 This is a talk that's like a hike at a fast pace. So, put on your walking shoes, or if you're a person who likes to walk barefoot, take your shoes off, because this is where we're going. We're going through 500 years of the history of Uganda, 300 years of the political history of Uganda, 300 years of the economic history of Europe, and then we're going to look at the history of Western ideas. Our goal, and we've got an hour, we'll be fine. Our goal is to understand social structures so that we can understand how to change them. I want to suggest to you that the Baha'i Revelation views social structures as embodiments of thought, which are built up slowly over time. Self-interested, turning away from God's thought, gradually creates social structures which hold people in oppressive patterns of action. Injustice is not inherent in societies. It's not automatically there, like bad weather. Injustice is created by people through intensely selfish thought that shapes action and shapes human's institutions. It builds up layer by layer, and people live inside of it and consider it to be natural. We are liberated from oppressive social structures by thought that comes from God. Human beings responding to the will of God gradually create social structures which purify human actions, empower people, and engender justice. If we look at this idea, this concept carefully, and we find this concept in the Revelation, if we look at it carefully, it reveals to us aspects of the Baha'i Revelation which we don't always pay as much attention to as we might. One thing that comes into focus is human agency. This is useful for us because it helps us understand what we are actually doing in the world. And it also can help us communicate what we're doing in a way that doesn't seem naive and a way that also attracts people. So I want you to pay attention to human agency, to the consequences of human actions in what I'm going to be talking about. Another thing that I hope will come into focus is imitation. It's really important for us to look at how often in the Baha'i writings Baha'u'llah and Abdu'l-Baha and Shoghi Effendi are talking about imitation and the consequences of imitation. So pay attention to that. The power of thought to shape social structures is the theme of the secret of divine civilization. And when Abdu'l-Baha writes about thought, he's writing not only about conscious thought, but also people's motivations and intentions, their will. We can see how this happens in a statement of Shoghi Effendi's where through his secretary Shoghi Effendi says, and many of you are familiar with this, but let's just listen to it again. We cannot segregate the human heart from the environment outside us and say that once one of these is reformed, everything will be improved. Man is organic with the world. His inner life molds the environment and is itself also deeply affected by it. The one acts upon the other and every abiding change in the life of man is the result of these mutual interactions, mutual reactions. So we act on the world and the world acts on us. Here's a really clear example of this from thought all the way to social structure. Abdu'l-Baha says, national boundaries and racial distinctions have been created by despots and conquerors who sought to attain dominion over mankind thereby engendering patriotic feeling and rousing selfish devotion to merely local standards of government. And he goes on to paint this picture of despots and conquerors living in luxury the consequence of their manipulations of humanity while the people of their country, the soldiers and the tillers of the soil shed their blood and die sacrificing their lives for a delusion. It's a very powerful statement and let's think about where we see human agency in it. National boundaries, this institution which is so fundamentally a part of the structure of society that we don't question it. Abdu'l-Baha says it comes out of selfish motivations and because man is organic with the world this assertion of self is made and then people begin to live inside it and see it as natural. But the origin is selfish motivations of those who sought to attain dominion over mankind. The consequence of this interchange of people affecting the world and the return being deeply affected by it can be an unthinking imitation of the past. Baha'u'llah and Abdu'l-Baha both clearly indicate that self-interest the desire to maintain control over followers motivates leaders to promote a blind imitation of the past. Abdu'l-Baha describes this as encrust station. He says, the dogmas and blind imitations which have gradually encrusted it and which are the cause of the decline and effacement of the nation. So think about this image. Encrust station implies layering, right? Layering and hardening. And since clay is often an image for the desires of self in the Baha'i writings we can think upon layer and upon layer of the clay of human desires shaping the societies in which we live. What dissolves the accumulated accretion of selfish thought? We know the answer to that, right? The Word of God. This is Baha'u'llah. It's not the object of every revelation to affect a transformation in the whole character of mankind a transformation that shall manifest itself both outwardly and inwardly that shall affect both its inner life and external conditions for if the character of mankind be not changed then the futility of God's universal manifestations would be apparent. Religion transforms the whole character of mankind into the inside of human beings the outside of social structures. It dissolves the hardened clay. Now I'm going to read you another quotation of Baha'u'llah and this time it's one that we're very familiar with but as I read it to you I want you to think about what it's saying about human agency about the process that Baha'u'llah is outlining for us of how injustice is overcome, okay? Justice in this day is bewailing its plight and equity growneth beneath the yoke of oppression the thick clouds of tyranny have darkened the face of the earth and enveloped its peoples through the movement