Roundup

Loose End Roundup

By John Taylor; 2007 May 02

Tomorrow is a Holy Day, Ridvan 12, and tonight we are having the Haldimand community's commemoration in our home. Lots of preparation to do, so today I will let others do the writing for me on the Badi List and Blog entry will tie together many loose ends. Here is a list of the topics covered today:

Joining Myspace
Email Interview with Barry Smith
New Decision Prayer
Why Ruhi? Video
The Blood and Gore Fund
Reader Response to Morality Essay
Response to Yesterday's Prayer Essay

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Joining Myspace

I have joined Myspace. I do not know exactly why I did that but I read that everybody is doing it so I jumped on the bandwagon. The URL I chose is "Gazpacho Guy", specifically:

<a href="http://www.myspace.com/gazpachoguy">Find me on MySpace and be my friend!</a>

Email Interview with Barry Smith

As announced earlier, I wrote Barry Smith with several questions about his comedy presentation, which I came across through newspaper publicity on the Net. His website is: www.barrysmith.com. Here is what I said to him:

"I came across some of your publicity and have written a little about you on my blog, badiblog.blogspot.com I wonder if you could answer some questions for me and my readers. Please feel free to give an introduction to yourself, maybe some of your publicity material. My readers are mostly in Ontario and I notice that you are coming to the fringe festival in Toronto this summer."

Hi John,

I'll do my best to answer your questions:

Are you a Baha'i?

I'm not a Baha'i anymore. I was, as you suspected on your blog, a member of the Baha'i's Under The Provisions of the Covenant, a Baha'i sect that I understand most Baha'i's have never heard of. It was led by a man in Montana, Dr. Leland Jensen, who believed he was the "establisher" of the Baha'i Faith - a fulfiller of prophecy that also had him be, technically, the return of Jesus. There were about 250 believers in this sect.

My show is a comedy about how I found out about this man, how I came to believe his claims (even lived in his basement for a summer), and how I eventually decided I didn't believe him. A comedy with serious undertones about faith and belief. I don't know that I can say across the board that Baha'i's would particularly enjoy this show - I do poke a bit of fun at Baha'i, but certainly not more than I poke fun at myself. My show is not anti-Baha'i or anti-religion (though I personally am neither Baha'i nor religious), it's just my story which happens to involve Baha'i and religion (I was raised Southern Baptist).

Where do you live, in Canada?

I live in Aspen, Colorado.

How do you work such wonders with Powerpoint? I find it clumsy. Do you have the help of a visual artist?

Actually, I use Keynote on a Mac. Like most Mac products (yes, I'm a fan) I find it to be very powerful and intuitive. I do all the visuals myself, though I have a sound designer, Arman Boyles, who does the music for me as well as making my videos sound good.

I am afraid that I do not even know what a fringe festival is, what is it?

Basically, it's an unjuried theatre festival - comedy, music, dance, puppets, improv, drama, you name it - anything goes! It really is an amazing experience, both for the artist and the audience. Lots of cool stuff to see at a Fringe Festival. There are many throughout the world.

Wikipedia has a great entry on fringe festivals:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fringe_festival

Canada has a fringe festival circuit that runs from Montreal to Vancouver for the entire summer. This tour is literally unlike anything in the world, and I'll be on that tour this year with my "Jesus In Montana" show and my new show, "American Squatter." And yes, I'll be performing Jesus In Montana at the Toronto Fringe Festival - you can find my performance dates on my web page, www.jesusinmontana.com

Thanks for writing. Good luck with your blog.

New Decision Prayer

New Prayer Distributed by the Universal House of Justice

Thanks to Jimbo for sharing this prayer of Baha'u'llah originally written for Shaykh Kazim Samandar. This new translation is now official, so rub it out of the handwritten part of your prayer book and put it into the printed section.

Subject: Prayer For Difficult Decisions

Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 20:30:10 -0700

THE UNIVERSAL HOUSE OF JUSTICE

DEPARTMENT OF THE SECRETARIAT

Baha'i World Centre P.O. Box 155 31 001 Haifa, Israel

Dear Baha'i Friend,

Your email has been received at the Baha'i World Centre and forwarded to our Department for response. The prayer that you quote is authentic. It was revealed by Baha'u'llah in Arabic for Jinab-i-Samandar (Shaykh Kazim Samandar), the father of the Hand of the Cause of God Tarazu'llah Samandari, to assist him in making a difficult decision. The Research Department has No information about the date of its revelation.

As you may be aware, until now only provisional translations of this prayer were available. Recently, however, an authorized English translation of the prayer and its context has become available at the World Centre, and it follows below:

Samandar, upon him rest My glory, hath ever been the recipient of divine favours, and there hath befallen him in the path of God that which His knowledge alone can encompass.

In regard to his affairs, let him repeat nineteen times:

"Thou seest me, O my God, detached from all save Thee and cleaving unto Thee. Guide me, then, in all mine affairs unto that which profiteth me for the glory of Thy Cause and the loftiness of the station of thy loved ones."

Let him then reflect upon the matter and undertake whatever cometh to mind. This vehement opposition of the enemies will indeed give way to supreme prosperity."

With loving Baha'i greetings,

Department of the Secretariat

Why Ruhi? Video

Here is a hilarious video explanation of why we need to take book seven and get more Ruhi coordinators going.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz3TjDvAYkg

The Blood and Gore Fund

When I saw Inconvenient Truth I was hot to trot for saving the world. I read an interview with Gore in Wired Magazine where he mentions that he, Al Gore, had got together with some billionaire by the name of Blood, and formed an investment fund that targets environmentally helpful enterprises. It is popularly known as the Blood and Gore Fund, since its real name is boring. I wanted to find out more about the fund but its website is pretty boring and uninformative. Then I ran across an investment professional from St. Catherines who kindly wrote this response to my query.

