Harold Rosen
Wilmette, Illinois
Contents
Acknowledgments...................................................................................... 1 1 – Finding Hope in an Anxious World..................................................... 5 2 – Founders of Faith: Mediators between Divine and Human Realms.....17 3 – Progressive Revelation: New Paradigm for Understanding Religion and History.......................................................................... 27 4 – Parallels and Patterns Linking the Founders....................................... 43 5 – Moses: Background and Mission........................................................ 75 6 – Moses: Teaching and Legacy.............................................................. 93 7 – Zoroaster: Background and Mission..................................................115 8 – Zoroaster: Teaching and Legacy........................................................131 9 – Krishna: Background and Mission....................................................153 10 – Krishna: Teaching and Legacy.........................................................173 11 – Buddha: Background and Mission...................................................197 12 – Buddha: Teaching and Legacy.........................................................215 13 – Christ: Background and Mission.................................................... 239 14 – Christ: Teaching and Legacy........................................................... 259 15 – Mu¥ammad: Background and Mission............................................281 16 – Mu¥ammad: Teaching and Legacy..................................................301 17 – Bahá’u’lláh: Background and Mission............................................. 325 18 – Bahá’u’lláh: Teaching and Legacy................................................... 349 Appendix – Patterns in the Backgrounds, Missions, Teachings, and Legacies of the Founders of Faith............................................. 373 Notes..................................................................................................... 385 Bibliography........................................................................................... 407 v
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Finding Hope in an Anxious World Conscious human life is like eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The fruit of this tree may prove delicious, or it may prove bitter. Tasting this fruit teaches us that there is both good and bad in the world, as well as countless other moral and spiritual consequences in between. The consequences are both personal and social, for we are both private and public beings. Greater awareness of these consequences can lead to either heightened joy or pain. Wherever we turn, we are faced with degrees of choice and responsibility—for better or worse. An endless array of questions confronts us throughout our lives. What is expected of me, and is this what I expect of myself ? Should I opt for safety, or take the risks of new experience? How might I respond to people, and what relationships will I encourage? Which of my interests will I pursue next? What capacities call for development? Should I follow the faith of my parents, seek alternatives, or neglect religion and spirituality altogether? What skills and knowledge might I acquire? Which paths of service and livelihood will I walk? Should expedience or principle guide my steps? How can I best educate my children? Which is the priority for my nation—economic development, environmental protection, ethnic harmony, cultural advancement, or international peace? Such questions are inescapable. Consciousness includes the awareness of choice, and choice imposes responsibility upon us, and responsibility often brings anxiety in its wake. These realities—consciousness, choice, responsibility, and anxiety—seem to be among the key descriptors of human nature. Many of our choices have distinctly moral and spiritual dimensions. At one extreme, we may sink into depths of anxious sinfulness, if not sheer terror, over something we have said or done that later fills us with guilt, anger, or fear. It is not only others who become defensive about beliefs and 5
Founders of Faith ways of life, sometimes resorting to violence above rational persuasion. We, too, might succumb to fear and desperation in our decision-making and, in highly pressured circumstances, be tempted to commit shameful acts. But as human beings, we can also make dramatic turns toward the high road of principles, ideals, and aspirations—attaining heights of loving joy, productive engagement, and creative fulfillment. Ideals and virtues have spread to our whole world, so models of excellence can be found in each society and culture. Nobility and inspiration can lead us to praiseworthy endeavors and the building of a more beautiful world. Between these depths of sinfulness and heights of virtuousness are a wide set of intermediate options and conditions. Individually and collectively, we attempt to escape from consciousness, to avoid bewilderment and challenges, to choose comfort over growth. We often settle for material survival routines, suspending the questions of ultimate meaning and purpose, indulging in whatever means of entertainment may be economically available. And so we can drift in a state of partial consciousness, uncertain morality, and clouded spiritual vision—without direction or sense of calling.