of our pen of glory we have at the bidding of the omnipotent ordainer breathed a new life into every human frame filled a fresh word into every word of fresh potency wherefore fear ye, oh my beloved ones who is it that can dismay you a touch of moisture suffices to dissolve the hardened clay out of which this perverse generation is molded the creative energies of God's will for humanity take shape in new institutions and this is the characteristic of the age that we live in the formative age of the faith this is the time when the creative energies of the revelation are crystallizing into institutions that will realize God's intentions for humanity Hooper Dunbar's work, The Forces of Our Time is a brilliant exposition of this theme and I'm deeply indebted to that work in this talk okay, in the writings of the Bab as well as Baha'u'llah and Abdu'l-Baha, crystal is an image of purity and let's think about it in geological terms crystal forms when extremely strong pressure forces molecules into perfectly regular patterns so if we're going to have social structures whose characteristic is crystal social structures that are a crystallization of the intentions of Baha'u'llah what that implies to me are social institutions which have through the extreme pressure and we all know what the extreme pressures are social institutions which have through extreme pressure had the impurity of selfish motivations squeezed out of them so this is what we're going to look at today I thought there was another page here here it is no, wrong one, okay this is what we're going to look at today we're going to look at this in three examples we're going to look at political institutions looking at the history of political institutions in Uganda and think about their future we're going to look at economic institutions looking at the history of capitalism in Europe and think about its future and we're going to look at intellectual structures and how the intellectual structures of the western academic tradition affect us let's start with Uganda I really need this other piece of paper oh here it is no, sorry guys let's start with Uganda and let's imagine a person in a bus park in Uganda buses come into the central area everybody goes into the same all the buses come into one place and then you leave that place and you go up into the city so we've got this person who's going to work in the center of Kampala his clothes are beautifully well ironed his shoes are polished he's walking up from the bus park and he's thinking about the capacity of human beings to create well-being in the world this person in Uganda has got in the social institutions that he lives inside of certain kinds of institutional structure that is easy and other kinds of institutional structure that are going to impede his efforts to do that Uganda has a particularly interesting kind of local government which consists of nine member local councils elected in every village and section of a town in non-party elections one wonders one might want to ask the origin of this idea every person in the local council unit is asked to participate in consultations regular consultations of that unit and in these consultations community disputes are settled there's discussion of community local development projects and some kind of administrative stuff happens the LC system attracted lots of attention when it was established 15 years ago after the revolution and people put a lot of enthusiasm isn't it at the present time people's attention is focused more focused on other levels of the government but I just have to say it's a really interesting system right but in Uganda people are worried really worried about government at other levels the 15 year when this 15 year civil war ended about 15 years ago people in Uganda really aspired to create a society a government without corruption and in the present they feel that they haven't got it they feel although the government of Uganda is certainly less corrupt than the governments perhaps of certainly than the governments of neighboring states Ugandans talk a lot about the questions is their eating and eating means people in power taking resources of the state for themselves people in Uganda are also really concerned about sectarianism there are very sharp political divisions and there have been since the 19th century between ganda Catholics and ganda Protestants talk about imitation between northerners where there's much less economic development in northern Uganda and southerners where most of the economic development is basically every issue of government of the state gets processed through the lens of what's this going to do to the sectarian divides in the society who is going to benefit who's not going to benefit and Winnie Bianyanima a pretty outstanding Ugandan politician has observed this is Winnie speaking what I observe is that ethnicity is being used to provide platforms from which the amenities of modernity can be competed for it plays a perverse role she said in political development and then she said we politicians are sometimes promoting it for narrow self-interest people don't trust their government in Uganda they don't think that the government is acting in everyone's interest they think that the government is making decisions with a calculation of political advantage to the people who are in power which is actually something that's a characterization of government in a lot of places okay the burning burning question in Uganda politics at the present is should we have a multi-party system because what Uganda has and it's also interesting to ask where this came from what Uganda has is no party democracy where political parties are allowed to exist but the political parties can't place candidates to stand for election anybody who would be running in the United States but they're standing in Uganda and anyone who stands for an election has to stand as an individual there's this huge polarizing debate about whether this is conducive to justice and all of the donors all of the donors want Uganda to have political parties why? I asked