Weight: 270 lbs.

Overall my month of Baha’i went pretty well. I managed to learn a lot about the religion, and even managed to interact with the community in more ways than one (there have been eighty comments made on my post to the ljbahai website so far).

The fasting was difficult. There were a few points where I almost didn’t make it, and even a few times when I just forgot that it was happening (small transgressions, honestly). It didn’t have the religious or spiritual connotations that were meant to accompany such an event, but it did help me gain a kind of empathy. I lacked that seemingly essential connection to God to make it a Divine, rather than a human experience. Regardless, I think it will change me for the better.

The Baha’i faith itself was very interesting, and in my opinion was one of the more progressive of the faiths that we shall be experiencing. What struck me most was the evolutionary, progressive stance it had on religion and revelation, as well as the strong connections it had to some of my favorite philosophical models.

At many points I read of God being equated to the sun, that although it may appear on different days and at different times, it is always the sun that we are observing. The resemblance here to Plato and his allegory of the cave is striking. Plato thought that the ideas of common human beings were like shadows on a cave wall- far detached from true existence outside of the cave. The ultimate truth, that of the idealistic, immaterial realm of the Forms, was represented by the sun. Here are the fully realized ideas and characteristics we see in every day life, the paradigms of justice and all the virtues.

Specifically the sun was the Form of the Good- that which is connected to all the other Forms and therefore all the other ideas. This is how we can come to define the virtues as any action that produces a good outcome, Plato’s solution to his predecessor Socrates and his endless questions. An action or idea is virtuous in so far that it matches our conceptions of what is good, that it reflects the says of the sun.

I concluded early on in my reflections that I could not conceive of God as anything physical or in any way anthropomorphic. Certainly not as some kind of divine creator or personal being that loves me. I have however come to conceive of God as indeed something to be worked towards, something worth studying and acknowledging. Please understand that my conception of God is wholly philosophical, it was the only way I could work toward the idea, and the word really doesn’t have a lot of the baggage that I would expect when hearing someone else say it. But after this, perhaps that may change.

God, simply put, is the fulfillment of the best of our ideas. In a way, God is the Truth. God is not something that has been fully realized yet, nor perhaps will it ever be. We have these concepts of what is good, of justice and fairness, of virtues and freedom, and of liberty and equal rights. We set ourselves these immense tasks of trying to fulfill these ideas that we have laid out in front of us, and we keep falling short. We know what it is like to be loving and just and fair, but we can’t point to any idea or method that fully encapsulates what we mean. We never see these ideals fully realized, but we get it right sometimes.

In philosophy a lot of stress is put on the difference between our ideas and the real world, and if we can ever know if the two truly match up. Some philosophers start to even suggest that our concepts of truth are all nonsense, that we can never have that genuine representation of the real world in our ideas, and so the only thing we can mean by truth is how useful the idea is. But some philosophers, like Putnam, argue that although some of our truths are largely contingent or subjective, every once in a while we get it right. Every now and again the ideas we hypothesize and argue for actually match up with how the objective world works, with the real and natural order of things.

This realm of what is natural and objective is what I would consider the realm of God. It is that source that we are trying to get right, towards which all thought and philosophy and discovery is bent on. God then, as I said, is the Truth.

But as I said earlier, we aren’t anywhere close to this yet. We cannot say dogmatically that we have found the right answers. As Baha’u'llah taught us, the truth does not come from one source, but from many, through all times and cultures. God, then, is a dynamic thing, not something which shall remain the same through out time. Just as we think we have everything figured out, someone comes along and points out where we went wrong. As the times change, so do our routes to God. So we can say that we are getting closer to fulfilling our ideas, but we should never put our foot down and say that that is the end of discovery, that at this point and no further will our knowledge take us.

God is also the Good. It is that best way to be, the ethics and morality that will allow us all to realize our own lives and best know the Truth. It is the same thing across cultures and ideologies, amongst all philosophies and religions. God is that final realization, that full and complete state where we can all agree on what the heck is going on. God is that state when we finally get it right. Eden, in a way.

These thoughts will become more elaborate as time goes on, but the Baha’i faith was a major instrumental part in my understanding. It was an interesting month, and will offer a stark contrast to Satanism.

Allah’u'Abha.