know the succession of the four bobs there was no way to get communication to allah to god through that so they've been waiting for like over a thousand years for the 12th imam to live to return so there's a whole theology in iran because a lot of these shiites are what they call the 12ers and one of the beliefs of the 12ers that god has sent 124 000 sinless prophets to man like noah abraham moses jesus and muhammad and each of these prophets you know they had moses uh muhammad as the final prophet the seal of allah the seal of the prophets he would you know each prophet would in that time would come in his own age and bring a book of laws and reveal god to men well that went on and they had all these different shia groups and one of these 12 groups was this heretical islamic sect called the shakies and it was kind of another like cult of islam there were followers of a guy like the shakers yeah the islamic shake yeah yeah so shake up shake ahmad he died in 1826 he was a um muslim leader who taught that he was uh the successor he was like one of the the bobs able to speak you know to this imam madi this hidden character and he's along with his successor was syed kazim rashti they were the that channel well these two islamic cultists were called by the title bob with the you know so just like the first four intermediaries back you know with the 12th imam when he was a child who died they were able to reveal the will of allah and say that the return of the imam madi was shortly to appear so i did say there's a bit of history here but this stuff's super important so when the other successor died syed kazim there was a split among the shaky cult and one man you know he continued to say well he was the new you know shaky the other said well he's going to call himself the bob and this is the man who would go on to lead the bobby movement and bob by the way is b .a

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.b. not like bob robert that means gate right yeah so he was going to be the uh the forerunner baha 'u'llah and the manifestation of god for this time so the bob wrote he wrote about 80 books the most important was the bayan and he wrote in details about laws for this new world order is supposed to come he also spoke of he who god will manifest so he basically said as a john the baptist figure that even though i'm at the manifestation from god there's a greater manifestation is about to come and but he he did say in his writings would be between 15 uh 1511 years and 2001 years in the future till this you know this other manifestation appear in his bayan scriptures can i just give a comment real quickly because i mean you're going over a lot of different timelines is that a lot of times people were from apologetic standpoints people will give objections to christianity just because well there's so many christian denominations therefore christian can't be the true religion but when you look at this you've got scores not just the sunnis and shias but even where this came from there's always some offshoots and offshoots not just a baha 'i but then you have baha 'i offshoots so this is the idea of fragmenting and splintering this is not something that's just a christianity issue no you had you had the death of muhammad you split the shias came out then you had the shakies come out of there and then you had you know the bob come out of that as his group and then then it went out to bahai so it's like all these offshoots and offshoots and offshoots so the government you know got involved over there and they wanted to crush the this movement because there was this conflict between these two people the shaky successor and and um you know after the the government they what they did is they executed the bob at 1850 they thought he was a problem but he did appoint one of his faithful followers and his name was and he was supposed to be the rightly appointed successor of this bob from this this weird cult well what happened is he had a brother who was kind of a better speaker and everything and his that was hussein ali nouri who became baha 'u'llah um so he basically pulled apart more of the people and that's how kind of baha 'ism started so the two groups they had violent conflicts a number of men of both sides were murdered in 1868 the turkish government stepped in and they sent hussein ali how

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Allah they sent him under house arrest and he was a penal colony for a couple years and then 1892 he dies so that was kind of a lot of the stuff i know there's a lot of numbers and names and a lot of arabic strange sounding people and people but well it's just important to show that this is it's very interesting because when i first heard the video of rain wilson this podcast where he's making the distinction between soul and body it sounded very eastern so it sounded like oh he might be like hindu or something like that so then when i heard it was baha 'i islamic i made so it's funny because i made the correlation well must be baha 'i must be an eastern religion knowing barely anything about it just because of the sort of relativistic units universalist language that randy wilson was using but then it goes to show this actually came from islam which is a very exclusivist no reincarnation none of that stuff like yeah it's pretty different yeah so um i just ran through the history real quick so that as they show you if uh abdul baha was the authorized interpreter baha 