a USAID official about this why? because we have political parties and they say that wouldn't political parties be a break on corruption and wouldn't political parties prevent power from being concentrated at the center now the NRM, the government of Uganda says no political parties could just be a machine for more corruption and they could polarize people to focus on the interests of some and not the interests of all and it just weighs it weighs on the populace now if we look at the history of Uganda of Uganda and I'm going to be talking partly about the Buganda Kingdom which is in southern Uganda which is what I have studied what we see is over say 500 years some aspects of government of the practice of power the practice of government which people were actually doing a lot better job of it a while ago than we're doing now I think if we look in the Baha'i Revelation or just in the Baha'i practice and also like if we look at the statements of the House of Justice about the nature of the relationship of leaders and people in the nation there's some things that emerge as elements of good government among many others I think one of them would be love and respect of rulers and people for each other the desire of rulers to be of service to their people and the desire of people to be of service to their nations good government also involves participation of every adult in society and clearly this includes voting voting is an important part of this good government also involves consultation seeking to achieve consensus now we're going to look at three moments in the history of Uganda basically when things got worse when selfish motivation got embodied in the structures of the state one of these happened in the 18th century when a series of ganda kings who had been ruling in a very interesting kind of understanding of reciprocal mutual obligation with the people of the country in the 18th century a series of kings began to at the end of sort of skirmishes little wars of interaction with their neighbors these kings began to bring back captive people and they tried to establish little mini-provinces of people who were not free who were solely the clients of the king this is great for the king because he was going to benefit entirely from the labor of these people but it utterly destabilized the society it led to about 150 years of war and the consequence of it was that the relationship of kings to people in the country was never the same again kings became absolute and they hadn't been absolute before here's another example Uganda lost the element the government officials, the element of good government the government officials have to be accountable to the people whom they are serving during the colonial period and this happened because part of the premise of imperial rule was colonies are supposed to pay for themselves which means there had to be taxation there had to be taxation to pay the salaries of colonial officers there had to be forced labor to build the houses and bring the firewood and the water and cook and all of the stuff that colonial officers needed this work especially the forced labor and people in Uganda did two to four to sometimes six months of forced labor in the years before 1920 and the consequence of this was that the social fabric like the cloth of the social fabric was eroded into it eroded away partly because if people are doing that much work which isn't the work to take care of their own lives they can't take care of their own lives some people excused themselves found ways to get out of it other people didn't and social class divisions emerged in the society that had never been there before but the thing that I was... what intended to tell you about this was not the emergence of social class but the transformation of the role of government officials because in Uganda a chief had had the same kind of relationship of mutual obligation with his followers but during the colonial period a chief had to get out the forced labor he had to make his people pay taxes if he didn't he lost his chiefship so governance the role of a chief changed from you're a chief if you take care of people and attract a lot of people to you you're a chief if you get the most work out of the people under you the nature of the institution of government it changed it's changed from then up to now the origin of that was an assertion of selfish thought it was the premise that of course colonial officers need to live comfortable, somewhat ostentatious lifestyles whatever the cost to the people they're ruling this concern among Ugandans now that government officials are corrupt is the same thing brought into the present it's the premise that the people who are rulers the government officials of the present need to live comfortable, somewhat ostentatious lifestyles whatever the cost to the people who are ruled pre-colonial chiefs showed their power through redistribution through feasts colonial officers and post-colonial rulers show their power by having fabulous wealth in comparison with the people who they rule it's an assertion of self it's also blind imitation that benefits some at the expense of others Uganda lost its practice of consultation which had been the characteristic of the government and in some of the documents that I use about the late 19th century there are these British officers trying to interact with Gandhi chiefs and universally they complain about how long the Gandhi can consult it's just such a burden for them to have to be a part of this consultation and they say, why can't the guy on top just tell people what to do the British just can't stand the consultation and of course what the British brought was a Westminster parliamentary democracy and the consequence of that was one small faction of chiefs managed to completely dominate the parliament for the next 40 years now in the 1920s sort of 20 years into this process of Westminster-style parliamentary rule which is not, you know it's not that there's not exchange but there's exchange where somebody always wins and the Gandhi found that a really