User talk:Cunado19/archive2

Zarathushtra

¡Hola Viking! I came across you in Islam and Bahá'í pages. Wow, I didn't realize you made the mosque icon. Anyway, my goal is to do for Zoroastrianism what you are doing for Bahá'í. I know that Zarathushtra is a Messenger in the Bahá'í Faith, but can never find much more than that. I have a few Holy Books left on my list to read and unfortunately the Kitáb-i Aqdas is one of them, let alone the rest of Bahái'í's scriptures. I was perusing over the online versions at bahai.org and saw tons of Qur'ānic and what He would have referred to as انجيل verses, but little else. I can't imagine Zarathushtra being added if the religion weren't started in Iran. Although words that did strike me were "...to make of my prayer a fire..." but probably just me attaching significance to a coincidence. I would be interested in writing a little on Zarathushtra in Bahá'í but I've never found anything explicit. Though when I was skimming I saw that the Bahá'í's attitudes to earthly pleasures are similar, except that Zoroastrians extend the moderation principle to alcohol as well. I saw the life-affirming spirit in any case. Sorry if I've inadvertently blasphemed or anything, although for the record my one criticism about Bahá'í is the Stasi Covenant Breaker thing. And anyone reading please do waste your time looking me up, I'm not Bahá'í - I feel its safer that way! Okay now that I have offended you I should shut my trap, but say that on my list of religions, Bahá'í really is up there in my opinion. And btw, I too want to visit the Ka'abah, just don't know if I can get away with it. Khirad^talk

---

Yes, after I first wrote you I realized my own error, but I just wanted to make sure nonetheless. And no, I would never want to divert you from your own expertise and passion ;-) ! You're doin' your thing. I was just asking for your expertise on this topic. I think that sometimes Báhá'í is mistakenly referred to as "syncretic" like Sikhism, but, like in my book on world religions it is listed as a movement under Islam (after the Twelvers, and such), much as Islam was to Christianity and so on (as the WP article also points out of course). I feel embarrassed as I did understand the basic tenents, but my curious zeal got the better of me! I was wondering if it was known how he chose the seven religions, forgetting that these things were probably divinely revealed to him - I think. I suppose it is representative more of the tolerant teachings of Baha'u'llah, for this age (and so on), but he was himself continuing the Abrahamic line and was not creating a syncretic religion (again, I think). In any case I just wanted to make sure as I'll add that he is considered a messenger to the Zoroaster page and link to the Bahá'í page proper. And yup, the three Magi (though that is its own contentious subject, the details of which I shan't bother you with)! Thanks for spending the time to clear up my questions. The fact about Zoroastrianism being little known is a blessing and a curse - though they are well known in India. I can write what I want without argument, but OTOH there's no real community. Just some perspective to think about if you ever get frustrated with others! Anyway thank you for hopefully understanding my 'doh!' moment(s).

I might be interested in learning more, but on the other hand I wouldn't want to feel guilty and deceitful by giving an impression I was sincerely thinking about converting (though I always keep an open mind). I've also accepted Jesus and recited the Shahada and felt weird about it later (darn that conscience). I also once met a Bahá'í in High School and he didn't really appreciate all my (comparative religion oriented) questions, and though I thought I had been respectful, I ended up feeling rude, especially as he was really nice. I just wouldn't want to offend anyone :-) Khirad^talk 04:00, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Thank you

Thank you for your enthusiastic contributions to the Bahá'í pages. I appreciate them very much, and they reflect your obvious concern for the subjects and their presentation. They are that much the better for your hard work. MARussellPESE 20:13, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

Jeff???

Yup, when I first started on wikipedia, there was a lot of attacks on the faith, and I felt that using my real name as my login was not very wise. Send my regards to Riaz and Shavak. -- Jeff3000 18:56, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

Some Random Acknowledgements

I wanted to thank you for your hard work and concern for the Bahá'í pages. You do the work of many hands. Much more needs to be done and I wish I were in a position to help as much as you and Jeff3000 and some others. Thank you. And I thought it was really commendable that you invited others to join a discussion even if they might not be on your side. That was cool.

Now I'd like to discuss your lifetime goals. I can understand jumping out of China or going to an airplane, Hugging an Orangutan (even though he could crush you like a boa constrictor... when you hug him you should probably make sure he doesn't think you're after his girlfriend) or visiting the Kaaba (I hope you're so lucky), but what I don't understand is if you were "sitting under a tree, when the temperature is just right, with a cool breeze on a hot day, where all I can hear is the wind in the trees, the birds in the air, and the sound of water flowing down a stream nearby" then why would you want to read a book? What book could possibly enhance such an experience? Perhaps one by Li Bai? but that would be like finding a painting of a moon ,going outside on a clear night, holding the painting up in front of the moon while thinking 'this is beautiful.'

