Apart from technological factors, unification of the planet
is exerting other, even more direct effects on thought. It would be impossible
to exaggerate, for example, the transformative impact on global consciousness
that has resulted from mass travel on an international scale. Greater still
have been the consequences of the enormous migrations that the world has
witnessed during the century and a half since the Báb declared His mission.
Millions of refugees fleeing from persecution have swept like tidal waves back
and forth across the European, African and Asiatic continents, particularly.
Amid the suffering such turmoil has caused, one perceives the progressive
integration of the world’s races and cultures as the citizenry of a single
global homeland. As a result, people of every background have been exposed to
the cultures and norms of others about whom their forefathers knew little or
nothing, exciting a search for meaning that cannot be evaded.
(From “One Common
Faith”, a document commissioned by and prepared under the supervision of the
Universal House of Justice, 2005)
