Causality

I recently read most of this famous article, Demystifying Dependence. This is a pretty transformative paper, in my opinion, as a Nix user who is interested in what “dependence” means, and as a software engineer. I also greatly appreciated the didactic method of providing nine stories and then investigating what we can learn about dependencies from them in the new framework.

The surprise in the paper is that dependence can be analyzed in terms of causality. The authors show how using a new framework called “Halpern causation,” a definition of causation from a subdiscipline called “actual causality.” The treatment is really interesting. One of the big “a-ha” moments is realizing that you cannot discuss causality without talking about counterfactuals. To paraphrase the math:

1. Create a model of the world in terms of input variables (“exogeneous”) and derived variables (“endogeneous”)
2. Figure out the variable configuration for the event that happened
3. Find a variable whose setting, if it were inverted, would lead to the opposite outcome

That variable is the “but-for” cause. It turns out not to be a perfect model of causality. They give an example: suppose we are worried about watering some grass, but we don’t want to water on days where it rains. We ask after a rain, why is the grass wet? According to the but-for definition, imagining a counterfactual world where it did not rain, we still have wet grass, because the sprinkler system would have come on. The authors then introduce a more sophisticated definition of causality called Halpern-Pearl causality which fixes this problem, using the idea of a contingency, which forces certain settings of variables. These settings are called witnesses to the contingency. The jargon alone is quite fun.

It does make me want to think about the Chornobyl accident in terms of actual causality. For instance, the roof being made of flammable materials made the disaster worse, but it was not a but-for cause of the explosion. But we could use these definitions of causality to answer questions like, was graphite-tipping the control rods an actual cause? It wasn’t if (and only if), holding everything else about the accident the same, the accident plays out in the exact same way without them.

August 20, 2025

A Few More Shavian Notes

A few other things occurred to me.

A major benefit: Tragedeigh naming is basically impossible. Is it Cate or Kate? It’s 𐑒𐑱𐑑. I also kind of like that you can see visually the irritating rhyming of my daughter’s friends names: ·𐑧𐑤𐑰-·𐑨𐑤𐑰-·𐑨𐑛𐑰, ·𐑧𐑤𐑰𐑨𐑯𐑩-·𐑭𐑮𐑰𐑨𐑯𐑩-·𐑭𐑛𐑰𐑨𐑯𐑩.

If you want to practice, there is a very nice addon for Firefox to convert a page to Shavian, in total or by replacing N (25, 50, 100, 200,… 500) common words. I don’t recommend trying to read a Wikipedia page about phonetics with “auto translate” enabled but otherwise it seems to be super useful.

In fact, a significant problem of learning another orthography like this is going to be that I have spent my entire life reading English text without sounding it out. My brain has a lot of experience. A more logical orthography might be a huge improvement, but beating decades of familiarity with another one is going to take time. This approach seems like a brilliant one, because you build up experience in a similar manner; as you get used to seeing common words mixed in with English text, hopefully you just get familiar quickly. Or maybe it backfires because your brain can fill in lazily from context. I guess time will tell.

The IPA/Shavian correspondences ʌ-𐑳, ʊ-𐑫 and u-𐑵 seem like a bit of a missed opportunity. I think IPA already had ʌ (Shavian 𐑳) before Read came up with the scheme, but I don’t know whether he was aware of it or cared. Not a huge deal either way.

There is actually a distinction which used to be phonemic that is not preserved in Shavian, which is the w/wh distinction, (in IPA, w/ʍ). Sometimes people exaggerate this (“a hwale is in trouble!”), but the distinction evidently still exists in some places, but probably not where Read was working on Shavian. So you can’t distinguish witch and which in Shavian writing.

July 24, 2025

The Shavian Alphabet

I’ve been spending some time the last few days learning the Shavian alphabet. There’s a great learning application at shavian.app.

What’s the point of this? I mean, fun mainly. One point of this alphabet is to have an actually phonetic (or phonemic to be precise) representation. English has a lot of phonemes, but not a lot of agreement on what they are or how they’re realized; Wikipedia doesn’t give an exact number but lets you add 24 consonants to as few as 14-16 vowels for the General American dialect or as many as 20-25 vowels in the Received Pronunciation, yielding as few as 38 or as many as 49 distinct phonemes, meaning we are missing symbols for between 12 and 23 phonemes, depending on how you count. Are there benefits to writing what we actually say?