Take Care. LambaJan 02:02, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Oh and that first joke is meant to compare China to an airplane because it's taking-off, not to imply that one would want to jump out. Rather, it seems like a great place to be.

Hello

Hi Cunado19. We have met before at the Islam template discussion. Just wondering, would you be interested in voting on my rfa? --a.n.o.n.y.m ^t 02:31, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Mahdi

What is strange about the picture? The person is a follower of Mahdi (and according to the original caption, supposed to be typical of a follower of Mahdi), so it makes sense to add it to the Mahdi article. You can't just delete it because you think it's strange. Please provide some reason why you don't like it. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-11-1 18:21

Vandalism

You've been quite vigilant on the Bahá'í divisions page. An anonymous user's been trying to re-write the BUPC section without sourcing. (They also seemed to spew a bunch of wild criticisms on the Bahá'í faith page. Jeff3000 took care of those in detail.) Thank you for rolling back the Bahá'í'divisions edits.

You are referring to these edits as vandalism when you revert. I don't think that these edits qualify, and I think that you might be picking a fight where we don't need to. It's probably provacative and possibly comes across as intemperate. We should assume the editor is making good faith edits, but isn't citing sources for them. Rather than calling these vandalism, we'd be on firmer and higher ground to revert the edits as un-sourced.

Nice source on Jensen's numerous failed doomsday prophecies. That does add a lot to that section. MARussellPESE 14:14, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

Can you help me?

Certain Hindus keep editing and changing the Muhammad bin Qasim article. They keep putting information I know to be factually untrue into the article and also information that is anti-semitic and Islamophobic in nature. Also on the talk page I have provided all my references, the sources where I have got the information about Bin-Qasim. Now the thing is one of the persons if making personal insults. If you check the history-page of the article. Can you keep an eye on this article or can you make it so that people can't edit it for a while? Also could you help me out with formatting the article? and aligning the image? - Any help would be welcomed.

--Street Scholar 00:12, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

Jeffmichaud

Howdy, and thank you for the warm welcome to the exciting world of editing Wikipedia. I hope to one day grow up and be a "legitimate account" like yourself. I'd like to apologize if I've appeared to be trying to "fool anyone". I could see how it might appear that having originally signed up under an anonymous title might be construed that way. It was only after the advice of our beloved Guardian that I decided to use my real identity. Rest assured my intentions in all my actions and words are to serve God's Will only, as I'm sure are yours! Thank you so much for your for your help in Wikifying the Leland Jensen page. I've been having the darndest time figuring all these codes out. I'm sure I'll get the hang of it. I'll continue to serve God in my own way, as I'm sure you will too. Keep up the good work:) Allah'u'Abha [Unsigned by User:Jeffmichaud]

Baha'i Faith wikinews

Hi Cunado19,

I've been reading your comments and it seems you're quite experienced on the Baha'i Faith wikipages so I wondered if I could trouble you for some advice.

I've been running an egroup - www.yahoogroups.com/BahaiMonitor - for a few months now but its run out of steam and I've thought about transferring it to wikinews. I've seen a good example of the one someone's done for Quakers and I'd like to do similar.

The kind of news stories would be:

a) As with BahaiMonitor - major media writes a story about the Baha'i Faith (e.g. The Scotsman article about the new Baha'i Centre)

b) Original reporting of internal Baha'i news - e.g. results of NSA elections, consultation at National Conventions etc.

I wondered with your experience, do you think:

1) this would be encouraged by the wikinews community? 2) there would be much help from other online collaborators? 3) there would be much interest from readers? 4) the project would be welcomed by the wider Baha'i community, particularly the institutions?

Any guidance you could give would be great beause I haven't decided yet whether or not to go along with it.

AndrewRT 19:47, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

Yes, I did

I sent you to Wikiquette alerts because you unilaterally removed items from the Bahá'í_Faith and Science article that you disagreed with, despite the fact that these had active support on the talk page.

I'd point out that your current proposed re-write on the science page is the very first time you actually tried to contribute a re-write to that article on the talk page rather than unilaterally editing the article itself. Unfortunately you seem to edit first and ask questions later on a lot of pages. That's not the wiki way (at least as I understand it to be), does not make for a good article, and does not get differences of opinion closed.

Your tangling with Jeffmichaud on the Bahá'í divisions page is another example. You'll never manage to get that in-hand as long as you both merely edit over each other. Geni's advice on how to win an edit war is very good material.