problematic notion in governing that you would resolve conflict by having winners this is a statement that a group of Gandhi chiefs brought a case against the government and their case was this is not good government the way we did it was better this is part of their case the Gandhi chiefs were doing this new British kind of thing they upset everything and the results of that mistake caused the present ill feeling which exists among our people as a whole shattering also our country from its former foundation and destroying all our good customs of helping and loving each other thus putting us under a form of government which we can't understand now I don't want to say that the Gandhi government in the past was utopian and that's why I started with the example of Gandhi kings taking non-free pill and causing a 150 year civil war but the point is the kind of government that we want to have in the world we don't have anywhere and it's a really big waste of humanity's time and effort to imagine that everybody in the world has to follow the mistakes and go through the same learning path of some particular people in Europe so our Ugandan person headed for work well dressed well ironed clothes can't use his full human capacity to be a responsible engaged citizen because of a long heritage of selfish thought and blind imitation the way people remember kingship as domineering is a residue of selfish thought political corruption is self aggrandizing and imitating a colonial model political divisions between Catholics and Protestants in Uganda is blind imitation the replacement of consultation with elections and only elections is not really a step forward the pressure on Uganda to abandon its innovative no party system for European or US style party politics is a really arrogant attempt to get Uganda to imitate this is the hardened clay out of which this generation is molded and it's very very hard what would dissolve this hardened clay Abdul Baha urges people in power to have pure motives and selfless intentions think about the consequences for Uganda of this kind of thought the hardened clay would dissolve if Uganda's public figures could act on behalf of all the people not only on behalf of the people whose votes they expect to get the hardened clay would dissolve if public figures could be content with modest remuneration and not seek to benefit from their positions if Ugandans and donors could see their own well-being in the well-being of the whole and focus resources on the least developed regions of the country that would remove the source of sectarian tension Uganda, like other African states is imprisoned in social structures which are encrustations of selfishness some of the oppressive structures come from the period of European imperialism but others are older a consequence of the actions of Africans but even people who live inside these structures can create alternatives and act on them crystallizing the power that Baha'u'llah has released into the world okay, we're this far on our hike we can take a little rest I want to point out to you in the distance sort of the social theory mountains because this is a social theory talk there's Mount Talcott Parsons there's Mount Antonio Gramsci we're about to get to the history of capitalism so Max Weber is very close by but we don't have time to look at them if you want to look at that look at the footnotes of the paper okay, so now we're in North America let's imagine a person driving to work she's on her way to work her clothes are not actually ironed but she took them out of the dryer at just a right moment so they're not wrinkled and they look fine not ironed but fine this person on the way to work is thinking about nobility and dignity and the capacity of human beings to create well-being in the world she can't see the way that her productive capacity is limited and confined by layer over layer of selfish thought it seems inevitable and natural to her that her work is all about making a profit for her company the company that she works for and that her enthusiasm and energy for her home, her recreation and her social life it doesn't seem unjust or perverse to her that she slots her efforts to be of service to humanity and to grow as a spiritual being into her spare time after work it's not a problem to her that she and her immediate family are entirely reliant on each other for their emotional, social and physical needs she doesn't feel oppressed by the constant stream of messages that tell her what to buy and when and why in fact, as she's driving to work meditating on nobility she passes them all and then she begins to think of the things that she has to go and buy this weekend because she knows they're going to be on sale right now she may not know it but she's a victim of the creation of capitalism in order to understand the oppressive dimensions of a capitalist economy it's essential to keep in mind the distinction which is made in the Baha'i Revelation between new technology which emerged in the 19th century and what humanity has done with those technological capacities Baha'u'llah made it very clear that the new capacities of humanity were the consequence of his revelation and in the sentence I'm going to read you that his knowledge is a capital H his and a capital K knowledge okay this is Baha'u'llah such material means as are now manifest have been achieved by virtue of his knowledge technology has made distance meaningless and technology could make want meaningless by which I mean to say we have the technological capacity to produce the goods to provide for the material needs of all of humanity this capacity exists what we're doing with it is the problem Baha'u'llah condemns how those capacities have been used saying that the excessive civilization that same that excessive civilization would be a source of evil and that his faith would be necessary to purge to purge the deeply rooted and overwhelming corruptions of the civilization of the West which have agitated and alarmist the peoples of the world now the people in that place may not feel very agitated