The Baha'i Faith & Religious Freedom of Conscience

From: Ron House <house@usq.edu.au>
Subject: Infallibility and deception
Date: Monday, August 09, 1999 11:55 PM
Smaneck wrote:
> 
> >Susan, only the UHJ has infallibility, not the secretariat. This is the
> >reason the UHJ, quite conscious of its lack of such perfection prefers to
> >have the secretariat say much of what comes out of Haifa. That way the UHJ
> >can later disavow whatever turns out to be wrong.
> 
> Dear Michael.
> 
> Let's do a reality check here. Can you think of a single instance where the
> House of Justice has ever disavowed a letter written on its behalf by the
> secretariat? Nine people aren't going to sit down and write a hundred letters a
> day. Infallible they may be, omnipotent they are not! But they will go through
> those hundred things on their agenda and give instructions to their secretaries
> and nothing goes out written on their behalf until at least five members have
> examined the final draft and approved it.
On the Baha'i Studies mailing list, I recently posted a criticism of the
Universal House of Justice, which, summarised, was this: that Baha'i
apologists on the Internet allow less informed Baha'is to believe that
the UHJ is infallible, when the original term actually is better
translated as morally perfect, sinless, or something of that nature;
that when this is challenged by producing demonstrations of their (or
'Abdul-Baha's, etc.) errors, then the fallback is made by then saying
"No, you've got it wrong! They are actually not propositionally
inerrant, but merely sinless."; and that when these apologists thereby
deflect the critic, they go right back to using the term "infallible"
and letting other hearers think they mean propositionally inerrant. My
criticism of the UHJ was that they permit this cycle of deception (for
the game can be played round and round as often as necessary). I will
extend this criticism here to mention that, by the way, the UHJ prior to
the advent of the Internet played the one-step equivalent game of simply
allowing non-Iranians to believe that the UHJ is infallible - that is,
inerrant. (The need to retreat round the cycle never existed whilst no
means could be found for a believer to make their problems known
worldwide.)
For my trouble I received a formal warning from the list managers, who
included the above Susan Maneck, but more importantly, a denial that
such a cycle of deception exists at all. But look at the above post: is
this not the same Susan Maneck, who on numerous occasions has answered
literalist criticisms of the infallibility doctrine by pointing out that
the word really means "sinless" - is this not she now giving the good
readers here the impression that the word means "inerrant"? Is this not
a demonstration before our very eyes of the cycle of deception I
mentioned being played out for one more round?
-- 
Ron House            house@usq.edu.au
The evils of each age always seem self-evidently right at the time.

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