'u'llah that was his son he ruled from 1892 to 1921 then in 1921 um shoghi effendi took over and like he ruled at 1957 didn't have that will and before he died he appointed successors to be what they call the hands of the cause the hands of the cause or the hands of the cause of god were custodians who would oversee the protection and propagation of the faith for a few years during the interim period after the guardian shoghi effendi suddenly passed away and then after that now the universal house of justice is the infallible baha 'i leading stuff so it's amazing how they pick all these successors who are all supposed to be infallible like shoghi effendi infallible um abdul baha infallible because they're able to somehow from god interpret the words of baha 'u'llah and his laws and his administration so perfectly for the cause that they have the ability to do that so um i don't if they're not divinely direct i don't see how this is possible yeah so we're at the 1920s here and this is primarily a lot of this history is really taking place in iran or in the middle east um i have heard i just listened to just a little bit of uh i read a little bit of just walter martin's statement just some of his take on the history what i've stuck out to me was that as they kind of moved over to the west they kind of utilized the aspects of the persecution that they experienced and they used it as a way to build empathy with them exactly like what was sort of the appeal did grow a whole lot would come over to america um shoghi effendi was trained in english at the university and he was very you know big on the expansion um definitely the empathy thing but the the one word religion the idea of all men and women be equal yeah uh harmony elimination of prejudice that's that's the real hook gets people in it's not the theological it's not like hey i've sinned before a god i need forgiveness it's more about yeah building like man building a kingdom on earth yeah and the appeal to celebrities was that something that happened organically or was it something with scientology how they had a celebrity center where they sought people out like travolta i i don't know if you know this jeremiah but i mean some celebrities are kind of left -leaning no it's serious it's true i mean you're from you're from california so you wouldn't have any insight about stuff that's left -leaning if you look at the united states california is literally leading to the left which i'm from california too but anyways um yeah so you're left -leaning right so that's part of and given the worldview it's the whole idea of like the whole brotherhood of man right the oneness everybody the multiculturalism woke social justice all that fits in really well for buddy yeah definitely religion of our times okay and then that would that would really be the appeal um and so then when it comes to that maybe this i mean also you think about the organizational structure is yeah yeah so how does that fit into the culture the supreme uh uh body of authority in baha 'ism is this universal house of justice they have nine uh leaders elected every five years and they have an incredible building over than israel where they rule one thing it's really kind of some people say it's very hypocritical is that none of the people who are allowed to be in the house of justice are women they have to be men so one side of the mouth the top of the equality men and women and their principles but then how come there's no yeah really yeah yeah well that was kind of like um with like jim jones when he was going around you know he was in california as well too like in building in san francisco and he had a whole message on racial equality and equality of women but pretty much his whole governing body were white men was it just kind of interesting so a lot of times you'll see groups where it's all rules for the not for me which is also very interesting but when it comes to organizational structure too let's just say i if i went up to the baha 'i faith that's over in scotland i've driven by multiple times the person who heads it up you call them the minister whatever you call them or they don't have any clergy they don't have any clergy no clergy so how does this how would a service operate so they basically have over everything they have universal house of justice they have a national spiritual assembly and they have local spiritual assemblies under that so that would be the local spiritual assembly over here right but they don't have clergy do they have to get sort of volunteers volunteers and they'll start with groups of nine they always that that number nine comes up all the time baha 'ism and what's the uniqueness of that well how many manifestations is there nine okay and it's the number of completion of god and um we'll we'll take a look at some of the calendar stuff and buys ask me about that later but so biblically said we usually like the seven tends to show up a lot in biblically been behind nine versus seven and nineteen nine and nineteen nineteen is huge because that came from the bobby's the bob cult that he they came out of yeah it's pretty wild yeah no can you what you're saying this is so fascinating yeah so um as far as scriptures authoritative uh writings um baha 'u'llah his books are basically almost like well they're pretty much scripture because he was the man are any of them here well yeah as i held up i just have a few of them here this is uh i've got a ginormous library of baha 'i