You've been very enthusiastic all over Wikipedia. You've made good contributions. But if you were to slow down, carefully analyze your and others contributions, and spend some more time talking things over before editing, you'd be much more effective and wikipedia would be that much the better. Sorry, son, I doubt I could make that sound more patronizing; but I'm twenty years your senior, and I've made more spectacular messes for myself doing just that than I can remember. MARussellPESE 05:12, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

BUPC Material/Leland Jensen

These articles were originally cut and pasted for the most part right out of bahai-library.org's baha'i divisions page. They scarcely reflected the actual beliefs of the BUPC. They can barely be considered historically accurate. They are certainly one sided, leaving out critically important facts to arrive at a semblance of the truth. The notion that pasting word for word from the bahai-library is NPOV is laughable. ROFLOL! If the BUPC is an "enemy" of the Baha'i World Faith as they claim, then how can the BWF library be considered as the end-all-source for information on the group. It is editorially irresponsible. I've repeatedly tried to edit changes back and forth with editors (whose sole source of information on the BUPC seem to come from within thier own Haifan propaganda machine) who have no first hand knowledge of the BUPC's actual beliefs. Unfortunately they have been sorely misled to facts. If any edits that I make are in error than I would certainly welcome the changes. I've never been re-edited for factual errors, but rather had edits reverted to old unfactual half-truths about the BUPC and Dr. Jensen. Thus far every revert to changes I make are editorially baseless. My edits are apparently threatening in some way to the dominate paradigm of belief about the BUPC and Dr. Jensen, which is obviously wrought with error. I challenge anyone to prove me wrong on any of this. ~Jeff

Just a couple of words

Hi Cunado - Sorry I didn't get around to responding to the comment you left on my user page a few months ago - seems like you worked out how to archive for yourself anyway. I went away on holiday and seem not to have been around much since then.

I love the way your user page makes the implicit suggestion that your becoming active on the Baha'i pages was just what we were all waiting for to make them so much better! Brilliant.

Regarding your comment of what's going on with Baha'u'llah's picture, what has struck me about that situation is that when an editor (usually not logged in) removes the picture, more often than not it is one of the Baha'is who have that page on the watchlist that restores it, despite the fact that they personally might prefer the picture not to be there - and this is even though it got there as a result of a bad-faith campaign by Martin2000. To me, this is an example of the *success* of wikipedia in building consensus between people editing articles in good faith. PaulHammond 09:15, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

A further comment

Checking out your archive, I notice that version 1.0 of your comment on prolific editing fell foul of someone with a sense of humour deficit! PaulHammond 09:23, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

Aw! shame you changed it. I really did like it. I suppose the trouble is sometimes people don't understand when you're joking with irony like that! btw - I'm not *just* back from vacation - I was on holiday in August - but I seem not to have checked into wiki for quite a while since then... PaulHammond 19:47, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

Covenant Breaking

As it is clearly stated in the Will and Testament, only the Guardian of the Faith has the authority to declare a believer a Covenant Breaker. This is the most serious charge imaginable to a believer, and is never issued lightly. As no Guardian of the Faith ever declared Dr. Jensen a Covenant Breaker before or after his death, it is erroneous to ever state that Dr. Jensen has this stigma in the after-life. Moreover it is irrelevant whether other believers or even institutions "consider" him to be one or not, as they are just opinions and not actually sanctions conforming to the Sacred Will and Testament which is the charter for all institutions governing the Faith. User:Jeffmichaud

Patently not true. The Universal House of Justice indeed has that authority. It was instituted by Bahá'u'lláh, properly elected per the Guardian's instructions at the close of the Ten-Year Crusage, and explicitly identified as the authoritative body on matters not found in the holy books — including determining who is, or is not, a Covenant breaker. 'Abdu'l-Bahá, Himself, is absolutely clear regarding the authority of the House of Justice in the very Will and Testament these people are so fond of selectively quoting:

And now, concerning the House of Justice which God hath ordained as the source of all good and freed from all error, ... By this House is meant the Universal House of Justice, ... It enacteth all ordinances and regulations that are not to be found in the explicit Holy Text.

('Abdu'l-Bahá, The Will and Testament, p. 14)

MARussellPESE 16:04, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

All conjecture and debatable. The Master's Words you quote are in my opinion not relevant in this case, for it all hinges on your fantasy that the sans-Guardian UHJ was established according to the Provisions of His Will, which I don't believe to be the case. Another flaw in this thinking is that it was "properly elected per the Guardian's instructions", for this is patently not true. The fIBC was to "efflouresce" through four stages: IBC, World Court, Supreme Tribunal (1st elected stage), and finally the UHJ. I'm not even getting into the whole Guardian, Twin Pillars thing. Your statements, though impressively crafted, are patently flawed. User:Jeffmichaud

Bahá'í Faith and science

I think we ought to take a break over there to give you some time to focus on Bahá'í divisions & Davidic line. It's not fair to you to have to be carrying on two discussions at the same time. I'd rather you have the opportunity to be at your best in both places. MARussellPESE 15:12, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

User:Jeff3000

Vandalism of others' user pages is a rather bad idea, so please don't do it again. Thanks in advance, Kirill Lokshin 23:46, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

Ah, my apologies if I misunderstood that; redirecting someone's user page is pretty standard vandalism. As for how I caught it: CDVF will flag such edits. Kirill Lokshin 23:53, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

Wikinews link

I notice that you've deleted the wikinews link on the Baha'i Faith template. Can you explain why this was?