Before seeing this particular attempt, I sort of assumed it couldn’t possibly work because the sounds of Indian English differ substantially from American or British English. I am singling out these three because you can make a strong argument that any of these should form the basis of a new English spelling standard: Indian, because it has the most speakers; British, because it is the original recipe; American, because of cultural imperialism. None of these would be very satisfying.

Shavian addresses the problem by being overtly phonemic and basing pronunciation on words. This idea is not that far from the idea of lexical sets. The original definition from 1982 yields 27 phonemes, and this table shows the agreement between these and Shavian:

You can see from the chart there are only a few examples that are not distinguished by Shavian, but having separate characters for rhotacized vowels seems clever to me, since they should occur in relatively predictable ways but can be pronounced with or without the R sound. I think it’s worth appreciating the cleverness of this approach, which prefigured lexical sets by a few decades, and yields an alphabet uniquely suited to English despite the plethora of local realizations of its large and fairly unique phonetic set.

Using Shavian, I am made pretty aware my accent and how it differs from the Received Pronunciation. For instance, when I say the word “been” it rhymes with “bin” and not “bean.” The words “caught” and “cot,” I pronounce the same, but if I imagine a British accent I can sort of imagine how the sounds differ. There are some standardized “spellings” for words that requires one to think in RP, or at least an accent with more vowels than my American accent affords, although using or not using standard spellings seems not to be a contentious issue within the tiny Shavian user community.

I think the majority of L1 English speakers are probably unaware of some of the phonemes. The obvious ones that come to mind are θ/ð. It’s not easy for me to guess which one I am using in a given word, and as far as distinct phonemes, there are not that many minimal pairs for this set (ether/either seems to be one of the few). I think most L1 English speakers think of this as “the TH sound” and wouldn’t do much better than me at guessing without a finger to their throat which they are using in a given word. Another example might be the word “think,” which phonetically contains what we English speakers would call “the -ing sound,” in Shavian you have to encode that but if you were thinking in terms of the normal Latin spelling you wouldn’t realize it.

I have frequently said that English suffers from an overabundance of shwa sounds. I think now that isn’t technically correct. Shavian helps show that what Engish does have is an abundance of vowels, and consequently many are not that different, and/or located near the middle. It’s fun to click around the vowel chart on Wikipedia and try and find one that doesn’t have an entry for some form of English; I didn’t find one but didn’t do an exhaustive search.

Aesthetically speaking, it’s pretty good looking, especially at first blush. It’s distinctive, it’s cool that there are 48 characters we can distinguish without picking up the pen. It doesn’t really look like anything else. Another plus is that the name would make one think it was designed by an Armenian, which it certainly wasn’t. It’s quite wise, in my opinion, to use certain letters as single-glyph words (for “the,”-𐑞 “to,”-𐑑 “are,”-𐑸 “for,”-𐑓 “and,”-𐑯 and “of”-𐑝). The sound-shape correspondences are interesting but not necessarily super helpful for remembering sounds. Most alphabets (Inuktitut is an exception) don’t have every possible permutation of each shape. In my five-day-old opinion, some of the shapes are not easy to write. I have noticed, as others have, the funny fact that the glyphs for “h” and “ng” are in the voiced and unvoiced categories respectively, which seems wrong, although the decision was apparently intentional. I don’t think it’s worth litigating these things, although they are curious. For instance, you’re better off learning Esperanto than Ido even though Ido is probably “better” in various ways, because it’s better to just pick something and get the community going around it rather than constantly nit-picking, creating minor refinements, and fracturing the community along the way.

An interesting benefit is that overall, text typically takes about 1/3rd less space to write in Shavian. Here’s an example:

Where does this reduction come from? I’m not a statistics person but I’ll guess. Small words becoming one character or two is certainly a big help. Another significant help is that many small words have a lot of silent letters, “through” being the best example (it becomes 𐑔𐑮𐑵, beating the slang “thru” by a character). On the other hand, there is no “x” character, so words like “exist” can actually become longer (“𐑦𐑜𐑟𐑦𐑕𐑑”). Probably in many cases, it’s simply digraphs like “sh” and “ch” or dipthongs like “ou” and “er” creating a small benefit across many words.