stuff but the kitabi akdas is is uh the most holy book and um we'll talk about the suppression of baha 'i material a bit later kitabi akdan um is a book of certitude we'll go over these in a little bit but yeah this is their most holy book uh written in the 1870s what would be the most uh if you're going to compare to any book of the bible are these like historical narratives of these like paul's no more about more about laws and you know some of the stuff meant for the new world order okay it's a very like torah ish islamic hadithi maybe you've gone more like that kind of flavor yeah it has a real arabic flavor kind of a muslim flavor even though they're going to say they're not muslim but there's a lot of similarities with islam okay a lot a lot so yeah so it either writes baha 'u'llah that's the holy book and you know it's kind of like text text mix we're just sort of some mix of both right maybe okay first thing goes my kind of hungry i need some food soon but anyways um yeah so that so you have this and you have the uh so you have the different uh scriptures they're just this sort of and they're unique beliefs yeah the unique beliefs that come from that and so how does that how what else do they adhere to as far as his teachings or are there are there current can sort of continuing revelations on top of that kind of like how mormonism has no mormon because we don't have the mormons about his current presidents but baha 'u'llah said there would not be another leader for a thousand years okay so he's the current manifestation for god to be more so let's go over some of the beliefs there we've talked about you know um 919 we've talked about a few times there's symbols of nine -pointed star um the there's no such thing as evil in baha 'ism there's only an absence of good i know let that sink in for a second i know i can see the look on your face that would that would that probably put a big conflict of interest for name rain wilson's outcries against any injustice in the world because he talks about that i listened to a little bit of his book soul boom unaudible and just from what i listened to he that seems to be kind of would be problematic well what baha 'is say is that man is basically good and he has needs to fix himself by education and you know it's basically moral improvement self -reformation basically by doing good and you know listening to doing a lot of the baha 'i rituals but that's it so there's there's no sinful nature there's not even such a thing as evil anyway so satan's not a personal being satan's just basically man's lower nature um as far as god's concerned um they held a very islamic kind of god um they god is like a unitarian god of one person um he's unknowable in his essence so that's kind of like out of islam um the real important a real center of baha 'ism is to understand the idea of manifestations so they believe in progressive revelation um you know you've seen those coexist bumper stickers right with all it's kind of that flavor a little bit but i you think more of like the indian parable they don't use this but it kind of fits more the indian parable the elephant the six blind men yeah so you know these six blind men went to the elephant they started feeling the elephant yeah and one of them says hey it feels like a wall because he's feeling the side of the elephant another one's feeling a tusk and goes this feels like a spear another one is feeling the trunk he said no no this is not it doesn't feel like a wall it feels like a a snake and another one's grabbing his leg no it feels like a tree to me and another one said grabbing the ear said it's a fan or the one grabbing the tail said it's a rope so this is kind of like mankind we're all trying to understand god but we're all touching the elephant in different ways so whether you're a buddhist or whether you're a muslim or a zoroastrian zoroaster by the way was a leader zarathustra uh in in persia and he was supposedly a prophet it's a smaller group there's a few you know temples around but so they believe all these these uh are people from god kind of like that so like we said before you know he's got um you know it's it's wrong for you to think your religion special in any way don't think christianity special any more than any other religion you need to understand how god works he sends these different leaders in these different cycles or dispensations like i said they have abraham krishna zoroaster moses buddha jesus muhammad the bob and bahala those are the nine manifestations and then you talk about some of these smaller manifestations around too now in regards to jesus and you're talking about every everybody has this always fascinates me too there's a book i really enjoy called putting jesus in his place yeah uh in it like the opening segment of chapter he says everybody has has to have jesus on their team which is always interesting like you can have walter martin will call it the with the calling card of the cults right yes yeah but you can't do that with any other world leader like muhammad doesn't show up in every other religion like there's no other other religious figure that does that but jesus you always have to you have to do something somewhere yeah so when it comes to the behind do they think he was a real historical figure oh yeah oh yeah okay so they'll acknowledge the history well in a response we'll definitely go through who they say jesus is and a lot of that stuff um they say the way the best way to