we may not feel alarmed we may feel that that state of excessive civilization where it becomes a bad thing hasn't been reached yet and what we've got is okay but some future amount of it would be a bad thing so it's helpful to us to have Shoghi Effendi's diagnosis of the condition of the world and he tells us about the evil consequence of the capitalist system that's Shoghi Effendi the evil consequence of the capitalist system and this is what it is the crass materialism which lays excessive and ever increasing emphasis on material well-being forgetful of those things of the spirit which are the only stable and sure foundation for society now there's two parts of this and I want us to pay attention to both parts of it we're sort of more familiar with materialism it's bad it's an excessive an excessive increasing emphasis on material well-being but let's look at the causality here what does that cause it causes forgetfulness of those things of the spirit which are the only stable foundation of society so if we want to understand the consequences the evil consequences of capitalism what we have to look at is what we've forgotten the things of the spirit which are actually the foundation of society and a couple pages later Shoghi Effendi this is from the Citadel of Faith he gives a description of the characteristics of people engulfed in materialism spiritual faculties are paralyzed by apathy and lethargy outlook is darkened by animosities and prejudices time is filled by pleasures and dissipations minds are distracted by fears and anxieties and souls are enshrouded souls are enshrouded by attachment to worldly things I want us to think about how this perverse diminished condition for humanity came into being I want us to pay attention to human agency to the consequences of human actions in the creation of this condition the structures of industrial capitalism which we take for granted which appear to be natural just like the boundaries of nation states are the creation of people who like despots and conquerors sought to attain dominion over mankind now we're going to do this it's going to be painless it's going to be quick the history of capitalism in three moments the first one maybe a painless quick history of capitalism needs some water a transformation in how people use natural resources in northern Europe is a crucial part of the beginning of capitalism patterns of land use that involved many different people using the same land in complex ways changed to a pattern of land use in which one person was the soul owner soul controller and basically the sole user of that land for example the Duchess of Sutherland in about 1815 claimed ownership of 800,000 acres of land she evicted 15,000 people by burning their homes and villages she needed the police to help her do it and she replaced them with 131,000 sheep this was great for the Duchess of Sutherland she and a whole lot of other people who engaged in enclosure got very very very much richer from doing it and the people who lost their access to productive resources they lost their land, they lost their animals they lost their capacity to create material well-being for themselves got very very very much poorer we have to understand enclosure as an assertion of self-interest what else was that if it wasn't an assertion of self-interest its structural consequences have been profound these regions never regained their capacity to create prosperity for large numbers of people and it could be argued that the extremes of wealth and poverty that enclosure created have never gone away they've endured in various manifestations up to the present but that's not all that happened the further establishment of extremes of wealth and poverty and the complete rewriting of human use of the environment what also happened is that practices of community solidarity disappeared when most people lost all of their resources except for their own labor and wealth became more concentrated relationships between people which had in the past had social and economic dimensions came to be solely economic this is called commodification and what it means is that the aspects of life which have many kinds of value begin to have only a monetary value for example, groups of people worked in turn on each other's lands and they also had common lands which they worked that land together now this labor produced crops there were material things that people got out of this cooperative work but that cooperative work also produced community what happened with the transformation of ownership and that's the beginning of capitalism is we lost the way that people work in community produced community through labor and we've never gotten it back that was part one two the way we industrialized and the way cities grew in order to accommodate workers intensified the destruction of social networks and the transition to an insistently individualistic organization of society we could have done it differently in the mid-19th century we had these new tools these new engines these new industrial capacities we could have created industrial production with a sharing of profits between workers and owners so that the new kind of production wove a more solid social fabric instead of ripping it apart we could have created working conditions for the new workers that allowed them to maintain relationships of mutual support and forms of community solidarity instead of grinding cooperative social practices into nothing the technology would have worked just as well that way but that's not what we did we created forms of industrial production in which all the profits went to owners and workers were barely able to stay alive as they worked this was an assertion of self-interest subsequent generations have imitated it in its essentials even though we've ameliorated some of its excesses what are the consequences? rigid extremes of wealth and poverty our acceptance of the idea that work doesn't have to be meaningful and our love affair with individualism there's a strong intellectual current in our culture that says the assertion of