Moral Relativism and Baha’i

Moral Relativism and the Baha’i Message

By John Taylor; 2006 October 01

I have been several days switching computers, having bought a new one.
This is a much longer and more complex job than I had anticipated.
Meanwhile, how to keep the Badi’ list going? How’s about this: our
community had a thought-provoking deepening last Thursday night about
attacks against the Baha’i Faith led by Joseph Woods. In passing, Joe
mentioned the following article which is to be found on a Baha’i
discussion forum, written by our Auxiliary Board Member:

http://www.groupsrv.com/religion/post-956604.html
A RESPONSE TO THE ARTICLE ON MORAL RELATIVISM by Shahkar Arjomand

This URL includes as well a response by the author being responded to,
one Brendan Cook, who evidently is bound and determined to “reform” the
Baha’i Faith even before he enters it. Their arguments are detailed and
inter-windingly complex. You can read it all for yourself at that web
locale. To oversimplify, Arjomand says that spiritual law is like
physical laws, unchanging; a cobra bite would kill the human body a
thousand years ago, today, and a thousand years from now. Cook responds,
rather subtly, that nothing is all that simple, that cobra venom in
minute quantities is used in medicine, and that spiritual laws cannot be
treated as simple, monolithic, unchanging entities either. This Cook
fellow should consult a thesaurus, because his objection against
simplicity that simple is too simple cannot stand unless his objection
to Arjomand’s simplicity is that it is reductionist.

Surely the whole idea of a law, physical or spiritual, is that it
simplifies a complex reality. A formula compresses the behavior of
materials anywhere in the universe under the same conditions. A
spiritual law like love is never abrogated, never changes. It may have
exceptions once in a while, but there will never be a religion that
teaches hatred. The fact that Jesus knocked over a few kiosks in the
Temple or that Muhammad was forced to defend Medina militarily does not
change or abrogate the universal law of love. Both were greater teachers
of love than you or I will ever be.

The same simplification is true of words. The whole idea of a word is
that it compresses and simplifies meaning. For example, you and I both
understand what the word “life” means even though I have not lived your
life nor have you lived my life. The word “life” compresses huge
variances between your life and mine. The word describes something that
we share with every other human, with animals, plants and, by some
lights, even rocks and minerals. I would be using the word “life”
reductionistically if I said, though, “That’s life,” and expected it to
mean anything at all. That is a reductionist use of the word. But even
that has its uses. You can say, “That’s life,” when you cannot think of
anything else to say and leave it up to the listener to paint in
whatever meaning they please. So, even reductionism, defined as “bad
simplicity,” can be a good thing at the right time and place.

Interestingly, I just read that a biological scientist a few years back
came up with a new definition of life and actually began the long legal
process of patenting it. There is a gold rush among biologists for codes
and simplifications, especially on the genome, the simple code that
writes our bodies, which are potentially very lucrative to Big Pharma.
Then somebody pointed out that God had already beat him to it, and he
stopped the patent process. This is very telling because “God” is a word
for a good kind of simplification, the kind of simple that does not
change, that was simple a million years ago and will be a million years
from now. Sure, God is that and much more, but for political purposes
God is our word for “long term considerations” and “things we cannot and
will never understand.” God, and the word “God,” constitute the ultimate
formula, the great simplifier, even the Most Great Reducer. That in fact
is what qualifies Him to make laws that no human or group of humans can
or will ever be qualified to fathom, much less make pronouncements
about. Humans may form opinions “fer” or “agin” homosexuality or
abortion or a thousand other unfathomables, but only one Being ever
knows, the Being that created us all for a purpose, a purpose known only
to Him and only explainable, insofar as it can be explained, by Him and
Him alone.

I have at this juncture two names to drop, Plato and Karl Popper.

Plato came up with a brilliant and much misunderstood idea called the
“true lie.” Law making, simplifying, reducing, call it what you will, is
a process of generating true lies. Any law about something that we
cannot understand is bound to start off as a sort of lie. Should I abort
that baby in my belly? Should I indulge that passion or desire? Who can
say whether any action or non-action will turn out for good or bad? Who
knows whether a law, which is far more complex, involving as it does
many lives rather than just one, will stifle more flames than it
intensifies? Thus any law at the moment it is passed is an unknown, an
almost random shot in the dark. It is a lie, based upon the false
assumption that you know something when nobody does or can know. ‘Cept’n
God. Any law is reductionist and, we can be sure, will have good and bad
effects. All we can say is that one law may be better than another if it
has fewer bad effects than it has bad ones. In that case the lie becomes
“true.” Or perhaps it will have more good effects in areas that matter
in the long term. That would make it even more “true.”

