There are no shunning of believers just because of a personal concept or opinion.
Is it not dictatorship when Abdulbaha say’’you have no right to have your opinion’’????
‘’You shall deal mercilessly with covenant breaker’’. (surely Iam not one of them).
And you know what treatment reserve for them from Bahais, people of Light, dictated by the UHJ, God’s representing on earth.
One ex. If one of the spouse is a c-breaker, the other partner should shun him/her Should divorce.(what about the children)??

The Writings exhort believers to love even their enemies but when you question on successors, infallibility of UHJ, contradiction in the writings of the central figures, you are then the worst sinner in the entire universe.

You spoke of unity of religion. Very nice.
But there are lot of rules in the faith to keep you away from others’ religions.
It will be too long to quote all .
‘’independent investigation of truth’’ There are certain limit that you should not cross or go beyond or you will will be taxed GOD’s rebel one.As in the Tablet of Ahmad.

RUHI: Bahaullah said’’intone O my servant the verses revealed……who reciteth..in the privacy of his chamber, the scattered angels….’’

Bahaullah said through meditation on the Writings you attain to spiritual illumination.

Meditate in the morn and evening. Myriads of mysteries will be unveiled before you.

Every where it indicate that spiritual upliftment will occur through a one- alone study of the Sacred Writings and not in group study. It’s here that Ruhi failed.

Meditation is the music that bring rhythm to prayer.

“”About the history of the Faith’’
The history have on many occasion distorted from both parties.

UHJ: Entry by troops.—every Bahai was enthusiasm and excited…but when the result did not met the expectation the UHJ—Entry by troop is a long term process.

RUHI: Great excitement, you will inflame the world with the systematic approach etc etc.But again a great deception.
After so many years it’s now that you learn how to teach according to Ana method.
But what about those few believers that brought the faith through out the world. There was no Ruhi.

Five core activities: Great response before a big lapse.
Infallibility reside in the Bahai concept.
As long as every believer convince themselves that all the UHJ decisions are perfect even if after analyzing the outcome is negative, the UHJ is therefore infallible,.

But really I appreciate your zeal, enthusiasm, faith to respond to the call to change the world to better.

Bye.

The only thing is that it can’t be a snake eating its own tail. That is, we won’t really get far if all we are measuring is how much Ruhi a community has done. In any case, as you know Ruhi coordinators keep quite a bit of statistics on how many participants take the course, how far along they are in each course, etc. But I have yet to see a well defined goal (remember, not a snake devouring itself!) and monitoring to see if that has been achieved. The only thing being measured unfortunately in the scope of the current statistics “busyness” is how much Ruhi related activity Ruhi is imposing on the Baha’i community.

So it will have to be something meaningful and measurable of course. For example, increase/decrease in… participation in community events/feasts, etc. participation in contributing to the fund, participation in voting, new enrollments, etc. In this way we can put aside such posturing and see if Ruhi and the institute process has indeed contributed something significant to the Baha’i community. Frankly, I’m a bit astounded that such simple reason has to even be suggested.

As I’ve outlined above, the fact that Ruhi has been in practice in Columbia for 40 years and not made any significant mark in improving the community there shows that it is basically a failure – mind you, this, in its most fertile environment! If Ruhi – after 40 years! – can’t make a dent in Columbia… then what the heck are we doing? Sadly few have even thought to ask this question.

This idea of measuring results scares the beejeesus out of the institutions because it means accountability. Not accountability to the community, but rather, accountability to themselves. It means that they can’t hide behind flowery rhetoric as they prefer to do in order to declare everything and anything a ‘victory’.

For example, I remember one teaching campaign in my locality that was trying something new: having Baha’is go up to people and doing ‘direct teaching’. What they meant in this case was to have a Baha’i walk up to a person or strike up a conversation with someone they didn’t know and bring up the Faith and invite the person to become a Baha’i. Gah!

Everyone at the teaching meeting was uncomfortable with this – including me. But the response from the organizing person asst. ABM was to just try it and see – as an experiment. I suggested that this was a worthwhile undertaking with one suggestion to the asst. ABM for propagation: that we measure the success of this campaign so that we could then know if we should do more or less or just learn from it for the future.

She was not happy about this, needless to say. And needless to say, thrusting well meaning Baha’is out into the world to become pushy “salesmen” went unsurprisingly bad. Anyway, sorry for the digression but this story popped into my head after talking about measuring Ruhi.

So what do you think of this idea? does it sound reasonable to you?

The Ruhi courses are way different than they were 5 or 10 years ago, the way they are implemented is different. It constantly evolves. There is nothing rigid or lock step about them. Ruhi in fact has driven the acknowledgement within the Baha’i community that, quite frankly, over the years a lot of mistakes have been made. It’s a very gentle system for personal growth, and is tailored to allow each participant to use his or her own strengths and styles to move forward. If that’s not your experience, I’m sorry, but things have changed a lot over the last 10 years. I didn’t like Ruhi in the beginning. None of the people in my community did. But it’s not what we first thought. Nobody in my community or any of the communities I’ve visited over the last 3 years thinks Ruhi is some “complete” system of teaching. It’s part of a learning process that is only beginning. It is a form of gathering experiences and sharing with one another, working as a community. A lot of the junior youth/ youth in my former community in New Jersey started meeting with friends from school, rather than other Baha’i youth, and their Ruhi groups became more interesting and useful. Their friends’ parents noticed a change in their kids’ behaviors. They started doing service projects together. And they didn’t feel pressed to hang out with eachother just because they’re baha’is… they get together when they want to, and focus on their individual ruhi groups: which are their friendships from school, not Feast or Baha’i school, but regular school.

What I’ve seen with my own two eyes is way different from the picture you paint.

If you know anything about Baha’u'llah, then you’ll know His stance on ‘taqlid’ – and Ruhi is 100% taqlid