This doesn't seem to comply with the wikipedia policy on good faith edits. AndrewRT 00:02, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

Haley Paige

Do you really want to put Haley Paige in the Baha'i Individuals category. She's a porn actress, and the web-links where she claims to be a Baha'i indicate that she thinks it is a middle-eastern cult. I would remove it, but the the guy who looks after the page, would put it back if I took it off. I don't think he would mind you taking it off, since you put it on. -- Jeff3000 02:23, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

Bahá'í Userbox

I've created a Bahá'í userbox, which you can put on your user page by adding the following: -- Jeff3000 04:30, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

 {{user religion|bahá'í}}

Capitalization

Hi, we talked a bit about this a half year ago and I just randomly came upon a reference in the wiki style manual while I was looking for something completely unrelated. But, nevertheless, thought you may be interested. [[1]] LambaJan 19:41, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

Divisions of Islam

Hi . Regarding [2] & [3], I had to change denominations with branches because Sufism isnt seen as a denomination or a sect in Islam . Secondly , Qadiriyyah isnt a kalam school , its a sufi school ,like a lot of other sufi schools/orders . A kalam school with approximately the same name existed in distant past , but it was pronounced as Q'drya ( while sufi school is called Qaadryya ) . So these are very different things . Cheers . F.a.y.^{تبادله خيال /c} 20:34, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Hello. I restored the portionst that you edited out of the Druze and Yezidi portions of Divisions of Islam. Not sure why you removed them. Nygdan 1-18-2006

Nosairi

Hello. What should I do to "cleanup" that article? Nygdan 1-19-2006

You are an administrator right? There was a discsusion about my entry on nosairii and I agree that there is already an entry under Alawite, see here. Not sure if this is the proper procedure. Nygdan

Image Tagging Image:Bahaiarc.jpg

This media may be deleted.

Thanks for uploading Image:Bahaiarc.jpg. I notice the 'image' page currently doesn't specify who created the content, so the copyright status is therefore unclear. If you have not created this media yourself then you need to argue that we have the right to use the media on Wikipedia (see copyright tagging below). If you have not created the media yourself then you should also specify where you found it, i.e., in most cases link to the website where you got it, and the terms of use for content from that page.

If the media also doesn't have a copyright tag then you must also add one. If you created/took the picture, audio, or video then you can use {{GFDL}} to release it under the GFDL. If you believe the media qualifies as fair use, please read fair use, and then use a tag such as {{Non-free fair use in|article name}} or one of the other tags listed at Wikipedia:Image copyright tags#Fair_use. See Wikipedia:Image copyright tags for the full list of copyright tags that you can use.

If you have uploaded other media, please check that you have specified their source and copyright tagged them, too. You can find a list of 'image' pages you have edited by clicking on the "my contributions" link (it is located at the very top of any Wikipedia page when you are logged in), and then selecting "Image" from the dropdown box. Note that any unsourced and untagged images will be deleted one week after they have been uploaded, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. -- Longhair 09:27, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

Amín-i-Iláhí

The thing is, that after reading the article I had no clue what was going on. I do not knowh what "Bahá'í" or "Bahá'u'lláh" means. I know I can click on the links and find out, but the basic definition of the term should be comprehensible at the first reading. It is also dificult to find out what country (and even what religion is going on). There is mention that he traveled in Iran, but it does not necessarily mean he was from Iran. For a while I thought he was from India (name bahai sound bit Indian). Generaly I think some of the context hidden in linked articles needs to be in Amín-i-Iláhí article too. --Jan Smolik 18:52, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

I like the last edit. Now the first article explains who he was and why he is importnant (it realy is necessary for any person (like me) that does not know what Bahá'í means (I initialy thought it meant somethink like "priest" or possibly "prophet".

Archive

I noticed your archive only contains 19 comments. This is quite short for an archive. I suggest you copy and paste those comments here, and then hold off on archiving until you have around 60-100 comments. KI 18:08, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

Reply

Suggest you put it on WP:AN, I think it would just inflame him if I were to do anything. KillerChihuahua^?!? 02:26, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

JeffMichaud

The first step would be an RFC on the subject. Next would be Wikipedia:Requests for mediation.Geni 13:15, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Joseph Smith article

Thank you for your willingness to assist on the article. An objective party is needed. I get too prickly with new people that have not seen the effort of many, many editors create an article come in and claim everthing is wrong. I know that your time is valuable, but it will be appreciated. Know that you are appreciated. Storm Rider 19:54, 10 February 2006 (UTC)