The Baha'i Faith & Religious Freedom of Conscience

 


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Al-Kafir Al-Kabir" <kafiralkabir@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups: talk.religion.bahai
Sent: Saturday, August 23, 2003 12:29 AM
Subject: Spiritual abuse


> The following is taken from a Sufi list and perfectly articulates the
> kind of spiritual abuse rampant inside baha'ism.


> Spiritual abuse is any interaction which seeks to: 

> compel -- whether through force, pressure, intimidation, emtional 
> blackmail/duress, or other metods of covert control -- anyone to 
> believe or act in certain ways. At the heart of any spirital/mystical 
> path is the inherent, God-given freedom to accept or reject the 
> Divine purpose of life, and while individuals may wish to disagree or 
> discuss various possibilities concerning the precise nature of what 
> that Divine purpose is or what this purpose might entail, no one has 
> the right to impose on others what this should be or demand that 
> people must comply or conform with such possibilities. The freedom to 
> choose -- which is a Divinely given gift -- should not be curtailed 
> through coercive means -- physical, emotional, psychological, social, 
> or spirtual. 

> Or, approached from another direction, spiritual abuse is:

> any interaction in which the intention or niyat of one person is to 
> corrupt, obstruct, undermine, interfere with, subvert, mislead, 
> destroy, or impair the essential relationship which each person 
> enjoys with his or her Creator -- that is, spiritual abuse is any 
> interaction in which there is some intention, agenda, purpose, or 
> goal other than a wish for the constructive enhancement of another 
> person's life -- not according to what one may believe is in someone 
> else's best spiritual interests, but according to what God's plan for 
> that individual is and, ultimately, the only person who has the 
> responsiblity for deciding or judging what God's plan is for an 
> indvidual is the individual himself or herself. Others -- such as a 
> spiritual guide, teacher, shaykh, murshid, guide or pir -- may be 
> called upon as resources in assisting an individual to try to reach 
> the best informed decision possible, but it is a breach of spiritual 
> adab or etiquette to seek to manipulate that decision making process -
> - especially when this is done for self-serving purposes ... no 
> matter how nobly and beautfully packaged this manipulation may be.

> Or, approached from, yet, another direction, spiritual abuse is:

> any form of interaction which seeks, intentionally, to treat 
> deception, disinformation, lies, misinformation, and falsehoods as if 
> they were spiritual guidance rather than error ... it is one thing to 
> have differences of opinion about this or that teaching and to 
> explore those differences in methodical, rigorous, but diplomatic 
> ways, and it is quite another to use discussion as a tool of 
> obfuscation for the purposes of influencing people to seek other than 
> the truth -- for the truth is all that stands between us and error.

> And, finally, one might also say that spiritual abuse is: 

> any form of interaction which is authoritarian in nature and which 
> provides few or no degrees of freedom for full disclosure -- or, as 
> much as is feasible at any given time -- with respect to critically 
> examining -- in an appropriately respectful and discrete manner -- 
> issues involving identity, doubt, faith, truth, quesions, concerns, 
> purposes, meaning, methodology, justice, knowledge, understanding, 
> integrity, adab, morality, duty, responsibility, or disparities 
> between what is said and what is done with respect to any of the 
> participants.

> The foregoing is not exhaustive, but it serves as something of a 
> beginning I believe, for further discussion and critical exploration.

> (The above was written by a member of the Sufi Spiritual Abuse 
> Recovery Group and is posted here with the permission of the author.)

 


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