Thinking about Shavian reminded me of when my daughter was very young and very desperate to write. She would spell things “phonetically” wich yuzuly rezultid n smthin hahrd tu red. Would this have been easier? It’s twice as big, so maybe the alphabet would take twice as long to learn. But it is uniform—apart from the distinctions mentioned earlier—so after learning the alphabet, reading would be entirely a matter of practice, getting faster, and learning vocabulary. That’s got to be worth a year or two of education.

A downside which only a great speller like myself would point out is that there is tremendous historical information in the way we spell things. The first part of the words “function,” “funny” and “phonetic” sound the same, but you can tell by looking that one comes from Greek and the others do not, and that the latter shares some meaning with words like “phonograph” and “telephone.” This information is purely written. But it also tortures students and led us here, where fixing spelling is a significant benefit of using a computer.

Shavian is unlikely to unseat English’s Latin-based orthography, but it is fun, fairly easy to learn, unique looking, and has various advantages. Wide usage is not one of those advantages but perhaps it will increase! It’s probably a better spelling reform than just reintroducing ð and þ.

July 23, 2025

I18n Puzzles, Day 2

This is the kind of problem where you could load the whole thing into Postgres and get the answer in about five seconds. In fact, let’s try it:

postgres# create table i18n_day2 (input timestamp with time zone);
CREATE TABLE
postgres=# \copy i18n_day2 from /i18np/input.txt
COPY 1758
postgres=# select input at time zone 'UTC', count(*) from i18n_day2 group by input at time zone 'UTC' having count(*) >= 4;
      timezone       | count
---------------------+-------
 20XX-YY-ZZ HH:MM:SS |     4
(1 row)

I decided to censor the output a little bit and I didn’t handle the formatting properly there because that’s not really the point.

Suffice to say, this is kind of a non-problem in languages with time zone support. Unfortunately, neither J nor APL have time zone support in the standard library, so we’ll have to figure it out on our own.

The first problem is that we have to parse these dates: 2019-06-05T08:15:00-04:00. These happen to be fixed-width. There are snappier ways of parsing but I decided to narrow in on this element of it.

My plan here is to handle the date+time part first, since there is a library built-in for this (todayno and todate, which seem like they should be inverses of each other but are not some reason). We can parse the time into a similar structure and expand it using expand. Then we add them, or actually subtract them (I realized this a little late).

I felt like I wanted to see a fork of the form f + g since the idea is to parse most of the timestamp and then the offset. The amount of work to handle a fixed-width format was not insubstantial, but I came up with these functions:

   dp =. (_ 2 1 $ 0 4 5 2 8 2 11 2 14 2 17 2) 0&".;.0 ]
   tp =. 0 0 0 1 1 0 #inv (_ 2 1 $ 19 3 23 2) 0&".;.0 ]

These two functions parse the date part and time part. Probably bad names. The key idea about using ;.0 is to take a substring of a given length at a given offset. So starting from 0 with length 4 gets us the year, this is the 0 4; then we get the month from offset 5 length 2, which is 5 2 which comes next. All six of the chunks of data we need are thus specified by the 12 items in the list; we convert these into an array of 6 2x1 vectors with $. This feeds the subarray ;.0 verb. We’re adding in 0&". to parse numbers; regular ". runs J code, but we just want the values.

The ever-friendly and wise elcaro on the J channel of the APL Farm Discord suggested using these predicates instead:

Nats =: '1234567890'&(i. ".@:{ ' ',~ [)
Nums =: '1234567890._ '  ".@:{~ '1234567890.-' i. ]

Which was really tempting since you can then do all the parsing with this kind of expression:

   t =. '2024-08-01T08:15:03-03:15'
   19 (Nats@{. , Nums@}.) t
2024 8 1 8 15 3 _3 15

Which is really hot, but I insisted on doing it the hard way for some reason.