individual choice over community obligation is the best thing that ever happened to humanity I'm serious an economic system which includes a premise of social obligation is called what? it's called a primitive economy oh no it can't be 15 minutes okay an economic system which is in which only individual choice is in theory the determinant of economic action is a modern economic system and I could talk about choice and how we use choice in this but I won't just to say there are lots of things we don't have a choice about in the United States we can't choose to have a healthcare system in which healthcare is a right of citizenship which is what Abdul Baha implies it would be we can't choose to live in communities where everyone takes care of everyone else because that takes a real community with active productive relationships which we don't have anymore the point is our commitment to a deluded destructive pernicious individualism has a history and that history is of self-interest of some people seeking dominion over others I also have a section here about the history of consumerism the issue this is the third point that what do we do with all of this productive capacity if everybody has clothing how is the clothing factory going to still be productive and the solution that we arrived at was to convince people that they need to own more everything about our productive system insists that greater consumption drives an economy and that that's a good thing but it's not, it's pernicious and destructive it enshrouds our dead and souls the organization of the laws, structures and habits of our society its information, its forms of information, its built environment all perpetuate this delusion, this fabrication that we are bundles of desires that have to be met through consumption its form of self-interest and imitation it benefits a few it's a hardened, hardened clay out of which this perverse generation is molded so the solution to this which I'm trying to cut down and it's very hard for me because I love this idea is, I'll try to say it in a sentence we have in the Baha'i Writings this notion Abdul Baha says the essence of economic question conditions are divine in nature and associated with a world of the heart and spirit so we can also like the spiritual solution to the economic problem really fast right, but what does it mean? what it means is that all economic relationships are social relationships and although we live in a society that says you can have economic productivity that has negative social consequences and it's still a good thing that's wrong from a Baha'i understanding there is no economic an action is not productive if it doesn't produce positive social relations so economic activity always has social consequences and productive economic activity is only economic activity that has productive social consequences and that is why Abdul Baha looked at western civilization and said well it's beautiful but it's a corpse because it doesn't have positive doesn't produce the social consequences you can't have good production with negative social consequences and what we need to do then is to manifest love in all of our economic activity this is what Abdul Baha says he says manifest true economics to the people show what love is, what kindness is what true severance is and generosity we manifest true economics by making sure that any economic interaction has positive consequences for every party involved in it now people sometimes portray a Baha'i economy as the one that we've got with people being more generous but I think the implications of this are far more profound and let's just look through it a little bit a deliberate systematic insistence on interactions characterized by love severance and generosity would change the way human beings think about ourselves because the tension to love in our productive lives would make us aware that happiness does not come from owning things or satisfying our desires it would change the way the structure of wealth inside the nation inside cities and around the world a deliberate and systematic insistence on economic interactions characterized by love severance and generosity would restructure the geographical organization of economic activity because productive units that build positive social relationships would probably happen more fundamentally inside of regions rather than on a global scale it would require a change in the structure of ownership because you couldn't be a stockholder if you didn't know whether the people whose work you were benefiting from were being treated well it would change the forms of industrial production because the goal would have to include drawing out the intelligence and capacity of workers instead of seeking to replace workers with machines we would have to redefine the measures of economic success because people seeking to show love severance and generosity might decide that efficiency is an empty goal striving to show love, generosity and severance in economic activity would probably lead us to producing less of higher quality now people who's going to do this? in whom did Baha'u'llah bestow this capacity? who has a new life breathed into their human frames this transition from institutions which are violently destructive into institutions which are empowering and healing it's not going to happen because we believe in the oneness of humanity it's going to happen because of deliberate actions that we take to implement Baha'u'llah's intentions and he didn't say do that later in fact every time we pay hukukalah we're systematically dismantling materialism and I think it's inherent in the House of Justice statements about this plan that we move from making sure that the faith is in a region to interacting with the institutional structures in that region justice in this day be wailing its plight an equity growneth beneath the yoke of oppression wherefore fear ye, oh my beloved ones who is it that can dismay you a touch of moisture suffices to dissolve the hardened clay out of which this perverse generation is molded okay intellectual structures