The shared center — held across the tradition
God cannot be known.
Not mysterious in the sense of not yet explained — inaccessible in principle. The gap between creator and created is held to be unbridgeable from below, so nothing whatever can be truly predicated of the divine essence, and every apparent statement about God is really a statement about a Manifestation.
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Religion is one story told in chapters.
Abraham, Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, the Báb, Bahá'u'lláh — one God educating one humanity through successive teachers.
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One line of teachers.
Abraham, Krishna, Moses, Zoroaster, the Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, the Báb, Bahá'u'lláh — and others whose names are lost. They are not incarnations and not merely inspired men: the image the faith uses is a mirror, which shows the sun perfectly without the sun ever entering the glass.
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Humanity is one people.
The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens — racial and national prejudice named as the disease to cure.
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Revelation has not stopped, and it has not sped up.
Each Manifestation brings what the age can carry, so religious truth is relative to its moment and the differences between faiths are matters of timing and social context. But Bahá'u'lláh set a floor: no further Manifestation for at least a thousand years, and anyone claiming otherwise before then is to be rejected.
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Science and religion cannot finally contradict.
Truth is one; a religion at war with reason is, on this view, misreading itself.
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Women and men are equal, and it is not optional.
Stated as a principle rather than an aspiration, with the argument that humanity is a bird with two wings and cannot fly on one. Where resources are scarce, the teaching is that a daughter is educated before a son, because she will teach the next generation.
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Truth must be investigated independently.
No clergy: each believer must see with their own eyes, not through their neighbor's.
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Every prejudice has to go.
Racial, national, religious and class prejudice are named individually and treated as the direct cause of conflict rather than as unfortunate attitudes. 'Abdu'l-Bahá called racial prejudice the most vital and challenging issue facing America, in 1912.
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The extremes of wealth and poverty must be abolished.
Not wealth as such — the faith is explicitly not communist and defends private property and profit. What is targeted is the extremes at either end, through graduated taxation, profit-sharing, and a mandated floor. Voluntary charity is held to be insufficient and structural remedy is called for.
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The soul goes on, and keeps going.
It comes into being at conception, is not pre-existent, does not return to another body, and after death continues to develop through worlds the living cannot picture. Heaven and hell are conditions of nearness or distance from God, not places, and progress after death remains possible.
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Work done in a spirit of service is worship.
Not a metaphor and not a consolation — the stated ranking is that such work is accounted the same as worship. Monasticism is abolished, mendicancy is forbidden, and idleness is condemned. A craftsman at his bench is doing the thing a monk would have withdrawn to do.
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