Posted by Stuart Gilman (67.68.70.88) on December 26, 2002 at 07:01:37:
In Reply to: Re: "God is Perfect - God makes errors" posted by Rob on December 26, 2002 at 01:01:58:
In North America we have 72% of married women working.
We have a 62% divorce rate in urban centers.
We have a 51% divorce rate in USA/Canada.
Suicides and mental illness resulting from divorce,
abandonment, disturbed children of deviants is high.
There are about 162,000 parental kidnappings in the US
each year.
About 58,000 children per month go missing, presumed
homeless or kidnapped or dead.
The decree that marriage and monogamy is the path to tranquillity
is the one of many errors I was referring to.
In fact, in our modern 2003 society, there is no path to tranquillity if you are part of the "American" way of life. It is possible to turn it off, of course. Is it? No tv, no radio, no computer, no car, no commuting, and so on. But Baha'is are commanded to work and bring forth children. To bring forth children one must work. Having 21st century children is the opposite of tranquillity. One of five is gay, one of five is mentally disturbed, one of five is psychopathic, one of five is mentally deficient and one of the five is normal. These are generalizations but the statistics - the truth - are worse.
Monogamy is a failed experiment since more than 62& of all North Americans cheat at least once. 10-15%% are legal or functional bigamists. N.O.W estimates that one in 10 wives is beaten and battered, one in ten wives is severely abused verbally and other agencies give higher values to these facts. There are also statistics for beaten and exploited husbands which I do not have. The majority of murders in our society are intra-marital. The majority of suicides are intra-marital.
Is it possible that not only was Baha'u'llah making a false statement about monogamy but that - since he wrote that the single purpose of bringing forth children was to praise His Name - that he was intentionally lying to serve his own ends? Logic dictates that conclusion, but we are not permitted such sacrilege. Instead, we must look to our own alleged ignorance, accepting His laws and Utterances as Perfect and Infallible. We must seek harder within the Faith to understand when such Utterances and Edicts seem "wrong".
At the same time, however, I am not allowed to interpret in order to make things reconcile with fact. If I were to claim that Baha meant you have the best chance for tranquillity in monogamy and marriage without guarantees, I could live with that.
The truth is: tranquillity comes only with aloneness, meditation, prayer, reflection, study and charity. People is Hell. Whether a member of a club, an association, a religion, a political party of a family, the people make tranquillity impossible. Having a job makes tranquillity impopssible. Americans, the loudest, untranquil, materialistic, hedonistic, libertarian, permissive population ever to achieve the status of Super Power, whose globalization means Americanization, with its benefits no doubt, but all the horror that comes with freedom (see Baha'u'llah on Liberty)
This is the source of my single example of error and fallibility.
seg
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