in the west 300 years of them, what have we got, seven minutes? five? oh no problem okay the essence of our oppression in the house of ideas that we inhabit is that we inhabit a house of ideas that is functionally atheist it's partly functionally atheist because of the enlightenment which was dark and said human beings are the center of everything God's on the side but even more than that or in addition to that we live in a world of functional atheism because religion itself is materialistic and to see that look at Abdu'l-Baha's statements about the materialism the tragic materialism of a practice of religion which happens in churches and temples he says that's not religion what would be religion would be to recognize and utilize the power of God to work through human beings to illuminate and transform every aspect of reality right? that we do not understand this that we do not think about religion as the power of God to work through human beings to create justice is the essence of oppression Bahá'u'lláh says this it's in the Katab'í Gan and I would like to sort of work through that whole quotation but I don't think we have time just a little bit he says although the fingers of divine power have unlocked the portals of the knowledge of God the leaders of people who busy themselves with selfish calculation maintain that the doors of knowledge are closed now we can think of that and think of the divines of Iran telling people that Bahá'u'lláh was not a messenger of God or we can think of it and think of political leaders in the present telling people that their party or their actions or voting for them is the one way that things are going to get better they're engaged in selfish calculation and their Bahá'u'lláh says their voracious beast praying on the carrion of the souls of men or what about leaders of thought who say the world of the future is the same as the world of the past we've got what we've got and that's it it's selfish calculation it's voracious beast praying on the carrion of the souls of men what about advertisers who tell people that they are their bodies or they are their possessions they're acting in self interest they're voracious beast praying on the carrion of the souls of men Bahá'u'lláh asks what oppression is more grievous than this than that a soul seeking the truth and wishing to attain unto the knowledge of God should know not where to go for it and from whom to seek it we are oppressed because we do not know reality and doesn't this sound like us this is Abdul Bahá'u'lláh like our society for the helpless masses know nothing of the world and while there is no doubt that they seek and long for their own happiness yet ignorance like a heavy veil shuts them away from it it is us and what are we going to do about it the thing about it a structure of thought it's like the house of ideas is that when you live in your house you know where things are you know so you can walk through your house and you can turn on the lights in the dark because you know exactly where the light switch is and a house of ideas is like that you don't have to look at where the walls are because you know and the problem in the present is that Bahá'u'lláh has moved the walls of the house but we still think we know where the light switch is and it takes a lot of courage to move out past where we thought the wall was it takes a lot of courage because people may not understand us and we may try to speak inside of their understanding it also takes a lot of courage because you know like me I might get fired if I ever said to people in my profession that I thought that God was acting in the world so the issue is how are we going to free ourselves and our own understanding of the relation from these oppressive structures of functional atheism I wanted before I talk about how we free ourselves we may not get to freeing ourselves but let's just look I just want to show you how we do this this is a diagnostic tool look at where how we speak about the revelation and whether we ourselves leave out human agency because if we leave out human agency we're complying with a functional atheism that says here's the world of man and there's the world of God what if we say we believe in the equality of the sexes great but where's the human agency the power that God has instilled into human beings what about we believe in the equality of the sexes and we're confident that our love of God and our devotion to justice will enable us to overcome oppressive habits of thought and action and allow us to create new patterns new equitable patterns for our personal lives and the life of society or here's the other way to do this take the one liners of Baha'u'llah you know the great top five one sentence quotations of Baha'u'llah and look at the sentence before or the sentence after the earth is but one country and mankind is citizens but what did he say in the sentence before that in the sentence before that he says it's the obligation of human beings to be responsible for their brothers one more you are the fruits of one tree and the leaves of one branch but what did he say in the sentence before that he said we cherish the hope that the light of justice may shine upon the world and sanctify it from tyranny now it's our responsibility that we know one very well and the other is unfamiliar to us I want to close I want to close with Baha'u'llah's like foremost clearest statement to us about justice and as I read it to you I want to think I want us to think about what it says to us about imitation about our obligations and about the gift that Baha'u'llah gives us if we pursue it O Son of Spirit the best beloved of all things in my sight is justice turn not away therefrom if thou desirest me and neglect it not that I may confide in thee by its aid thou shalt see with thine own eyes and not through the eyes of others and shalt know of thine own knowledge and not through the knowledge of thy neighbor ponder this in thy heart how it behooveeth thee to be verily justice is my gift to thee and the sign of my loving kindness set it then before thine eyes