Month: August 2021

Categories
baha'i

Book: Intended, by Sharon Nesbit-Davis

I ran across a book on Amazon by an acquaintance from my college days, Intended: a marriage in black & white. It’s a memoir of growing up in Illinois, with a focus on her painful 5-year engagement to marry George, a black man, and the racism she encountered. It’s very well written, understated, and it does finally end well.

I didn’t know her, but in our little Bahá’í community of Normal, Illinois it wasn’t possible to not follow her story as it unfolded, and some of the anonymized people she refers to I knew at the time. I met her in a group during my first week or so as a freshman, and I remember 2 things: She intentionally wore mismatched socks, and she was a very talented mime artist. I met George once or twice but never talked to him — he had a very soft & kind voice, and he went on to become a social worker.

What Sharon brings out so well was the racism we absorbed just growing up in southern Illinois, never aware, for me never even showing because I almost never met a black person so I didn’t have to face my own reactions. She quotes one of her most supportive and open-minded friends asking her “but what about the children?” Now, 45 years later and in a more diverse city, I can see that such children are very cute & wonderful, but I can remember the fear then. And George’s family had the same fears.

From the acknowledgments:

The first story in this book was prompted by my friend … she posed a question: “Is there a story from your childhood that would have predicted your life now?” I immediately thought of the Black doll I loved. And thinking about that story led to more stories that revealed a clear path, an intentional one to the life I have.

Categories
baha'i tech

Expanding the definition of “human”

(this is speculative, FWIW)

There are a lot of Bahá’í Writings, applying to a lot of different contexts, and many aren’t translated yet. But I’ve been puzzling over two quotes. The first is:

Know thou that every fixed star hath its own planets, and every planet its own creatures, whose number no man can compute. (Gleanings, LXXXII)

This makes sense to me — how could a universe so vast (and probably not the only one) not have life everywhere? And the concept of social progress with the Bahá’í concept of Progressive Revelation — that we are evolving from family unity, to tribal, to national, and now we need world unity — surely implies interplanetary unity somewhere down the road? And besides, there’s Star Trek 😉

The other quote is:

Having created the world and all that liveth and moveth therein, He, through the direct operation of His unconstrained and sovereign Will, chose to confer upon man the unique distinction and capacity to know Him and to love Him—a capacity that must needs be regarded as the generating impulse and the primary purpose underlying the whole of creation.… Upon the inmost reality of each and every created thing He hath shed the light of one of His names, and made it a recipient of the glory of one of His attributes. Upon the reality of man, however, He hath focused the radiance of all of His names and attributes, and made it a mirror of His own Self. Alone of all created things man hath been singled out for so great a favor, so enduring a bounty. (Gleanings, XXVII)

This too makes sense — this physical world is a nurturing home for humanity, and the definition of “mankind” or “humanity” is often cited as “fully reflecting all of the attributes of God”, not just some of them like the mineral, plant, and animal Kingdoms.

But look at that second quote closer: it says “man has the unique distinction and capacity to know Him”. Surely the Klingons can also know God? And we’re not admitting a pantheon of gods, there is just One God for both Klingons and Earthlings.

So if I bring those 2 quotes together, it seems to me in a Star Trek future, we would have to use the words “human” or “mankind” to also include all the different intelligent species in the universe, and they would have human souls, neither Klingon souls nor Earthling-specific souls.

This might be quite a shift in our thought. There’s probably a reason the distances between stars is so large, related to our capabilities now.

Orson Scott Card explores this in Ender’s Game, where we face the guilt of wiping out an entire race of beings before really knowing them, if I remember it correctly.

Categories
baha'i meta

The universe within

There’s a new Baha’i site with a name inspired by the same Seven Valleys quote this site was inspired by. It’s called “The Universe Within”, but it’s not a single website, rather a contrasting approach to mine — I use plain text on a one-older-guy blog, they are a young group producing music videos with computer-generated animation. The group uses 3 resources at the moment, rather than a single website:

I like the artwork. This little musician is kinda cute.