Now my plan is to “normalize” the timestamp, by converting this from a 6 item array to an internal date and back, and then throwing it into a printing function. First the printing function:

   require 'format/printf'
   
   dt =. '%04d-%02d-%02dT%02d:%02d:%02d+00:00' vsprintf

Nothing interesting here. Now my goal is to avoid boxing and pass lines through a function which does the work here. That function will do the “normalization” I mentioned above:

   norm =. [: dt 2 todate 2 todayno dp - tp

There’s the fork I was thinking about. I read another article (about ray tracing in J) which explained that the cap [: is about converting a dyadic function to a monadic one for forks.

The use of [: is a little weird to understand, but it is basically a no-operation left argument to ensure that the verb is evaluated as a function of one argument instead of two.

This seems like a decent explanation. So the idea here is to handle the time zone data with the date part, convert that to a day number, then convert that back to a date, then format it. The conversion handles the possibilities of negative times and whatnot.

Another approach would have been to instead convert the first number to a “day number” and then convert the hour and minute values to fractions of a day. In trying that, I saw odd behavior so I decided this might work alright.

OK, so now we have the verb that will parse, but we still need to actually do the puzzle. The first piece is to use norm;._2 fread <filename>. Using norm with ;._2 is how we’re going to avoid boxing; we’ll get an array of normalized timestamps instead of boxed strings or whatever. But the puzzle question is to find the times that appear most frequently. This is not all that different from the word frequencies problem. So I wound up using key /. with length # on the normalized timestamps, sorting by that, and applying that sort order to the nub ~. of the timestamps. Taking the first item of that list yields the timestamp we are interested it:

   {. (~. nm) \: #/.~ nm =. norm;._2 fread 'test-input.txt'

And this is our solution. The entire thing is:

   require 'format/printf'
   
   dt =. '%04d-%02d-%02dT%02d:%02d:%02d+00:00' vsprintf
   dp =. (_ 2 1 $ 0 4 5 2 8 2 11 2 14 2 17 2) 0&".;.0 ]
   tp =. 0 0 0 1 1 0 #inv (_ 2 1 $ 19 3 23 2) 0&".;.0 ]
   norm =. [: dt 2 todate 2 todayno dp - tp
   {. (~. nm) \: #/.~ nm =. norm;._2 fread 'input.txt'

June 2, 2025 j

Relational Thinking in J

According to Aaron Hsu, the starting point for APL programming is the relational model.

I’m mixed on this, because I don’t think J has a natural concept of table, actually. Moreover, it seems like your code gets littered with head {. and constant-powered { lookups if you do represent data in a tabular format, with heterogeneous rows. I could be wrong, but it seems to work better in general when you have homogeneous arrays. Creating weird packets of data like we do in other languages just doesn’t seem to be the ticket here.

Suppose you design a table like this:

You will probably wind up using 0 { or 1 { to take it apart to do different things with the different columns. So I would probably build this table in J like so:

   developers =. 'alice'; 'bob'; 'calvin'; 'delilah'; 'ellen'
   devemails =. 'a@example.com'; 'b@example.com'; 'c@example.com'; 'd@example.com'; 'e@example.com'

This is maybe a column-oriented view of the world. You can recover the table pretty easily though:

   developers ,. devemails
┌───────┬─────────────┐
│alice  │a@example.com│
├───────┼─────────────┤
│bob    │b@example.com│
├───────┼─────────────┤
│calvin │c@example.com│
├───────┼─────────────┤
│delilah│d@example.com│
├───────┼─────────────┤
│ellen  │e@example.com│
└───────┴─────────────┘

Projection is sort of obvious now, you have to choose the columns you want because you don’t have the table, as it were. Selection isn’t so bad; you are going to filter on a certain column and apply that filter on the other column. Let’s find the developers with an “a” in their name:

   developers #~ 'a' e."1> developers
┌─────┬──────┬───────┐
│alice│calvin│delilah│
└─────┴──────┴───────┘

The same selection works on the other column, and you can still stitch together columns to make a table:

   devemails #~ 'a' e."1> developers
┌─────────────┬─────────────┬─────────────┐
│a@example.com│c@example.com│d@example.com│
└─────────────┴─────────────┴─────────────┘

   (#&developers ,. #&devemails) 'a' e."1> developers
┌───────┬─────────────┐
│alice  │a@example.com│
├───────┼─────────────┤
│calvin │c@example.com│
├───────┼─────────────┤
│delilah│d@example.com│
└───────┴─────────────┘

