How to Live
the ethic — what it asks of a life
No alcohol.
No wine, no spirits, no beer, and no ritual exception anywhere in the faith — there is no communion cup and no festival drink. Drugs taken for pleasure are covered by the same prohibition; prescribed medicine is not. It is the rule that most reliably marks a Bahá'í out in a room, and there is no soft version of it.
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Backbiting.
Bahá'u'lláh calls it the most great sin, and says it quenches the light of the heart and extinguishes the life of the soul. The prohibition is comprehensive — not repeating a fault, not carrying a report, not discussing an absent person's shortcomings — and the faith's administrative practice is visibly shaped by it, with Assembly deliberations confidential as a matter of course.
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Chastity, and the argument around it.
Sexual relations belong within marriage, and Bahá'í marriage is between a man and a woman; the institutions do not perform same-sex marriages. Bahá'ís are simultaneously required to oppose all forms of prejudice, and the Universal House of Justice has stated that the teaching on marriage is not something the institutions have authority to change. The tension is acknowledged inside the community rather than resolved.
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Stay out of politics.
No party membership, no partisan office, no political agitation, and obedience to whatever government you live under. The rule is not a convenience: Iranian Bahá'ís are forbidden by their own faith from organising politically against a state that has executed their co-religionists, and they have observed it for four decades.
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Huqúqu'lláh.
Nineteen percent of whatever remains once necessary expenses are met, paid once on that amount rather than annually on the same capital. It is calculated by the individual alone, paid confidentially, and no Assembly may ask about it, audit it or mention it to anyone. An entirely self-assessed religious tax with no enforcement whatsoever.
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Work, and no monasteries.
Everyone able to work must, and work done in a spirit of service ranks as worship. Monasticism is explicitly abolished, mendicancy is forbidden, and there is no contemplative option — the faith closed the door on withdrawal from the world on purpose, holding that the ascetic path removes people from where the work is.
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Consultation.
Say what you think frankly, and then let go of it completely, because the moment it is spoken it belongs to the group and not to you. A decision once taken is executed wholeheartedly by everyone including the dissenters — on the reasoning that a wrong decision carried out in unity reveals its wrongness faster than a right one carried out in fragments.
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