Hello Mr. Taylor,

I have some information for you as discussed at the Dunnville Home Show. With regard to the "Blood & Gore" fund, after doing a bit of research I found out that it is unfortunately a US only mutual fund firm. We cannot offer it to our clients because it falls under a different jurisdiction. Some US funds have a Canadian mirror that we can offer but this one does not. Essentially, Gore and Blood created a firm called Generation Investment Management. This firm creates funds using companies that are sustainable, eco friendly and that do not add to the long term negative depletion of the environment etc ...

Although we cannot offer funds from this specific company, Investors Group does have a fund that has been around for quite some time that has the same investment philosophy. The fund I am talking about is called Investors Summa fund. This fund may or may not be suitable for you, it depends on your individual investment profile.

You can learn about this fund here:

http://globefunddb.theglobeandmail.com/gishome/plsql/igf.fund_pro?fundname=Investors+Summa-A&iaction=Get+Fund+Profile

Another older article about the fund can be found here:

http://www.investmentreview.com/archives/2001/winter/social.html

Let me know what you think about this fund and if you would like more information on it.

Reader Response to "It is all about morality"

Over a month ago I wrote an essay about sex, more or less laying out the Baha'i position on sexual morality (marry them off young) and discussing the implications for education. Unbeknownst to me at the time, two people responded to the essay. Here are their thoughtful and interesting comments:

Phillipe Copeland wrote:

Thanks for addressing the "hooking up" issue, I've been hearing a lot about it. I've often meditated on how the Baha'i writings tell us that the purpose in obeying the Laws of God is to protect us from our own ignorance and the harm of the mischief maker. Boys and girls engaged in hooking up are not only retarding their own spiritual development but also exposing themselves to injury by "mischief makers" who will manipulate their moral vulnerabilities. Our world is full of such predatory personalities and I don't just mean the obvious ones that you hear about in the news, but the multitude of smooth talking characters who mislead young people on a path of destruction all while professing a commitment to "freedom" and "liberty".

Mystic Wayfarer wrote:

A most thoughtful post. Striving for moral excellence is rarely acknowledged as a critical educational goal. As the Master emphasizes: "Man must now become imbued with new virtues and powers, new moral standards, new capacities."

After living in Israel and observing how the orthodox Jewish communities encourage and nurture young marriages (often under the age of 20), it is clear that the very nature of the social fabric must be designed so as to support such families. But there are various shortcomings in these communities, most particularly the opportunities for women. Here, we can see that the principle of gender equality that so forcefully pervades Baha'i teachings anticipates the complete remolding of the socio-economic matrix of human life. Resources of society must undoubtedly flow to support an intense and ongoing educational process to young parents and all. Understanding how community processes can be restructured is clearly a most challenging spiritual, moral and intellectual task--one that cannot abide the simplistic assumptions of neoclassical economics regarding human nature (or the nexus between human beings and the natural world)

Response to Yesterday's Prayer Essay

Jean wrote:

Enjoyed your speculations today on what is the most common prayer.

I don't agree that it is necessarily about wealth or power. I don't think I've ever prayed for either, though I certainly wouldn't mind more wealth!

I mostly pray for these things:

1) "Dear Lord, get me out of this mess I've got myself into." I procrastinate, I get distracted, I over-promise, and these bad habits get me into situations where I fail miserably at trustworthiness. Not so much the honesty part of trustworthiness, but definitely the reliability part.

Laugh away, but many are the times that Baha'u'llah has sent me green traffic lights and parking places, or phone calls from the people I'm supposed to be meeting, to save me from arriving at appointments late. Or he has helped me stay focused at the last minute to get an important piece of work done before a deadline after I've goofed off for weeks.

2) "Dear Lord, protect my loved one." whether that loved one needs protection from the physical dangers of military service, illness, or natural disasters; the psychological dangers of temptation or bad habits or resentment, or the pain of depression or loss.

I agree with you though, that whatever we pray for ourselves has the possibility of going badly wrong once given to us. If Baha'u'llah bails me out after I procrastinate, where is my incentive to organize myself better and work harder to keep my promises?

I know perfectly well that cleaning up after my mistakes is a waste of His time and energy, limitless as they are, but every time I get in a tight spot, SOS! SOS! There goes another prayer.

The rest of the time, I try to pray for stuff that can't possibly go wrong and that recognizes that God is in charge and I'm not. Even knowing it's impossible to achieve that perfectly, I think it helps me pray for better things. Dear Lord, please make my friend's cancer treatments spectacularly effective, and give him the strength to endure the misery of chemo without losing his hope or his sense of humor.

Dear Lord, help my teenager find a better way to deal with those two kids on her sports team that she always complains about. Lord, inspire our world leaders to make loving and wise decisions and help them to find sound information and pure hearted advice to guide those decisions. When I pray that way, instead of "Cure my friend, don't let anyone bother my teen, and bring our troops home" I acknowledge that God's way of doing things has got to be better than whatever I could dream up.

I also recognize that God's way usually involves silent, invisible changes to hearts and minds rather than splashy contraventions of the laws of nature. Finally, it shows me what I could be doing on my own to make the things happen that I'm praying for. I could send my friend an email or joke; I could think of ways to talk to my teen about backbiting without alienating her, and I could invest the time to write a thoughtful letter to the politicians.

Finally, there's always "Lord, help me do the right thing, with the right attitude". That about sums it up, doesn't it? :)

All the best,

Jean