Comments on: The Lost Prophet of the Millennium

By: Joseph

Joseph — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 02:07:45 +0000

Eric Stetson has become the visionary of the new age

By: Eric Stetson

Eric Stetson — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 20:26:32 +0000

How is sharing one’s beliefs in public fora such as websites, message boards, etc. necessarily the same as “seeking the spotlight”?

I have a right to change my mind about things, and frankly, I think that people who are on an authentic quest for spiritual growth and the search for truth inevitably go through an evolutionary process regarding their beliefs.

As for the fact that I have been public about my beliefs at every stage of the process, you can chalk that up either to a narcissistic desire for attention or simply a quite normal desire to engage with people about religious issues in dialogue and debate and hopefully persuade others to my point of view. If people are drawn to the ideas I share, doesn’t that say more about the quality of my ideas than about my intentions? Only God is the judge of my intentions, but anyone can see that I have been, in a variety of contexts, a persuasive advocate of my religious beliefs. And I have not refrained from admitting that I have been wrong about some things I have believed and advocated in the past.

Finally, even if I do desire to be a leader (or just AM a leader whether I want to be or not, because it’s in my nature), what is wrong with that? No progress in any field ever occurs without leadership — and that’s true of religion just as much as anything else.

By: igneous1

igneous1 — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 14:40:54 +0000

Sorry to have taken so long to approve your comments. I have had my head elsewhere.

I guess I’m not going to get away with just calling this humor.

@Brendan: I think you’re missing the point. It is one thing to change one’s mind, but it is another to create an imaginary movement every time one gets a notion. Eric wants to lead, and I think people who persist in seeking to lead ought to be open to criticism, and yes, mockery. Eric has recently been pushing a fractionalist agenda that has somehow taken on the misnomer “Unitarian Baha’is.” He wants to push the idea that Baha’i unitarianism consists of refusing to worship `Abdul’Baha’ while continuing to worship his father. This amounts to an authority claim, though it be on behalf of others. So Eric has returned to the Baha’i Faith as an opponent of `Abdul’Baha’, or *has* he? Who knows what Eric is really thinking. Why shouldn’t I have a little chuckle about his past claims? He may no longer think he’s God’s messenger for the millennium, but he has hardly ceased to seek the spotlight.

By: Dale Husband

Dale Husband — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 07:29:50 +0000

Here are screenshots stored at the Wayback Machine of my WordPress blog:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://circleh.wordpress.com/

By: Dale Husband

Dale Husband — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 07:20:59 +0000

Interesting discoveries. Here is the current version of Eric Stetson’s site on the Bahai Faith:

http://www.bahai-faith.com/

I wonder what he will be saying he beleives a decade from now. As for me, I remain a Unitarian Universalist, an agnostic, and a non-Baha’i seeking to discredit and bring down the version of the Faith led by the Universal House of Justice. Like Eric, my religious views have changed greatly over the decades (I’ve been a Southern Baptist, a Unitarian/agnostic, a Baha’i, and a Unitarian/agnostic again), but my desire for honest truth has remained constant.

By: Ben

Ben — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:05:21 +0000

You should set out to interview this guy, or something. I wonder what he would say about that stuff, now. He seems to radically change his spiritual beliefs every three to four years. He was a devout Baha’i for three years, then came to the “realization” that he was a prophet of the Baha’i Faith, then an independent prophet outside of the Bahai Faith, then had an encounter with the Devil, then became an evangelical Christian for about three years, then became a Universalist Christian for two and a half years and subsequently wrote an apology letter to the Baha’is for saying bad things about Baha’u'llah (while at the same time making a slide show mocking the Baha’i concept of ‘unity of religion’), then started this Unitarian Baha’i thing in 2009.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 02:43:22 +0000

I am pretty sure that was Eric Stetson who claimed to be the “new messenger” of the Baha’i Faith. He seems to be obsessed with “reforming” the Baha’i Faith using different tactics and means.

By: Brendan Cook

Brendan Cook — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 14:21:04 +0000

I understand why you’d find this interesting, but I also suspect that it might be better to let sleeping prophets lie. If we always allowed the self-appointed purveyors of divine revelation to back away from their claims gracefully, perhaps there would be less of them. I for one would have been glad never to mock, or even mention, the Book of Mormon if Joseph Smith could have been prevailed upon to renounce the silly thing. So if Mustaghath doesn’t want to publicize his writings, we should help him to forget about them. Reminding a man about his claims to prophetic status after he’s renounced it seems unfair: it feels like reminding someone of the string of burglaries he’d committed when he’s long ago repaid his debt to the community.