An Introduction to the Bahá'í Club

The Bahá'í Club is a student group whose membership is not confined to members of the Bahá'í Faith. It organizes regular, diverse activities open to all. Its main purposes are to bring people together in a spirit of friendship, to promote independent and unprejudiced thinking, to foster unity among different racial, ethnic and religious groups on campus, and to collaborate with organizations having similar aims.

In the Bahá'í Club, we discuss and act on issues of world peace, spirituality and religion, and the progress of humanity in all fields. We give the Columbia community a forum for tolerant, informed discussion of the things that really matter, one of the widest variety of speaker meetings to be found in the university, interfaith activity, and connections with many other campus organizations.

Our e-mail address is: bahai@columbia.edu. Please send questions, suggestions, and requests for information or to be added to our e-mail list. We are happy to hear from you!

An Introduction to the Bahá'í Faith

The Bahá'í Faith is an independent world religion. Its founder, Bahá'u'lláh (1817-1892), is believed by Bahá'ís to be the most recent in the line of Messengers of God that goes back beyond recorded time and includes Abraham, Moses, Krishna, Buddha, Zoroaster, Christ and Muhammad.

The central theme of Bahá'u'lláh's message is that humanity is one single race and that the day has come for its unification in one global society. God, Bahá'u'lláh said, has set in motion historical forces that are breaking down traditional barriers of race, class, creed, and nation and that will, in time, give birth to a universal civilization. The principal challenge facing the peoples of the earth is to accept the fact of their oneness and to assist the processes of unification.

One of the purposes of the Bahá'í Faith is to help make this possible. A worldwide community of some six million Bahá'ís, representative of most of the nations, races and cultures on earth, is working to give Bahá'u'lláh's teachings practical effect, including:

the abandonment of all forms of prejudice
assurance to women of full equality of opportunity with men
recognition of the unity and relativity of religious truth
the elimination of extremes of poverty and wealth
the realization of universal education
the responsibility of each person to independently search for truth
the establishment of a global commonwealth of nations
recognition that true religion is in harmony with reason and the pursuit of scientific knowledge

Some current Baha'i Club members:


© copyright 2003 by the Bahá'í Club of Columbia University