explain the manifestations of bahai they say like god is like the sun and the reflection the mirror is like the manifestations you're not you're not really you know seeing god in his glory but you're seeing the rays of the sun in the mirror they use that they use that all the time yeah and also you may have mentioned this before but you've you've given so information so i feel like you know when i whenever we're doing this episode i had to listen to a couple times it could take everything it's always awesome to have all this study that you've done and just get it out there but just the name baha 'i like what is that you know follower of glory so someone who's a follower baha 'u'llah is a baha 'i okay follow baha 'u'llah who was the origin is the current manifestation of the nine manifestations he's the current manifestation that we need to follow okay so jesus is obsolete muhammad kind of made him obsolete and then the bob took over yeah he was he was like so four prophets ago jesus you know he was like so yesterday so it was like jesus said he got replaced by bahamut and then muhammad got replaced the bob and then now it's baha 'u'llah and then it's a thousand years later so baha 'u'llah is like the prophet of the day the flavor of the week you know so if we're going to use modern day tech terms baha 'i would see the most current iphone jesus to them would be an iphone not to be irreverent today yeah yeah of course we're not trying to use using a correlation use it in an analogy yeah yeah this would be like an iphone 4s yeah exactly that's it so we can maybe you know do a little cartoon thingy of this yep yep okay i think it also we need to maybe have this game on the show where we every time we mention walter martin we have a shot right his name comes up because he knows so well so as far as the um the manifestations are very different than humans like regular humans they're not divine they're not god but they're all sinless so that means do the math that means not only baha 'u'llah was sinless buddha was sinless moses was sinless muhammad was sinless they're all sinless they say all the prophets and they all lived in a pre -existence so that's an interesting thought because you know didn't moses kill an egyptian and bury him in the sand didn't muhammad kill people by the edge of the sword didn't you know i mean you get there's so many arguments against somebody's previous and there's actually apologetic books by baha 'is showing how no no no you're misunderstanding they never really sinned all the manifestations god are sinless because baha 'u'llah said so okay so it's pretty wild um you're not allowed to show the prophet's faces the manifestations faces that's a lot like islam too we're not allowed to show what muhammad looks like so you know when there's movies about the bob or baha 'u'llah you can't show his face interesting you can't reproduce the face now there's two pictures that we have old old black and white pictures like a passport photo it's like a baha 'u'llah and you know they don't even like you posting those pictures would that be the same thing with images of jesus with uh no yeah they'd probably say the same thing but yeah sorry yeah i don't understand the question yeah absolutely so you're not supposed to show the faces of the manifestations that's very interesting i know that for example you know there's certain christians who have convictions about images of christ whether it's a second commandment or two cv that's i mean that's that could be a whole nother can of worms but it would just be interesting to see that if they believe that it would be from a very different reason the same sense well if they're saying jesus is sinless it's not because the scripture is the authority where it comes from that it's because baha 'u'llah said so and it comes out of islam there's a lot of things we'll see that since it had that islamic roots it kind of has those similarities yeah you know these things so really just one last thing before you jump in here so really when it comes down to authority the position of authority ultimately someone who's behind us because baha 'u'llah said so yeah basically he's like the current manifestation for today okay you know you you're not supposed to follow jesus okay in one sense you they can say like i said it's one side of the mouth yeah you can be christian or baha 'i or hindu to baha 'i but you're not supposed to be because baha 'u'llah is the prophet for gotcha okay so and the next one as i said it's supposed to be a thousand years from now so there's there's just so many contradictions a thousand years from now takes the pressure off of having to get contained revelation that's always good so look moving on to jesus so how do baha 'is see jesus well they say that all the biblical prophecies about jesus in the bible have been fulfilled in baha 'u'llah he is the second coming of christ so he literally is and they kind of say this for all religions so just like the jews are looking for messiah or islam is looking for the 12th imam well it's all been filled in baha 'u'llah you know buddhism is looking for lord maitreya to come back that's baha 'u'llah or the 10th incarnation of vishnu the 10th avatar in hinduism that's him azor astrians are looking for the world saver shabbaram that's also baha 'u'llah so he's like the fulfillment of all these kind of you know eschatological figures that different religions are waiting for so in other words if i'm having a conversation