But the problem is that every assumption every step of the way can be
challenged by a clever fellow like Mr. Cook. But cleverness is not the
same as wisdom. Plato refused even to call the discipline he founded
“wisdom,” he called it only “love of wisdom,” or philosophy. All we can
do is love what comes down from a greater Mind than our own. All we can
do is what Plato and his teacher Socrates both did: Throw up our hands
and admit our own ignorance, just admit from the start that we are
talking about lies and true lies, not about right and wrong, truth and
falsehood.

Karl Popper in his youth was the most ardent and prominent critic of
Plato because he considered Plato’s ideal Republic to be the root of
tyranny and autocracy. The very idea of a philosopher king is a standing
excuse for your Hitler or Stalin or Mao to take over and do the
atrocities they did. But after a lifetime of wrestling with the greatest
philosopher in history Popper came up with what I think is nothing but
an elaboration of the true lie, albeit a crucial one for understanding
the merits and bounds of modern science. This was his concept of science
and “non-science” –- a scientific theory is a proposition that not only
simplifies, but it is one that can be tested and proven wrong.
Non-science is any theory that cannot be proven wrong. Non-science is
not a synonym for “nonsense.” This simple delimitation is why many
consider Popper to be the greatest philosopher of science of the last
century.

This raises the question, can a law be proven wrong? Before the fact,
no. It is a lie, a shot in the dark. Only after the fact can you examine
its effects and assess it, and even then only according to the values
and criteria that engendered the law in the first place. Only then can
you start the great weeding out process that we call science. Science
aims to eliminate the fallacy of “post hoc ergo propter hoc,” that is,
“It happened after, therefore it was caused by it.” About what happened
before, it has nothing to say.

Religion, on the other hand, is technically a kind of “non-science” but
nonetheless it is very much concerned with testing, not the kind of
testing that decides which particular belief is right or wrong (that
would be mere arrogant nonsense) but the inner, invisible testing of the
heart that results in attitudes and virtues. It asks, “Is this heart
worthy of recognizing its ignorance?” Look up high enough and you have
to say: I have seen the enemy and it is us. In this sense religion most
emphatically does have something to say about what happens before the
fact, before and above what we understand. Not that it asks us to
understand what we cannot understand. It only asks us to be ready by
adopting a worthy attitude, by recognizing, like both Socrates and the
drunk in any 12 step program, our own ignorance and powerlessness.

I think Mr. Arjomand correctly points to the opening page of the
Kitab-i-Iqan here. The Iqan’s main contribution to the history of ideas
is to introduce relativity to religion (the idea of progressive
revelation) but at its very start it rules out the ethical form of
relativism, moral relativism. If you cannot, like Mr. Cook, get past the
pronouncements on the first page of Baha’u’llah’s greatest work of
ethics, then you can hardly enter into dialogue with Baha’is about
morality. As the spiritual continuation of the Bab’s greatest work, the
Iqan starts out with a headpiece citation from the Writings of the Bab:

“No man shall attain to the shores of the ocean of true understanding
except he be detached from all that is in heaven and on earth. Sanctify
your souls, O ye peoples of the world, that haply ye may attain that
station which God hath destined for you and enter thus the tabernacle
which, according to the dispensations of Providence, hath been raised in
the firmament of the Bayan.” (Iqan, 3)

Here is the essence of the Bab’s message. Purify, detach yourself. This
passage acts as it were as the gate (Bab) that, opening up, lets you
into the tabernacle of the Baha’i Faith. There is no other way in. As
Jesus said, “Strait is the gate and narrow the way that leadeth unto the
Kingdom…” Then Baha’u’llah says,

“The essence of these words is this: they that tread the path of faith,
they that thirst for the wine of certitude, must cleanse themselves of
all that is earthly -- their ears from idle talk, their minds from vain
imaginings, their hearts from worldly affections, their eyes from that
which perisheth. They should put their trust in God, and, holding fast
unto Him, follow in His way. Then will they be made worthy of the
effulgent glories of the sun of divine knowledge and understanding, and
become the recipients of a grace that is infinite and unseen, inasmuch
as man can never hope to attain unto the knowledge of the All-Glorious,
can never quaff from the stream of divine knowledge and wisdom, can
never enter the abode of immortality, nor partake of the cup of divine
nearness and favour, unless and until he ceases to regard the words and
deeds of mortal men as a standard for the true understanding and
recognition of God and His Prophets.” (Iqan, 3)