Joins work by doing lookups by index. Let’s introduce another table:

Following the earlier example we get this:

   projects =. 'alphago'; 'bitbucket'; 'cafeteria'; 'diffie'; 'entryway'; 'finality'; 'grace'; 'homelab'
   projdevs =. 'calvin'; 'ellen'; 'delilah'; 'alice'; 'bob'; 'alice'; 'delilah'; 'calvin'

   projects ,. projdevs
┌─────────┬───────┐
│alphago  │calvin │
├─────────┼───────┤
│bitbucket│ellen  │
├─────────┼───────┤
│cafeteria│delilah│
├─────────┼───────┤
│diffie   │alice  │
├─────────┼───────┤
│entryway │bob    │
├─────────┼───────┤
│finality │alice  │
├─────────┼───────┤
│grace    │delilah│
├─────────┼───────┤
│homelab  │calvin │
└─────────┴───────┘

We can find the email of the developer for each project like so:

   (developers i. projdevs) { devemails

┌─────────────┬─────────────┬─────────────┬─────────────┬─────────────┬─────────────┬─────────────┬─────────────┐
│c@example.com│e@example.com│d@example.com│a@example.com│b@example.com│a@example.com│d@example.com│c@example.com│
└─────────────┴─────────────┴─────────────┴─────────────┴─────────────┴─────────────┴─────────────┴─────────────┘

This might be easier to read as a table, so let’s do that:

   projects ,. projdevs ,. devemails {~ developers i. projdevs
┌─────────┬───────┬─────────────┐
│alphago  │calvin │c@example.com│
├─────────┼───────┼─────────────┤
│bitbucket│ellen  │e@example.com│
├─────────┼───────┼─────────────┤
│cafeteria│delilah│d@example.com│
├─────────┼───────┼─────────────┤
│diffie   │alice  │a@example.com│
├─────────┼───────┼─────────────┤
│entryway │bob    │b@example.com│
├─────────┼───────┼─────────────┤
│finality │alice  │a@example.com│
├─────────┼───────┼─────────────┤
│grace    │delilah│d@example.com│
├─────────┼───────┼─────────────┤
│homelab  │calvin │c@example.com│
└─────────┴───────┴─────────────┘

So there’s some basic relational-type stuff in J. Is this the right approach? I don’t know.

Edit: Notes from the chatroom from elcaro:

You want to be a little bit careful when dealing with boxes, because unboxing a boxed array will create fills. When you do 'a' e."1> developers, your right arg is a 5×7 character vector

   quote"1 > developers 
'alice  '
'bob    '
'calvin '
'delilah'
'ellen  '    

If you looked for developers with a Space in them, you’d match all except ‘delilah’. You can unbox each, and so compare each unbox string by itself ('a' e. ])@> developers 1 0 1 1 0

Which is fine, but might be hard to put into a larger tacit expression, as you need to explicitly refer to left arg in that inner expression. Something else you can do is use Spread (S:) or Level-At (L:) where appropriate. I don’t use these much, but S:0 often pairs nicely with e. or E., where you want to match some unboxed string to a list of boxed strings

'a' e.S:0 developers 1 0 1 1 0

This new operator is often easier to put into a larger tacit expression (if desiered) Spread and Level are a little like the Depth modifier in BQN ⚇ (and proposed in APL ⍥) in that it modifies operators to perform on nested data. The Nuvoc pages are a little lacking, but play with them and you’ll get a hang of what they do Spread - NuVoc Leval-At - NuVoc Depth (operator) - APL Wiki Depth - BQN docs

Oh one more thing… you can do

(#&developers ,. #&devemails) 1 0 1 1 0

as

(developers ,. devemails) #~ 1 0 1 1 0

May 28, 2025 j

My thoughts on the CES Letter.

My friend Bill recommended I read CES Letter. I found it pretty hard to put down, and read the whole thing over the last couple days. I thought it was worth reflecting on the ideas in it from the point of view of a Baha’i.

I haven’t mentioned it on my blog yet for various reasons, but I declared myself a Baha’i in October 2023. So I now belong to a Faith about the size of Mormonism (although much smaller in the US). I have been met with quite a bit of understanding and maybe a little puzzlement. But this seems like a good context to talk about it, because any faith should be able to withstand the kinds of questions Jeremy Runnells asks of his former faith. Why not start with the controversial stuff? At least you won’t think I’m being fatuous.

