Summary of Bahá'í beliefs
God is transcendent and can't be known directly. God is known through the lives and teachings of his great prophets, the most recent of whom was Bahá'u'lláh.
All human beings have a soul that lives for ever. All human beings are members of a single race, which should soon be united in a single global community. All human beings are different, but equal; there should be no inequality between races or sexes. All religions have the same spiritual foundation, despite their apparent differences.
Bahá'í religion may be unique in the way that it accepts all other faiths as true and valid.
Bahá'ís accept the divine nature of the missions of Abraham, Moses, Zoroaster, the Buddha, Jesus and the Prophet Muhammad. They believe each one was a further stage in the revelation of God. Other prophets and Manifestations are also accepted.
Bahá'í beliefs about God
Bahá'ís believe there is one God and that all the universe and creation belong to him
God is omnipotent, perfect and has complete knowledge of life
Bahá'ís believe that there has only ever been one God, who is called by different names in different religions
God is too great to be ever understood by the finite human mind
Knowledge of God means knowledge of the attributes of God
The only thing we can actually know about God is that God exists
So when we attribute properties to God we are actually making a false analogy based on human ideas - but it's the best that we can do.
Knowing about God
Since we can't comprehend God directly, the best way to get an idea of God is by looking at the lives and teachings of his messengers (the Manifestations of God) and at the world God created.
God and other religions
Any description of God is bound to be coloured and limited by the views and cultural background of the person making the description. Bahá'u'lláh thought that this was why different religions had different ideas of God.
It was not that each religion was looking at a different reality called God (whatever that was) - they were all trying to describe the same reality, but their descriptions were built out of their own experiences and cultures, and so were different.
Abdu'l-Bahá put it like this:
The differences among the religions of the world are due to the varying types of minds.
Abdu'l-Bahá
Thus for a Bahá'í the different views of God held by different religions are the closest that that particular culture and time can come to an idea of the absolute reality of God, and are helpful to the people of that culture.
But these ideas of God are nothing like the true reality of God, because humans don't have the mental ability to understand that reality.
Incarnation
Bahá'ís believe that God cannot become incarnate in a human being.
Gender
Bahá'ís do not regard God as having a gender. Although the Bahá'í writings use a masculine pronoun to refer to God, this is to suit the language in which they were originally written.