Transcript:Ruhiyyih Khanum/Freedom
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[0:00] You know, I want to talk about freedom. You know to my great surprise, people do not know that liberty and freedom are synonyms. You take the Gleanings and go back to the index and look up everything that Bahá’u’lláh has said about liberty, and just put the word freedom in, and you'll have it right. There's no two words in Persian, there's only freedom. But liberty is a more literary term, and the Guardian writing such beautiful English put liberty because of its literary character, and it means freedom. I just like to read you some of his passages on this subject, they're the most telling anyway. He says, "We find some men desiring liberty and priding themselves therein. Such men are in the depths of ignorance. Liberty must, in the end, lead to sedition whose flames none can quench. Liberty causes man to overstep the bounds of propriety and to infringe on the dignity of his station. It debaseth him to the level of extreme depravity and wickedness. The liberty that profiteth you is to be found nowhere except in complete servitude to God". Thomas à Kempis, the great Christian mystic put it very beautifully, he said: "For the strict way of thy commandments is the only perfect law of liberty", so beautiful.
[2:01] Bahá’u’lláh says: "True liberty consisteth in man’s submission unto My commandments. Were men to observe that which We have sent down unto them from the Heaven of Revelation, they would, of a certainty, attain unto perfect liberty." And this freedom, I'm going to use the word freedom now, this freedom that we have in the world today, this permissive society is shaking the planet to bits. It's shaking it to bits, politically. It's shaking the way it's banded around in some countries nationally. It's shaking it to bits economically in many ways. It is shaking it to bits morally, because there is nothing that is not barred in the name of liberty, and you people who live in the United States, you ought to know what's going on in the name of freedom because of not being able to hold anything back because of what's written in the American Constitution. You can have an ocean of filth pouring, wave upon wave, over the children and the youth and the adults of these countries of the West, particularly the United States, because they can't handle the clause in the American Constitution to do with freedom. And of course, that's not what the founding fathers had in mind at all and everybody knows this is a long subject, but the point is that this kind of freedom is [???] to the Bahá’ís. We do not believe in that kind of freedom. And I think that the Bahá’ís are very remiss in their understanding of freedom. They go on banding it around. We have to be free. I have to do my thing. The children have to be free. Why should the children be free? Look at the generations that come along outside of the Bahá’í faith that has been free, and take a good look at it. It's awful. That's what freedom leads to. The Master said that you have to prune the tree, you have to cultivate it. You have to cut it back forcibly. Then you will get the fruits otherwise you won't. And I think that we Bahá’ís have got to be on our guard against this perfectly ridiculous concept in the world today that freedom is right in itself. It is all wrong according to Bahá’u’lláh, obedience to the cause, yes.
