 | True Freedom and the Wisdom of Virtue
How the Bahá¹í Principles of Personal Morality Make Life Better
130 pages, $8.00. Order this book.
Most people understand that goodness is its own reward and that we must strive to be moral even if it means hardship, poverty, persecution, or death. But we seldom stop to consider that in the vast majority of cases, the moral choice also is the one that makes life easier in the long run. Virtue is about making life richer, more meaningful, and ultimately more enjoyable, not about quashing all of our fun. True Freedom is about the deep wisdom that is imbedded in virtue, with special focus on the virtues practiced by the worldwide community of Bahá¹ís. Many of these virtues are broadly shared with those of other moral traditions ‹ chastity outside marriage, abstinence from drugs, moderation of materialism. Others are novel, such as noninvolvement in politics, and still others find an emphasis in the Faith that they don¹t in society at large, such as avoidance of fault-finding and gossip. But all of these virtues pose a special challenge to Bahá¹ís of the West, who are confronted daily with an ethos of radical individualism. The irony is that true freedom, as opposed to the counterfeit freedom our culture often promotes, is only attainable through a life bound by morality.
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