Before going too far down this road, I want to make it clear I’m not going to bag on LDS believers. Baha’u’llah says “Consort with the followers of all religions in a spirit of friendliness and fellowship.” Reading the CES Letter, I felt a lot of sympathy for Jeremy and others like him: good and decent people trying to adhere to God’s wishes, whom I have no doubt are worthy of and will receive an ample share of God’s blessings. And furthermore, I’m just a random Baha’i and a guy who has read some books; I don’t speak from authority about anything, let alone the Baha’i Faith.

The CES Letter is concerned with a number of topics: the verity of the foundational texts, the legitimacy of Joseph Smith Jr and the line of authority starting with him, the legitimacy of his witnesses, certain difficult or troubling teachings, and the Church’s attitudes towards historicity, fact, belief, emotion and the general reconciliation of reason with, let’s say, shortcomings in those categories.

There are analogs in some of these areas to the questions that are asked of the Baha’i Faith. In Mormonism, the question about the texts has to do with their historicity and legitimacy. In the Baha’i Faith, we have a large number of writings that are untranslated. Both religions have gone through succession crises and wound up with basically one real movement and a few tiny groups of sectarians. Neither is especially progressive about LGBTQ issues, and both have a kind of membership status that can be imperiled by transgressing certain behavioral standards including this. Both have a concept of infallibility, a word that makes my skin crawl a bit and probably yours too.

Probably the most basic difference is that the Baha’i Faith requires you to figure things out on your own. While you may be born into a Baha’i family and may get a Baha’i education, in the end, it’s completely your personal decision. When you declare, at least in the US, you fill out an online form; if you withdraw, you click a button on the same site. You’re not going to get harassed about it. You can attend Baha’i gatherings as a Baha’i or just a friend; declaring and undeclaring does not imperil this. Nothing is really at stake if you reject the Faith. The benefits of being a declared Baha’i are simply that you can donate money, participate in the electoral process and take part in the internal discussion part of the 19-day meeting (“feast”). Nobody believes that you are going to hell or otherwise going to suffer some kind of penalty in the afterlife. Similarly, the Baha’i behavior standards are for Baha’is. If you have not declared, they obviously do not apply to you, and nobody will think less of you for drinking or whatever. Anyone can use the Baha’i prayers, read the Baha’i books, believe in any part of it or none of it; it is for everyone equally.

Based on the CES Letter, it sounds like for Mormonism, the important thing is that you feel it is true, and this is called a testimony. Based on this, you’re supposed to accept everything. The outcome for Jeremy was extremely difficult. It’s not a good look for the LDS church, in my opinion.

Now, infallibility gives me and most Americans hives because we find it impossible to imagine that someone could never have made a mistake about anything. The combination of infallibility with two known-invalid translations and a third whose source is not available kind of beggars belief. For Baha’is, the combination of infallibility with a large corpus of untranslated text at first sounds like a minefield. I have only read a small portion of what is available, because despite it being a fraction of what exists, it’s still enormous. In doing this reading, what I came to realize is that generally when something is said and I have trouble with it, when I ponder it, I come to see how it fits with everything else. Though there is a vast amount of writing, the majority of it closes in on the same themes repeatedly: the unity of mankind, the unity of religion, the unity of the world. It is tremendously optimistic. Having read as much as I have, my fears about what remains untranslated have reduced a lot. Baha’u’llah didn’t sit around holding forth on every possible topic. He talked about the same things repeatedly with many different people, using different kinds of language.

