Project Conversion

I thought I’d do something different for today’s post. Yesterday I featured the account of an American convert to the Zarathushti Faith. As you know, conversion is a hot topic within the faith and most traditionalist and even moderates consider the practice inappropriate. In an effort to offer a balanced dialogue regarding this matter, I invited several…

If you’ve followed along, you saw this coming. Conversion within the Zarathushti Faith is a hotly contested issue and as we observed so far this month, not even I was able to escape its grip. In a nutshell, many (if not most) ethnic Zarathushtis (Iranian and Parsi) do not believe in nor recognize conversion to their religion. On the…

Hey everyone. Technically, Social Issues week started yesterday, however as many of you know, my family and I just bought a house and so we are swept up in packing, moving, making repairs, and all that fun stuff. So the regularity of posts will be frantic for the next week or so, but Project Conversion…

The last time I celebrated New Year’s, I was chugging my last beer before the start of Project Conversion and, at the stroke of midnight, asking myself what the heck I was getting into. Little did I know what this year had in store…and we are only three months in! Now, I get to celebrate the new…

I have a confession to make: I haven’t connected with the Zarathushti faith…at all. January1st of 2011 was the first time I’ve prayed since I left Christianity 10 years ago. I went into Project Conversion thinking that, by the end of the year, I would have a better understanding of other religions…not God. But the unexpected has…

Whenever people ask what I am this month and I answer, “Zarathushti,” their eyes usually glaze over. We’ve spoken at length thus far about what this faith teaches, who founded it, and some of the tenets…but the reason “we” know so little about this faith is due in part to their population. About 280,000…around the…

To kick off our Zarathushti Arts and Culture Week, I thought I’d start off with the most recognizable symbol of the religion: the Farohar. Also known as a fravahar or fravashi, this Zarathushti symbol adorns many fire temples, homes, and worn as jewelry by the faithful. This winged man first appeared during the Achaemenian period of Persian history and…

I attended church service with my wife and two daughters yesterday. I do this on occasion at the request of my wife–not because she wants me to “convert”, but because time is so precious now with all the work I am doing for Project Conversion. If there is no conflict in my monthly schedule, I…

Humata, Hukhta, Huvareshta. Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds…the practice of this is the central tenet of the Zarathushtrian Faith, the path of Asha. Asha is often described as the law of the cosmos, or the way things ought to be. This has implications in both the physical and spiritual world. These worlds are called menog…

When Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher of the 1800’s, wrote the novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra as an attempt to turn our concepts of God and morality on their heads, he selected his protagonist, a man called Zarathustra, because: Zarathustra was the first to consider the fight of good and evil the very wheel in the machinery of things…Zarathustra…

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