Religion as an Attempt to Address Anxiety Traditionally, it has been religion that awakened humanity to invisible possibilities, providing us with conscious direction and hope vis-à-vis the challenges and perplexities of our existence. But religion, being an interaction between divine and human realms, shows the influence of both infinite grandeur and finite frailty. Religion can bring out humanity’s best, including moral uprightness, spiritual transcendence, and cultural refinement. But religion can also lose its effectiveness over time to guide us along the right path. When this happens, we can easily succumb to our worst failures, and religion can become tainted with human limitations and evil decision-making. Religion, in its “earthly” dimensions, declines inevitably to the point of needing divine renewal. This strange rhythm of heavenly and earthly counterpoint, this dialectic of rising and falling religions and civilizations, has given human history its decisive shape—for better or worse. The anxieties of human consciousness are responses to both outer and inner conditions. Outwardly, events in today’s world are rightly described as disturbing and often frightening. In the opening decades of the third millennium, religiously motivated violence often dominates the news. Commentators on current events allude to the clash of civilizations, especially that 6
Finding Hope in an Anxious World between the Christian West and the Islamic Middle East. Images abound of explosions causing innocent civilian death. Beyond this religious “war,” many other problems are also apparent. The gap between the extremes of wealth and poverty is widening. The faces of starving children remain in our mind’s eye long after the television is turned off. Many thoughtful, informed people conclude that the long-feared economic or environmental collapse has indeed begun. When we see these disturbing images on TV and in magazines, many questions come to mind. Was it inevitable that capitalism, like communism, would prove to be a shallow ideology? How close to the end of the fossil fuel supply have we come? Have we set irreversible and inevitably destructive processes in motion? Could governmental anxieties reach the point where weapons of mass destruction are used indiscriminately? Believers in the Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, and Islamic faith traditions may be wondering if their own religious civilization is in a stage of decline. Secular values alone seem paramount on the world stage. To an alarming degree, moral idealism has become very weak, and in many regions, creative spiritual vision has become a faint memory. Believers among established religions see no obvious signs of the Day of God or the Golden Age promised in their scriptures. Many traditional religious beliefs seem to contradict the scientific description of the universe. Old cosmologies, as traditionally interpreted, have been completely outgrown. Those who do not identify with any particular faith and expect technology and the economy to provide a good life for everyone are also deeply disenchanted. Prejudices of many varieties divide humanity and obstruct our search for cooperative solutions to global problems. And there are a growing number of New Age seekers who desperately await the unified consciousness that will usher in a truly global community. These outwardly oriented anxieties have counterparts in our inner world. Feeling a sense of being unsafe, if not in immediate danger, many of us go through periods of feeling left out, unloved, and simply not counted as significant players in the drama of life. At times, we feel utterly incompetent and incapable of learning, incapacitated, and left behind in the ever-quickening pace of social and economic development. Often we feel that we have failed as students, spouses, parents, and coworkers, not knowing where to turn for guidance we can trust. Many religious institutions and spiritual movements seem hypocritical and shallow. As years go by, we may feel further and further 7
Founders of Faith away from earlier dreams of developing and expressing our creative potential. Given the frustrations and injustices that abound, failing health and waning energies that come with aging, we may begin to conclude that God does not exist, that life is meaningless, and that there is no realistic hope of abundant eternal life beyond this fleeting world. When these anxieties begin to take hold, hope dwindles and despair mounts.
The Priority of Religious Hope Hope is a universal need. We cannot become fully human without it. Precisely because we human beings are acutely aware of time and unfolding processes, hope is essential to all higher human functioning. It is a positive orientation to the future, providing constructive motivation in the present, as well as a useful interpretation of the past. Hope reframes personal mistakes as learning experiences, collective problems as evolutionary drivers, crises as opportunities, breakdowns as preludes to breakthroughs, and darkness as motivation to discern more light. We do well to remember the famous observation of Alexander Pope in the early eighteenth century: “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.” Traditionally, religion has addressed our need for hope in the face of all the inner and outer anxieties of the human condition. Religious belief may be understood as a very important “if ”—the provisional hypothesis that human life is meaningful because it is part of a larger and more significant whole. Religion, generally speaking, declares that if God, or an Ultimate Realm, really exists; if this divine power is creative and benevolent and almighty; if He speaks to us and provides for us; if we can understand what is said; if we can accept the grace of divine sustenance and mould ourselves virtuously; if we can learn and grow and come to reflect heavenly qualities in this lifetime; if we can cooperate with divine guidance, envisioning and working toward a better world, then there is hope because the world is ordered and purposeful. Life has purpose and beauty, prayer and meditation are effective, all human beings are children of God, and we are brothers and sisters who are interdependent with one another, comprising together a united world family. Each of us is dignified and vital, and the future is promising. History and religion are ultimately progressive, prophetic visions are essentially true, and our existence and the universe as a whole are evolutionary and developmental. Even if one is not ready to embrace these traditional religious beliefs personally, it might be possible to entertain them as provisional hypotheses so as 8
Finding Hope in an Anxious World to gain insight into religious experience and the role of religion in world history. Stepping into the religious frame of reference may illumine the sacrifices and idealism that have generated some of the most significant turning-points of humanity’s journey across the ages.
