Aliens and Religion, Part 12 - The Bab Faiths
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Religion and Aliens
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This post is a special in the series of objective, non-judgement views of various religions’ views on the potential of extraterrestrial life. See the previous posts on Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Protestantism and Other Christian Faiths, Islam Judaism, the Dharma faiths, the ancient faiths, Theozoology and World Ice Theory, Native American religions, the Twentieth Century faiths of Nation of Islam, Scientology, & Falun Gong, and Outside Mainstream Catholicism for more. Additionally, check out my look at the “Aliens are Demons” argument and my podcast interview on that subject.
The Faiths of the Bab
In the 1840s, Iranian Shia Muslim Siyyid Ali Muhammad Shirazi started a series of writings that were compiled into what became known as the Bayan. These writings established a millenarian movement that taught all religions had truth in them, and that God would soon bring a prophet that would usher in a golden age. This prophet was referred to as He Whom God Shall Make Manifest. The new religious movement became known as Babism, named after Shirazi as he took on the title the Bab.
Persian authorities executed the Bab for heresy in 1850. Before he died, the Bab appointed Subh-i-Azal as his successor. Subh-i-Azal kept the faith centered on the Bab’s teachings and awaited the coming prophet. Meanwhile, one of Bab’s earliest followers, Mirza Hussein Ali Nuri, claimed to have a revelation from God that revealed he was the promised prophet. Renamed Bahaullah, he split from Sub-i-Azal and gathered most Babists to his side. Bahaullah then embraced progressive revelation stating that Buddha, Jesus, Muhmmad, and the Bab were prophets of the same God. He further claimed to receive more and more teachings from God. Follows of Bahaullah established the Bahai faith.
Today there are about eight million Bahais. Meanwhile, there are only about 2,000 traditional Babists left.
Note: Babists are sometimes called Azalis to distinguish them from the original, pre-Bahuallah Babists.
Babism: Silent About Aliens
The holy book Bayan focuses on spirituality, the End Times, the replacing of Islamic laws, praising various religion’s prophets for giving bits of truth throughout history, and preparation for the great prophet to come. There are no teachings in the Bayan or the Bab’s writings addressing the possibility of extraterrestrial beings. No modern day Babist writings that I have seen address the question of alien life.
Bahai Faith: Aliens Do Exist, and God Has Reached Out to Them
The Bahai faith explicitly affirms the existence of life on other planets, viewing the universe as infinite and filled with diverse creations of God. Bahaullah himself stated, “Know thou that every fixed star hath its own planets, and every planet its own creatures, whose number no man can compute.”
Bahaullah’s son and appointed interpreter Abdul Baha said, “The earth has its inhabitants, the water and the air contain many living beings… then how is it possible to conceive that these stupendous stellar bodies are not inhabited? Verily, they are peopled, but let it be known that the dwellers accord with the elements of their respective spheres.”
Bahaullah went further saying that divine revelation had spread throughout the worlds. He said, “Through His potency the Trees of Divine Revelation have yielded their fruits, every one of which hath been sent down in the form of a Prophet, bearing a Message to God's creatures in each of the worlds whose number God, alone, in His all-encompassing knowledge, can reckon.” Great-grandson of Bahaullah and guardian of the faith Shoghi Effendi stated that the next great manifest of God (prophet) could have a scope that would be interplanetary.
As for UFO aliens, the Bahai faith takes a wait and see, scientific approach. In 1992, the Universal House of Justice, the supreme ruling body of the Bahai faith, wrote, “Regarding the attitude Bahais should take toward unidentified flying objects, the House of Justice points out that they fall in the category of subjects open to scientific investigation, and as such, may be of interest to some, but not necessarily to everyone. In any case, Bahais have a fundamental obligation at this stage of the development of the earth's people, that is, the responsibility of spreading the unifying Message of Bahaullah.”
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Until Next Time
Special edition next week when I interview Sara Light-Waller about the Pulp Science Fiction era. Then, in two weeks, I will interview Eric Sammons and provide a review of his new book, Shard of Eden.
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Savannah Paranormal Detective Agency 2: Chapter Five & Epilogue
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Extraterrestrial beings were a scientific and spiritual concept in 18th century Europe and the Baha'i Faith is very clearly a reaction to religious modernity in the West. I didn't see a volume of Emanuel Swedenborg's works at the Archive in Haifa, but the term "fixed star" is all over western esoteric works of the 19C. Stars are not actually fixed, of course. Their apparent lack of motion differentiated them from planets, whose motion was accounted as astrology. There are other early modern proto-scientific misunderstandings in the writings of Baha'u'llah. (That's his symbol, BTW, it's not the symbol for God, it's his name in Arabic). He also writes of metals transmuting underground, which was a theory of elemental formation abandoned later on. You find this sort of stuff all over the literature of moderns trying to harmonize science with religion, which is a stated tenet of the Baha'i Faith.