Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Category: Religion / Baha’i Faith

  • Happy New Year

    Today is Naw-Rúz, New Year’s Day on the Bahá’í calendar. For the nineteen days prior, we have been fasting between sunrise and sunset. So parties are pretty common to celebrate surviving this trial. My first Baha’i experience here in Athens was a Naw-Rúz party. A coworker said with all the stuff my group is doing I…

  • The Bahá’í Fast

    From Shoghi Effendi in Directives of the Guardian: The fasting period, which lasts nineteen days starting as a rule from the second of March every year and ending on the twentieth of the same month, involves complete abstention from food and drink from sunrise till sunset. It is essentially a period of meditation and prayer, of…

  • Happy Ayyám-i-Há

    The Bahá’í calendar consists of nineteen months with nineteen days plus 4-5 intercalendary called the Days Outside of Time or Ayyám-i-Há. On the Gregorian calendar, it starts at sunset on February 25th and lasts until sunset on March 1st. The morning of March 2nd starts the Bahá’í Fast where we abstain from eating between sunrise…

  • Saint Valentine

    We celebrate with flowers, candy, dinner, and gifts the beheading of the patron saint of love, beekeepers, young people, and happy marriages. The flowers suddenly make sense given the beekeeper part of his domain. I forget how interesting Catholicism can be. According to Catholic Online…. Valentine was a holy priest in Rome, who, with St.…

  • Martin Luther King, Jr. : Quotes to Make You Think

    Various Martin Luther King, Jr. quotes my Facebook friends posted today. Strangely enough I did not already have any on the Quotes to Make You Think page. The time is always right to do what is right. Everybody can be great because everybody can serve. Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see…

  • How to Pray

    Included below are the steps that Shoghi Effendi Rabbani, 1897-1957, reportedly gave to a follower of the Bahá’í Faith, Ruth Moffat, who visited him in the Holy Land. His injunction speaks to us all about the dynamics of prayer and how we can use it to find solutions to even our most challenging problems. Here are…

  • Baha’i Science Quote

    In the furor over a bacterium using arsenic where normally it would use phosphorus, I looked up this quote. This has no direct bearing on the discovery other than why science is important. If we look with a perceiving eye upon the world of creation, we find that all existing things may be classified as…

  • Dizzy Gillespie interview about Bahá´í Faith

  • TED Talk: Optimism

    I agree all too often we think of our interactions with others as competition (a zero sum game where other’s loss is our gain). Instead, our fortunes are correlated with others, aka in non-zero sum game, so cooperation is the effective strategy (like Tit For Tat). Because non-zero is becoming more an more the norm, working effectively…