Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

Making Unity a Matter of Weights and Measures

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
Making Unity a Matter of Weights and Measures

Article one presents the oneness of humanity chiefly as a spiritual and social claim, illustrated through Baha'u'llah's images of one tree and one country. The teaching also descends to specific, almost administrative proposals meant to give the abstract unity concrete infrastructure, and those proposals are worth setting out on their own.

Baha'u'llah's writings call for the eventual adoption of a single auxiliary language to be taught worldwide alongside each people's mother tongue, easing communication between nations without erasing linguistic diversity, and for a unified international system of weights, measures and currency, removing the everyday friction of incompatible standards as a small but constant obstacle to the practical unity the doctrine describes. Later Baha'i institutional statements have extended the same logic to proposals for a form of collective security and an international auxiliary force under a future world tribunal, offered as necessary institutional scaffolding for a unified humanity rather than as an abstract ideal awaited passively.

These proposals put the oneness of humanity in a different register from parallel appeals to universal brotherhood in other traditions, most of which stop at ethical exhortation. Baha'i teaching treats standardised infrastructure, a shared second language, common measures, common security arrangements, as itself religious business rather than as a secular matter outside revelation's scope, which is consistent with the faith's broader insistence, noted in the entry on independent investigation of truth, that revealed religion and practical reason are not separate domains that might conflict but a single project addressed to both the individual conscience and the organisation of the world.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.