In the light of unity, I see infallibility as primarily serving the role of bringing about unity by proscribing intense, schism-causing debate. In this perspective, Baha’u’llah gave leadership to Abdu’l-Baha’ and declared his infallibility so that there would not be schism from different people trying to usurp the religion. (Many tried anyway.) The same story repeats with Shoghi Effendi. In neither case were they empowered to add new things to the religion, only to explain. Each of these were small succession crises in comparison to Shoghi Effendi’s death and the formation of the UHJ. But even there, enough groundwork had been laid that the vast majority of people came along to the Baha’i Faith we have today, and only a small splinter group was created (mostly living in Roswell, NM, of all places). There are only a few examples people have found where Abdu’l-Baha’ appears to say something contrary to science; the most prominent one is probably this one:

Question: What will be the food of the united people? Answer: As humanity progresses, meat will be used less and less, for the teeth of man are not carnivorous. For example, the lion is endowed with carnivorous teeth, which are intended for meat, and if meat be not found, the lion starves. The lion cannot graze; its teeth are of different shape. The digestive system of the lion is such that it cannot receive nourishment save through meat. The eagle has a crooked beak, the lower part shorter than the upper. It cannot pick up grain; it cannot graze; therefore, it is compelled to partake of meat. The domestic animals have herbivorous teeth formed to cut grass, which is their fodder. The human teeth, the molars, are formed to grind grain. The front teeth, the incisors, are for fruits, etc. It is, therefore, quite apparent according to the implements for eating that man’s food is intended to be grain and not meat. When mankind is more fully developed, the eating of meat will gradually cease.

On the one hand, we have an evolutionary explanation for why we have incisors: tearing meat, probably. But the question isn’t about where we have come from, it’s about where we are going, and virtually everyone can agree that eating more meat is probably worse for us. Evolution tells us where you came from, it doesn’t necessarily tell you where you’re going; giant pandas have incisors too, but only eat bamboo.

In the Baha’i Faith, science and religion are complimentary because one tells you where you have been and the other where you are going; one tells you how things are and the other tells you why. As Baha’u’llah says: “Knowledge is as wings to man’s life, and a ladder for his ascent. Its acquisition is incumbent upon everyone.” While there is an emotional, experiential dimension to the Baha’i Faith, it is not to override reason. This does not appear to be the case in the LDS church.

On the question of LGBTQ issues, we have about the same in the Baha’i Faith as in the other major Abrahamic religions: a definition of marriage as being between a man and a woman and that sexual relations are to be limited to this union. Baha’u’llah made a very oblique mention of pedophilia in the book of laws; Shoghi Effendi expanded this to homosexual relations. I can’t reconcile myself to Shoghi Effendi’s interpretation, but he certainly did not have the power to add something new to the writings or abrogate something completely in order to arrive at another solution. In the interest of unity, I can only acquiesce to it. There are LGBTQ Baha’is, as well as Muslims, Catholics and Jews; I think Baha’u’llah certainly did not want us to construct our identities on the basis of our preferences, and this is simply one of those tests for us, especially Americans who are accustomed to equating the satisfaction of our desires with the good. The matter is, in my opinion, somewhat overstated, because the Faith does not really permit us to categorize people into “good” and “bad” categories (or “in-group”/“out-group” or any other dichotomy) on any basis. If you are discriminated against by a Baha’i, they have failed to fulfill their obligations to Baha’u’llah to create unity.

Unlike Mormonism, we simply don’t have questions about the accuracy or authenticity of our religious texts. Also unlike Mormonism, we get to have the benefit of most other religion’s texts. The validity of our translations are sometimes questioned. The Arabic of The Báb and Baha’u’llah were not exactly normative; Modern Standard Arabic wasn’t yet really formalized and their styles are idiosyncratic and have a lot of Persian influence. The Báb’s writings were only intended to last a short period of time and are written in a very dense style for people highly acquainted with the Qur’an; translating the bulk of them into English has not been a high priority. Those interested in knowing more about His writings should probably read Gate of the Heart. I don’t know the precise reason why much of Baha’u’llah’s writings haven’t yet been translated. I suspect that the reasons are simply because A) there is so much to translate, B) Shoghi Effendi translated what he considered important for us, and there is a general trust in his decisions, C) not much trust in our ability to do an equally good job, D) the funds are better spent in other ways, and E) a lot of Baha’u’llah’s writings are direct correspondence with believers and others, so may be repetitive in toto or not particularly general. These are just my speculations.