A Hopeful Book, Reviewing Humanity’s Spiritual Progress This book was written with great hope for humanity’s progress and with a strong desire to contribute to interfaith understanding and global cooperation. It grew out of a lifelong fascination with the idea of unity in diversity—the discovery of common ground and interdependence across religious, cultural, and national boundaries, and building on this discovery to help make a more just, peaceful, and creative world. This book’s global emphasis was influenced by work and travel in the United States, Canada, Mexico, England, Greece, Israel, India, China, Japan, Korea, and Turkey. This book also grew out of my study of the human sciences and my twenty-five-year Unitarian Universalist ministry, during which I engaged in extensive interfaith activities, along with eager study of the world religions and their respective founders and scriptures. This book reflects my experience as a community interfaith educator, grateful to many and varied students. Finally, the pages before you reflect my becoming a member of the Bahá’í Faith, hearing its call to investigate truth independently and glimpsing its all-embracing vision of humanity’s past, present, and future. Though others more competent will soon surpass this effort, I feel called to share what I see now—trying not to get lost in the trees but rather to survey the forests with an eye for useful and general truths about humanity’s endowment and prospects. This book is for those who want to renew their hope for humanity on an informed and reasonable basis; those who want to rise above cynical, pessimistic, and partisan attitudes in their assessment of religion; those who intuit that, despite great dangers faced today, a positive and transformative breakthrough is emerging; those who want to see religion and science as complementary partners, rather than antagonists, in establishing an everadvancing global civilization; and those aspiring to be better world citizens or international bridge-builders. In this book the term “we” usually refers to readers, as well as to all the people who would be willing to entertain the hypothesis of progressive revelation—the idea that God or the realm of ultimate truth periodically reveals 9
Founders of Faith or discloses new guidance to humanity by means of revelatory teachers Who founded new scriptural traditions and generated new civilizations. The term “we” will sometimes also refer to humanity as a whole, because the focus of this work is world religion and world history viewed as a common heritage. This book is for those who feel lured to the process of dialogue and the creative ideals embedded in unity in diversity; those who suspect that humanity’s commonalities are more abiding and significant than our differences; those who prefer to build upon common ground rather than accentuate differences; those interracial and multicultural activists who are discovering the motivational importance of spiritual vision; and those who sense that if certain foundational virtues were practiced widely, our world would be transformed for the better.
My Spiritual Journey A few of the developments in my process of becoming a Bahá’í may cast light on the methodology and rationale of this study. In the summer of 1996, I made an interfaith pilgrimage to Oxford and Seoul, where I met many enthusiasts for global cooperation and participated in their devotions. It was soon after this that I began to take a different approach to the major faith traditions. Before this time, I had adopted a kind of anthropological perspective on the teachings of other faiths, and had tried to understand them from a safe distance. I did not anticipate being changed in any significant way by exposure to these teachings. But then the world’s scriptures, including the Bahá’í writings, began to speak to me personally and spiritually. I became a more open-minded and open-hearted seeker of higher truth. I began to hear the same voice behind all of the scriptures, as if the same story were being revealed, and as if a common body of sequential guidance were being offered to humanity as a whole. Another key turning point for me was gaining some insight into the giant puzzle of history’s civilizations. I had long been fascinated by the whole concept of civilizations, broadly conceived as mountain ranges of human achievement. How had these mighty structures arisen? Were there significant patterns in their development? Why did they fall? How do they arise anew? What roles does religion play in this earth-changing sequence? Is a new civilization arising today out of the ashes of two devastating wars involving both the Western and Eastern hemispheres? 10
Finding Hope in an Anxious World I was thinking of civilization in general as the highest collective achievement of a sizeable portion of humanity, bringing certain images to mind: religiously inspired architecture, beautiful gardens and parks, kind and trustworthy people in all walks of life, schools and universities, flourishing arts and sciences, widely shared prosperity marked by fair commerce and trade, respect and care for the earth, creative development and opportunity for all levels of society, effective social services, a just legal system underlying a wise and humane government, dignity and moderation in all quarters, and spiritual reverence and philosophical reflection. I adopted the Bahá’í view of history, which is reflected in this study. The Founders of the world’s religions seem to be the very hinges of history—the establishers of the highest civilizations, effectively generating new worlds of meaning and purpose for humanity. The deep, transformative impact of religious Founders is briefly described in this quotation. “He was in the world, and the world was made by Him.” The promised Manifestation of God appears; a community of believers forms around this focal centre of spiritual life and authority; a new system of values begins to reorder both consciousness and behaviour; the arts and sciences respond; a restructuring of laws and of the administration of social affairs takes place. Slowly, but irresistibly, a new civilization emerges, one that so fulfils the ideals and so engages the capacities of millions of human beings that it does indeed constitute a new world, a world far more real to those who “live, move, and have their being” in it than the earthly foundation on which it rests. Throughout the centuries that follow, society continues to depend for its cohesion and self-confidence primarily on the spiritual impulse that gave it birth.1 This is a concise summary of formative patterns enabling us to learn effectively from humanity’s past. Progressive revelation unlocks the mystery of the rise and fall of civilizations. The Founders’ teachings help us discern where tragic mistakes were made, to celebrate virtuous achievement, to embrace the latest divine guidance, and then hopefully to co-establish a glorious future. We explore this hope-giving pattern in detail in the exciting journey ahead. The intimate connection between civilization and religion will be identified, and key dynamics specified. 11
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