with someone who's of the baha 'i faith and say we're talking about the if you're talking about defining terms of the language bearer if i'm talking about that from their perspective they would think that i'm actually really i'm truly longing for the manifestation of baha 'u'llah i'm just looking to the advent of it of christ well in this place it's already it's already happened right it's done baha 'u'llah like when it talked about the spirit of truth like i was you know the spirit truth is going to come um you know shin chonji we did an episode on that they say that's lee man he and muslims say that's muhammad yeah the spirit of truth is coming that's baha 'u'llah he's a comforter so um there's there's a lot of baha 'i writers like william sears wrote a book called thief in the night and actually that's the book that got disney gillespie converted there's michael sowers gary matthews no relation but these guys have all written books trying to prove how the fulfillment of um baha 'u'llah is the already it's a done deal so um as far as jesus uh why did jesus come that's a really good question of baha 'is so they say that the only reason he came was to do one thing here's um here's a quote from abdul baha the purpose of the appearance of the manifestations of god is the training of the people that is the result of their mission the real outcome the outcome the whole life of jesus was the training of the 11 disciples and two women i'll read that again the outcome of the whole life of jesus was the training of the 11 disciples and two women he didn't come to die he came to teach his moral upgrade of teaching um why did he suffer troubles ordeals and calamities for the training of these few followers this was a result of his life the product of the life of christ was not the churches but the illuminated souls of those who believed in him afterwards they spread his teachings just real quick it's just quick commentary it's almost if you're gonna make it off of that you'd have to say jesus was not the greatest teacher because how many times in the new testament do you see jesus explaining something to his disciples and they are clueless they have no clue right and then like he goes up and he does the transfiguration and basically how they respond to it jesus responds by saying get behind me satan exactly so if jesus that's the goal of it then there's a huge communication barrier between jesus and disciples from the you know but you see how it takes away from our christian view because if it's to us why did jesus come he died to lay down his life as a ransom for many and he gave his life for god so loved the world he gave his son it's for us that eternal life and for bahai nope he just came to teach yeah so as far as the resurrection is concerned um they say that jesus did not rise bodily from the dead a lot of people get this wrong when they talk about the highs they think an invisible spirit creature like jehovah's witnesses they basically say that jesus didn't raise physically from dead but his teachings caught on they suddenly went three days later and oh that's what he meant so here's a great another quote um from some answered questions pretty famous baha 'i book we say that the meaning of christ's resurrection is as follows the disciples are troubled and agitated after the martyrdom of christ so he was a good teacher who didn't come to die for your sins he was a martyr again majorly contradicting you know scripture and the words of jesus himself the reality of christ which signifies his teaching his bounties his perfections and his spiritual power was hidden and concealed for two or three days after his martyrdom and was not resplendent manifest no rather it was lost for the believers were few in number and troubled and agitated the cause of christ was like a lifeless body and when after three days the disciples became assured and steadfast began to serve the cause of christ and resolve to spread the divine teachings putting his counsel in the practice of rising to serve him his religion found life his teachings and his admonitions became evident and visible in other words the cause of christ was a like a lifeless body until the life and the bounty the holy spirit surrounded it so basically they kind of said oh now we understand that was the resurrection and resurrected spiritually in their mind they're understanding what bahala was teaching for that time sorry which he was teaching all that time they never got the resurrection so so they so they would adhere to then a spiritual resurrection without the physical resurrection so that's it's not even it's not a resurrection of spirit it's the fact that it resurrected in the consciousness of the followers when they understood what he's been talking about for all that time yeah well it's interesting too that they would adhere in some sense to the historicity of jesus but once it comes to the resurrection it's almost their pre -commitments all of a sudden they have to sort of move mold history in its image in concordance to their pre -commitments well they really have a low view of it yeah they have a low view of it like um bahala's son he was up on a roof and he fell through a skylight and he fell and landed on this wooden crate and he was killed like they always punctured through the crate and he died and bahala made that equivocated that to the death of jesus that his that his son died like that and he even said that um he even offered up uh as a ransom for the