History of the Bahai Faith

There is a present-day tendency towards religious universalism, towards a new religion that would generously and unconditionally incorporate all the faiths and beliefs in the world. These tendencies do not come only from the Extreme Orient, but also from the Islamic, Arab spiritual realm.

Apart from the Islamic aim to create a unique religious empire, there are some other movements from Indonesia to Morocco, that want to achieve worldwide domination through religion. Such a religious movement is the one called " Bahá'í " which is an expression Islamic eschatology.

In order to provide arguments in favor of their ideology, the movement's followers start from the premise that the life of the world would develop in stages, within different time frames or historical cycles of gigantic proportions. When a certain cycle ends, another one starts, and the previous one becomes obsolete.

Each revelation represents a synthesis and fulfillment of the previous revelations and it confirms the fact that humanity has reached maturity from all the viewpoints. In the opinion of the Bahá'í believers, this last cycle has started with Adam and it closes with Bahá'u'lláh universal revelation.

This represents the accomplishment of all the previous religious revelations but also the peak of all the evolutions, of the wise thoughts and salvation doctrines people had so far: Moses and Jesus, Mohamed and Buddha. All these "prophets" of the only God have revealed truths with eternal qualities, but the truths preached by each of them are only partial.

Bahá'u'lláh does not annihilate all these truths, but he incorporates them and sets them free from their temporal condition, makes them eternal. It is for this reason that Bahá'í believers claim their faith represents God's most pure and final revelation, the sum of all the faiths on this planet.

Bahá'u'lláh declared himself to be the "Promised One" of all the religions in the world. He claimed to have fulfilled all the world religions' messianic prophecies. According to the Bahai teachings, there is only one God. We absolutely cannot access God from our physical realm and because of that, his reality cannot be known.

Therefore all the conceptions of God developed throughout mankind's history are nothing but some manifestations of the human thinking and do not reflect the essence of God.

Thus, the Guardian of the Bahá'í faith by the name of Shoghi Effendi Rabbani clearly describes God as having the following attributes: personal, inaccessible, rational, omnipotent and omniscient. Effendi rejected therefore any such belief as pantheism, anthropomorphism or incarnationism.

God revealed Himself to mankind via some divine Messengers, with teachings that are meant to provide us with guidance and education and ensure the basics of our society's good development.

Among these Messengers, we can mention Moses, Abraham, Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Zoroaster, and Muhammad. There is one and unique divine Source for all the Messengers' religions. Their teachings essentially are nothing but some successive chapters of only their own religion, which is coming from the One and the same God.

Bahá'u'lláh, the latest of these Messengers, brought new spiritual and social teachings for our time. His essential message is of unity. He taught the oneness of God, the oneness of the human family, and the oneness of religion.

God has created man in order for man to know and love God. And because all men are the creation of God, each one of them needs to love his neighbors, without any discrimination of gender, confession, race, nation, social class. There is only one God and one single human family, and this family should live in harmony and universal peace.

Starting from this idea, Bahá'í religion considers that it has the mission to structure a new world order based on these egalitarian principles. It is about the political, social, cultural relationships, about the contact with all the so-called "progressive" movements which mean to detach themselves from any conservative reflexes or dogmatic traditions.