Would help all involved if you can post an authoritative link to describe the tenants of your religion. I for one have zero understanding. It would keep you from continually having to define and redefine it for everyone.
As I remember it, the Bahai Faith is, above all else, fiercerly inclusive. One almost gets the feeling that they would have a crisis of conscience if they somehow learned for certain that some people can't truly feel well received by their faith.
One of their main and most admirable values is the deemphasizing of ethnic and national origins. They
truly think of humanity as a giant brotherhood of the equally deserving, and tend to apparently forget outright about national boundaries.
Historically, IIRC they originated in Iran, and IMO it is not too out of the mark to think of them as Shia Islam with adjustments for a new couple of prophets (they will call them Messengers, but in all honesty the distinction is academic) and a short succession of later chairmen, albeit with different titles and less exalted authority.
One of the qualities that they inherited from Islam is the radical sense that ultimately all people are equally deserving and therefore deserve a reaching hand to offer brotherhood. Some twenty years later I still marvel at how deep, beautiful a mark that value leaves in them. We all could learn a lot from them in that regard.
Still, it can't be helped but noticed that they are very much a revealed, Abrahamic religion. They of course see that as a quality as opposed to a disadvantage, as did Islam and Christianity before them. But it puts them in a very awkward position when it comes to their claims about other, non-Abrahamic religions, to the point that I wish they did not claim inspiration from Zoroastrism, Hinduism and Buddhism (which they do). The good will is rather blatant, even embarrassing. The Bahai would like little better than to be acknowledged as brothers in faith of pretty much all religions that they meet, despite the considerable challenges in doing so even with the handful they claim a direct connection to.
They are also highly organized in a political sense. I don't think they are actually a majority in any one country or even city, but despite or perhaps because of that they make a point of keeping regular contact with their peers of the local community. There is a lot of formal decision-making, and a well established hierarchy that ends up at the Universal House of Justice. They have a goal of ultimately establishing an unified global government, which I suppose scares many people. Not me. For one thing, there is no merit to keeping people separate and mistrusting of each other. For another, it will take a lot of demographic growth before the Bahai become a political force capable of such a feat, and odds are that a lot of good will come from the effort before the time comes to wonder if maybe they should be discouraged from it.
They don't really discourage anyone from learning about any other religion, and particularly not about other scriptures. But they tend to be somewhat unaware of how unusual their Abrahamic framework is far as religions in general go, and end up making unadvisable assumptions about other religions. To their merit, they also make a strong effort to correct that flaw. Even so, their practice is very much centered on Abrahamic expectations, on the writings of Bahahullah (sp?) and his successors, and on an often unspoken assumption that most or even all of humanity would embrace or at least support the Bahai Faith if they only understood it well enough.
As religions go, they are probably the finest that Abrahamism has to offer except perhaps for Judaism, which sort of specialized in a different field. They could be a truly
great religion, perhaps even greater than Hinduism, if they only learned to rise above the Abrahamic trappings of its own origins. Come to think of it, there must be a few who do, and they must have quite the history to tell. Unfortunately, one quality that the Bahai Faith does not have is the desire to encourage open disagreement with the authority of its founders and figures of authority, from the Bab to the current Universal House of Justice.
@ratikala
