According to Darwinian theories of evolution, it usually makes more sense to kill than to be killed, because it is not possible for a dead individual to procreate and to have offspring. This is certainly true of our animal aspect, but humans are more than animals. We are thinking, intelligent beings, capable of creating not only biological offspring but also poetry, music, ideas, theories, social movements, etc. The act of creation, after all, is not limited to the act of procreation! Hence, it is sometimes possible that a person can create more through physical death than through staying alive. Human history celebrates the lives of those who sacrificed their lives for a greater cause. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. are recent examples of people who, though dead, continue to exert an influence as though still alive. Their lives attest to the truth that it can sometimes be better to be killed than to kill. More generally, it can be better to suffer harm than to hurt others. This truth captures the essential idea underlying the principle of nonviolence.
Gandhi is famous for his emphasis on nonviolence. He even felt that violent methods are unbecoming of intelligent human beings:
Non-violence is the law of our species as violence is the law of the brute.[1]
There is nothing very wonderful in killing and being killed in the process. But the man who offers his neck to the enemy for execution, but refuses to bend to his will, shows courage of a far higher type.[2]The concept of nonviolence is also emphasized in the Bahá'í Faith and can be traced to its earliest days. Some years after the 1850 public execution of the Báb by firing-squad,
![[footnote]](img23.png){kind=small}
Bahá'u'lláh emerged as the leader of the new Faith and began to teach the
surviving
believers that ``if ye be slain, it is better for you than
to slay.''[3]
By 1863, when the Bahá'í Faith was founded by Bahá'u'lláh,
the Bábí believers--now called Bahá'ís--had become
distinctly nonviolent in their ethics as well as in their methods.
Shoghi Effendi concisely sums up this change in direction in the
following sentence taken from
God Passes By,
his
masterpiece
history of the first Bahá'í century:
The dissociation of the Bábí Faith from every form of political activity and from all secret associations and factions; the emphasis placed on the principle of non-violence;Violence, oppression, tyranny are all categorically and repeatedly condemned in the Bahá'í writings. `Abdu'l-Bahá explains that while violent methods might have been tolerable in earlier stages of human evolution, now we are more mature and have no excuse to resort to violence:the necessity of strict obedience to established authority; the ban imposed on all forms of sedition, on back-biting, retaliation, and dispute; the stress laid on godliness, kindliness, humility and piety, on honesty and truthfulness, chastity and fidelity, on justice, toleration, sociability, amity and concord, on the acquisition of arts and sciences, on self-sacrifice and detachment, on patience, steadfastness and resignation to the will of God--all these constitute the salient features of a code of ethical conduct to which the books, treatises and epistles, revealed during those years, by the indefatigable pen of Bahá'u'lláh, unmistakably bear witness.[4]
O ye lovers of God! In this, the cycle of Almighty God, violence and force, constraint and oppression, are one and all condemned.[5]There are many other instances where nonviolence is emphasized in the Bahá'í Faith. For example, in the opening page of the 1976 edition of Esslemont's book, Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era, we read that the Bahá'í Faith takes ``firm worldly positions in vital areas affecting modern man,'' including ``Nonviolent Means.''[6]