Cute flute player

Beyond that, too soon to tell how it develops but I’m very hopeful. I have the impression that it’s so new, they hurried to organize what is here in time for their Bahá’í Chat Zoom talk today. Below is their Seven Valleys quote, from the Zoom chat.

Likewise, reflect upon the perfection of man’s creation, and that all these planes and states are folded up and hidden away within him.

Dost thou deem thyself a small and puny form,
When thou foldest within thyself the greater world?

Categories
baha'i tech

Feeling like an old carburetor

Back in the 1960’s cars had mechanical carburetors and ignition, even manual chokes, and for me they were sometimes a source of problems — if they were adjusted just right, the car ran well, but the next day it might not because the weather changed a little, or the airflow got a little obstructed, and the engine sputtered or failed to start. Sometimes it flooded with too much gas, but if you let the car sit for an hour or so to “dry out” it would start then. It wasn’t as predictable or reliable as with today’s sensor-equipped models.

As I age I find my own mind acting like this, some days are productive, some a wash, and some have failures where the best I can do is try again another day. Right now I work in InfoTech, but not in management, and the level of detail required becomes difficult to manage as an older person. Most of my coworkers are at least a generation younger, some almost two generations; although we discuss the work itself, there is no one I can talk to with similar experiences. In my small local Bahá’í community I can watch how people deal with aging and learn from them, but they don’t work in IT.

Lately I’m puzzling over a new experience, and not just in the workplace — sometimes people seem to react overly well to me and I think back the next day and wonder what in the world I did that was so great; other times people will look at me in disgust and I think to myself what did I just do wrong? That’s usually a good time to quit for the day and try again, but sometimes even after reflection I can’t figure out what happened, thus it’s harder to learn from.

One thing that’s obvious is I’m too isolated, and so I talk too much in some situations. That takes time to work on, but I should have more time in a few months.

Using the analogy that our heart is meant to be a mirror, Baha’u’llah says:

Cleanse thy heart with the burnish of the spirit (Hidden Words #8)

Categories
misc

Reparations

According to an article in the Washington Post, the Australian government is planning to make cash payments that actually amount to something (ca. $55,000 per person) to some of the native peoples who were/are mistreated by the dominant white culture. This idea has been discussed, with no action that I know of, in the US (“The case for reparations”, by Ta-Nehisi Coates), and there have been commissions set up by the Canadian government too; I think they took some action.
The reason this is significant is not because these payments are really a fair compensation at all, but because doing something that takes more than a token effort is a necessary step to heal the culture which did the damage. America is carrying the burden of two original sins: genocide and slavery, and both are historical sources of our material success and spiritual challenges. The “land acknowledgement” statements now being used are a good step, because knowing our history is important, but at the same time they are token, too easy.
(If you go to https://land.codeforanchorage.org and put in your zip code, or text 855-917-5263 with it, you can find out what your acknowledgement should say)
After World War 2, Germany paid reparations to the new state of Israel for its genocidal actions. But it seems some members of the Israeli government didn’t want to accept them because mere money is so token, or they wanted revenge instead, according to the Coates article linked above. But we can’t undo the past, nor hide it. Faulkner is often quoted — “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
(When I read Faulkner in college, I completely couldn’t understand his novels — maybe I’d have a better chance if I reread them now, time permitting)
This is a preachy post, but I wanted to say that I don’t think America is terrible or wonderful, it’s both (just like the current internet, actually) — we have to replace either/or with both/and and move forward from there, all together. I think we have a lot to learn from the indigenous cultures among us once we get through this. One little-known book I come back to on this topic is “Faith, physics, and psychology: rethinking society and the human spirit” by John Fitzgerald Medina.
One other link — an angry song from the sixties by Buffy Sainte Marie, “My country ‘Tis Of Thy People You’re Dying”.