The historicity claims of the LDS church are pretty integral to the entire enterprise. If Joseph Smith didn’t really find hidden tablets, if the tablets aren’t true, then the rest of his revelation is probably false, which is what provides the impetus for their being an LDS church at all. Would the Book of Mormon be worth reading if it were an out-and-out forgery? The context surrounding it makes it difficult for non-Mormons to take seriously, and the Book of Abraham and Kinderhook Plates are obviously forged. Is there still value in reading and studying these books? I’m not in a position to say. Much of the Hebrew Bible is either unverifiable or false from a historical perspective; the majority of Jews don’t see a problem with this and find that the ideas are still useful and worth studying. Most of Jesus’s words are in the form of parables, which means we know that their “truth value” in the sense of logic is false, but their “truth value” in the sense of spiritual teachings is quite large. On the other hand, it is the truth value of the LDS’s teachings that gave the LDS church racist teachings, promoted polygamy and conversion therapy, several of which were abrogated only recently.

The Baha’i Faith has some historicity problems of another sort. The obvious one is that if all religions are one, why are they so different from one another? The Baha’i perspective is that there are core teachings that are the same for all religions, which have been promoted by the Manifestations of God in all eras and all regions; the details differ because the locality and era might demand different emphasis, or perhaps just due to the passage of time and meddling by religious authorities (a favorite target of Baha’u’llah’s). This seems pretty workable for the Abrahamic faiths that preceded it but raises problems about Eastern religions that do not have obvious solutions. Consider this question about Confucius and Buddha:

Buddha also established a new religion and Confucius renewed the ancient conduct and morals, but the original precepts have been entirely changed and their followers no longer adhere to the original pattern of belief and worship. The founder of Buddhism was a precious Being Who established the oneness of God, but later His original precepts were gradually forgotten and displaced by primitive customs and rituals, until in the end it led to the worship of statues and images.

It’s quite difficult to look at the Buddhism we have today and see how Buddha could possibly have been talking about the oneness of God when there are no Buddhisms today that talk about God. Moojan Momen wrote a lengthy article about the interface between the Baha’i Faith and Buddhism centered around the 8-fold path. But it’s unlikely that a Buddhist would be interested in hearing from us that they were originally monotheists. But Buddhism is so old and the original writings long gone, so what we have here from Abdu’l-Baha’ is basically untestable. His interpretation of Buddhism as worshipping images would be offensive to Western Buddhists. But I’m not in a position to judge whether it is true elsewhere; my sense is that Buddhism in the West is rather different from Buddhism in the East, where people actually visit Buddhist shrines and have them in their homes. But back to the point.

Faced with a particular instance of an infallible person saying something at least untestable but perhaps false, I could respond by just giving up on it. I could respond to the unacceptance of gay marriage by giving up on the Faith. I didn’t though.

1. There is not some slightly-tweaked form of the Faith out there that would resolve all these problems; there’s one Baha’i Faith.
2. If there were, how would siding with some splinter group help working towards unity?
3. There is not a place in the Faith where it says it is my job to judge people on the basis of their religion or sexuality or anything else. On the contrary, I am to accept everyone, show kindness to everyone, show violence to no one, speak ill of no one, etc.
4. What we are trying to build is bigger; quibbling about this or that element creates more disunity rather than more unity.
5. I can accept and show love to anyone, even if I can’t change doctrine.

Whether Abdu’l-Baha’ is right about the historical Buddha, we will probably never know, but I don’t think it undermines my religion. We have what we have today. Building bridges between Buddhism and the Baha’i Faith, that is something that matters today, moreover between Buddhists and Baha’is. Whatever their beliefs are based on, I still think we can learn something from them today. And it’s the same with the LDS church. We can learn things about God, humanity, how to be a better person and so forth from Mormons, from Buddhists, from LGBTQ people, from atheists. And we should, and we have to.

So this my interpretation of infallibility: that it is more about unity than about being right about everything. Much like in a marriage, sometimes you have to set aside the question of who is right in order to be happy and have peace. Hopefully not all the time. The marriage is more important. It can be, anyway, ideally. But also like a marriage, it’s hard to rebuild trust after a lot of lying. After having gone through the CES Letter, it feels like there is a little too much fabrication.

Overall, the CES letter is a great read. I recommend it to you whether you are an LDS member or not. I only disagree with one idea: “Each religion has believers who believe that their spiritual experiences are more authentic and powerful than those of the adherents of other religions. They cannot all be right together, if at all.”

May 25, 2025 religion