regeneration of the world and the unification of its peoples that's how he talked about his son dying he made that like a ransom for the world so they they don't have a concept of jesus being god obviously he's just a manifestation another divine he came here just as a teacher not to give his life as a ransom for many he they deny his resurrection uh they deny you know evil and everything why you would need resurrection the conquest of evil and um they deny you know they just kind of make light of his his purpose of dying it's it's pretty a pretty different view than christianity wow so they're very spiritualized hermeneutic they don't think anything literal and one of the big problems i was going to mention later but i can mention it now is when baha 'is kind of have this idea that you know how a lot now is a new manifestation they become de facto infallible experts on all other world religions so now that you understand that he's the manifestation buddha and krishna and zoroaster all before him we don't know our bible as well the bahai current manifestation is the real interpreter of what the bible is what the quran was the zen divesta of you know zoroaster so basically they become like the divine interpreters of all the religions where we have to listen to how a lot we don't even know our own religions properly we have to take his word for the bible really was teaching we're missing another one yeah so in other words in our one of the episodes we covered you know the before is shin chon ji in other words what you're kind of looking at then is in the same way how he sort of took revelation mold it to its liking they're basically taking their it's a world religions class but it's fitting them all in but it's fitting it all in but molding it in the image and taking certain parts literally certain parts figuratively where it supports their context mostly fairly totally they take figurative interpretations of bible the by we talk about the historical grammatical method and hermeneutics and you understand the intent of the author and what they were trying to communicate they throw that all out the window yeah as long as it can fit when with what how love was trying to say yeah and so just real quickly as as we kind of uh are sort of wrapping up starting to wrap up at part one here in part two we're going to kind of more into the apologetic sort of response uh that what is maybe you'll get those two when you think about like salvation and how does that work in relation to bahai like is that is there a point where you know you have somebody who is buddhist who's seeking reincarnation we look at christians we're looking at qualification you know what um how does that we'll take a look i think this is going to take enough time that next week we can maybe pick up with their view of life after death they have a whole view of you know where would man go who man is where what man's problem is and where he's going to go after death um there's a it's a it's a group that's been around for a while they've got a lot of literature a lot of teachings and it takes a bit of time to go through you know a religion that's been around a hundred so i'm sure there's more even before you have here i'm sure there's a lot more that can even expand upon this for sure oh yeah yeah what are the thoughts you have kind of giving an overview of the bahai faith i mean i know for me it's i'm probably gonna give this a couple lessons like i said when this comes out because this has been so uh informative what what's really what else is really important for our audience to understand uh as we kind of in the final parts of this episode kind of like i said where they're people become baha 'is for emotional reasons they don't become baha 'is for intellectual reasons they don't they it's a it's almost like a big social club they're trying to build a kingdom man on earth they're not looking for you know gods a redemptive plan where he invades time and space to save man but as opposed he's trying they're just kind of building their own utopia on the world through love harmony equality that kind of thing and there's no sense of it's it's a very shallow kind of spirituality to me in a sense yeah they're gonna argue and say they got the deepest thing going but you know especially philosophically there's not much meat in the bones okay so it's very broad very very emotional very experiential when you start looking at the internal consistencies that's where it starts to fall apart and we'll definitely i'm definitely look forward to hearing yeah if it's mormons they say oh we're all but the family yeah see that's why we're a great religion that's why well these guys we're all about humanity and i don't think wider than the family we want to bring you into the fold love on everybody kumbaya and then so instead of families are forever it's like humanity is forever pretty much we are that we are the world that bumper sticker gotcha gotcha so in other words it's sort of like yeah it makes yeah it makes sense all right well this has been really good so if you have enjoyed this uh definitely where can people find out more about you know you have a website in the making and a podcast examining the cults .com

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and we're going to have a dedicated site going through a lot of the teachings and problems of baha 'ism which are going to hit hard next episode but yeah that's all going to be on examining the baha 'is .com