Baha’i Rants

Perhaps my favourite poem by Roger White, poet laureate of the Baha’i community:

APPLESAUCE

I tire, Eve, of innocence,
Let’s kiss and grow contented.
Suppose we touched, where I protrude
And you’re cunningly indented?

Oh Adam, what a sweet pastime!
I’m glad that I consented.
Tell me, dear, what shall we call
This game that we’ve invented?

With half my heart I’d call it love
And not have it repented;
The other half would name it sin
And urge it be prevented.

Had I not led you to the fruit
Guilt would be circumvented.
My punishment’s to have my crime
Eternally resented.

Spake the snake:

All Adam’s sons are cursed to woo
A maid and gently take her;
But after they’ve made applesauce
They’ll like as not forsake her.
And down the centuries men proclaim:
We’ll take the pleasure, she the blame.
Let posterity lament
That mother Eve gave her assent;
In slithering wisdom I rejoice
That she gave birth to slippery choice.

Adam & Eve by Titian (Prado Museum)

Roger White believed committed artists would be a vital force in preventing inflexibility in the Bahá’í community. “They will,” he predicted, addressing a group of Bahá’í youth in Haifa in 1990, “be a source of rejuvenation. They will serve as a bulwark against fundamentalism, stagnation and administrative sterility…To the degree the Bahá’í community views its artists as a gift rather than a problem will it witness the spread of the faith ‘like wildfire’ as promised by Shoghi Effendi, through their talents being harnessed to the dissemination of the spirit of the Cause.” To this end, White encouraged hundreds of budding writers and artists around the world, and called upon Bahá’í communities to assist the artists to find their place.

Obituary

A partial copy of this letter exists on the net, but this is the complete version:

Letter from William Hatcher to Dean Liston Pope
Yale University, Divinity School – May 21st, 1957

I am writing to inform you that, contrary to my previously expressed intentions, I will be unable to attend Yale Divinity School next fall. I do this with a feeling of grateful appreciation for your acceptance of my application and for your offer of a Grant-in-Aid of $400.00 which I accepted from you in my letter dated May 17, 1957. The reason for my decision not to enter Yale is wholly irrelevant to monetary considerations, and I would like to explain this to you.

Since accepting the Grant-in-Aid to Yale, I have become firmly convinced of the unanswerable truth of the Baha’i World Faith. During my four years as a student at Vanderbilt, I have been privileged to know and talk with some of the greatest leaders of Christianity in the United States and, to some extent, in the world. I have been in proximity, for the entire four year period, to Nels Ferre who, as you know, is one of the most creative theologians in Christianity today. The summer between my freshman and sophomore years I was fortunate enough to attend the full seventeen-day meeting to the Wold Council of Churches in Evanston, Illinois. There I was able to talk personally with some of the most dynamic spirits and the most creative thinkers the Christian world offers.
Continue reading ‘William Hatcher’s Letter to Yale University’

I’ve never studied economics and so the following is how I understand the recent financial crisis after asking around and using google.

In the last 5 years or so property prices particularly in the US started going up; this was stimulated by clever people creating new types of financial institutes that got around government rules about financial institutes needing a certain reserve ratio (amount to be kept in cash). This happened in various countries but more so in the U.S. because there the regulations were less stringent. Since the economy was flourishing, and even though experts in the field could see where this would lead, in such a climate no government would want to insist on tighter regulations – this would be very unpopular.

So we have this bubble of buying and selling – even ordinary people, re-mortgaging their houses for that extra cash to spend on something. It makes sense. You see an opportunity and you take it.

What makes this unstable is when what is borrowed is close to what is the value of a property, because property prices always fluctuate. At some point, sooner or later, experts involved in this buying and selling are going to realise that this bubble will break and so they stop buying and selling. When they do, other experts recognize what is coming and do the same. Now the time for a property to sell takes longer and so there is less cash in movement. It hits institutions (banks / financial institutions) first because they can’t move their money to repay loans.

There was also a stock market bubble, stimulated by interest rates being low. Governments kept interest rates low because this stimulates economic rate. This is a good thing but usually inflation starts to happen (a chain reaction of wages going up, things costing more to buy and so money having less buying power) and this is a warning governments usually see in time and then solve, by raising interest rates. This time inflation was well under control (so interests rates remained low); perhaps the efficiency of new technologies and globalisation (imported cheap products) masked or compensated for the inflation that usually goes with strong growth, but this is a guess.

What is of interest is how governments have responded to this.

The U.S. response was to give credit and to buy mortgages, instead of buying bank shares. Buying mortgages involves more administration and doesn’t punish the shareholders who are mainly to blame for the problem in the financial institutions to start with. Shareholders control how financial institutions work. Where the government buys newly issued bank shares, it means that shareholders lose part of their stake (influence on how the company works and the profits). The U.S. response, -buying mortgages- means that there is no future restriction nor punishment for the irresponsible fat cats (the majority shareholders). They have no interest in being prudent since they didn’t suffer, and are likely to repeat this in the future. Government-owned shares promote more prudent actions, but, yes, in terms of politicking, this is called socialism and that’s most likely the reason that the U.S. didn’t take the approach the U.K. government took. Today on the BBC radio (October 14th) it was announced that the U.S. is considering buying shares in the nine largest banks, whether they need it or not. If this goes through now shareholders of banks who were responsible will be punished along with the irresponsible ones.

A friend posed these questions:

“What would be a “Baha’i” solution to the problem, and here I mean more than the very general ideal of the elimination of the extremes of wealth and poverty and more to the point of how is this ideal to be accomplished?

Is a form of “world socialism” the answer?

Does free market capitalism as we know it have to be fundamentally changed, and if so, will the wealthy of the world ever agree to such?

To my way of thinking the failure of Marxist ideology was more than just the misuse of its ideals by tyrants such as Stalin and Mao. It was also the fact that individuals are more concerned with their own well-being (family and close relatives etc.) than with the well-being of the people they do not know or have contact with. How much are people willing to sacrifice individually for the good of the group, especially when the group is the size of humanity?”

What do you think?