Your opinion on rastafarianism

[Jimbo Gomez]

OK, we all know that rastafarians are batshit crazy, but do you consider them Christian in any meaning of the word? Serious replies only please.

[WFHermans]

I support all back to Africa movements by Blacks.

I don't know anything about their religious beliefs except that the late Emperor of Ethiopia has some kind of exalted status, being a descendant of king Solomon. This would make him a very distant relative of Jesus Christ. Emperor Haile Selassi was a devout Christian.

[Jimbo Gomez]

They have some protestant base, and they basically added the worship of emperor Selassie to that. I really don't know how to classify that beliefsystem myself. It obviously has Christian roots, but as it is today, who knows?

[Ahknaton]

They're closer to being Jewish aren't they? Don't they believe that Blacks are the real Jews? "Iron Lion Zion" etc.

http://www.fullmoonfamily.com/Merchant2/graphics/00000001/JWStitchRas46_lg.jpg

[Jimbo Gomez]

I think that's just because of all of that pot they've been smoking. That's another part of their system that is so damn odd. Truly a weird system.

[Geist]

I am not sure it is odd. A healthy attitude towards the religious potential of drugs is fine by me. The only time I have ever felt connected with God was via magic mushrooms. An intense experience, and one I imagine achievable with weed. It is our own disconnection with this potential that clouds our view of such drugs. They are not inherently negative. We bring the negativity to it.

[Jake Featherston]

I don't believe Rastafarians claim to be Christians (or Jews). It is its own religion.

[Jimbo Gomez]

I don't believe Rastafarians claim to be Christians (or Jews). It is its own religion.


Mormons have that too, but nevertheless an argument can be made to call them Christian.

[Jake Featherston]

Mormons have that too, but nevertheless an argument can be made to call them Christian.

I think Mormons prefer to be thought as a sect of Protestantism, while Christian theologians are the ones who prefer to regard Mormonism as a separate religion. Christianity grew out of Judaism, and Mohammed was originally a Christian missionary who devised Islam as a scheme for converting the Arabs to Christianity*, but was quite able to reconcile his new sect back into the Christian mainstream, ergo Islam grew out of Christianity. But when a new religion emerges out of an old one, there's a period of a couple centuries where its not always entirely clear that the new religion (which Mormonism seems to be) isn't just a heretical sect of the previous religion. When the Muslims first conquered Spain, many considered Islam to be a renegade sect of Christianity. It wasn't until later that Christians fully understood the extent to which Mohammed had replaced Jesus in order to form the basis of an entirely new religion.

Mormons employ both the Bible and the Book of Mormon in their religious practices (much as The Torah is included within the Old Testament of the Bible, although we let them keep their filthy Talmud), while I don't believe Rastafarians use the Bible other than as a historical text to jusify some of their oddball claims; they don't see it as Holy.


*I once read a novel about the Byzantine Empire in the 17th century; the Ottomans had never conquered it because Mohammed/"St. Mahmoud" had been successful in converting the Arabs to Christianity.

[Anarch]

...Christianity grew out of Judaism, and Mohammed was originally a Christian missionary who devised Islam as a scheme for converting the Arabs to Christianity*, but was quite able to reconcile his new sect back into the Christian mainstream, ergo Islam grew out of Christianity.

Whoa. Sources, please? This is very interesting.

[Boleslaw]

I honestly cannot say, I don't know that much about rastafarianism.

I'd have more to say about Voodoo than rastafarianism.

Whoa. Sources, please? This is very interesting.
I second this request. This is the first time I've ever heard of Mohammed being a Christian. My recollection saids he was a typical Arab pagan merchant untill he was visited by the Archangel Gabrielle.

I just googled a few bios of the Prophet, and none of them seem to mention this.

The only time I've heard of the argument that Islam grew out of Christianity is what Hilaire Belloc wrote on the issue, but I've never gotten around to reading these writings of his.

[Jake Featherston]

Whoa. Sources, please? This is very interesting.

I think I saw that on the History Channel, sometime within the last year. Not very useful, I know, but in my defense, I didn't know it wasn't widely known until just now.

[Boleslaw]

Excerpts from Hilaire Belloc's The Great Heresies, and Chapter 3 "The Great and Enduring Heresy of Mohammed" (http://www.freivald.org/~jake/library/hilaire-belloc_the-great-heresies_html/hilaire-belloc_the-great-heresies_chapter3.html):

Mohammedanism was a heresy: that is the essential point to grasp before going any further. It began as a heresy, not as a new religion. It was not a pagan contrast with the Church; it was not an alien enemy. It was a perversion of Christian doctrine. Its vitality and endurance soon gave it the appearance of a new religion, but those who were contemporary with its rise saw it for what it was — not a denial, but an adaptation and a misuse, of the Christian thing. It differed from most (not from all) heresies in this, that it did not arise within the bounds of the Christian Church. The chief heresiarch, Mohammed himself, was not, like most heresiarchs, a man of Catholic birth and doctrine to begin with. He sprang from pagans. But that which he taught was in the main Catholic doctrine, oversimplified. It was the great Catholic world — on the frontiers of which he lived, whose influence was all around him and whose territories he had known by travel — which inspired his convictions. He came of, and mixed with, the degraded idolaters of the Arabian wilderness, the conquest of which had never seemed worth the Romans' while.

He took over very few of those old pagan ideas which might have been native to him from his descent. On the contrary, he preached and insisted upon a whole group of ideas which were peculiar to the Catholic Church and distinguished it from the paganism which it had conquered in the Greek and Roman civilization. Thus the very foundation of his teaching was that prime Catholic doctrine, the unity and omnipotence of God. The attributes of God he also took over in the main from Catholic doctrine: the personal nature, the all-goodness, the timelessness, the providence of God, His creative power as the origin of all things, and His sustenance of all things by His power alone. The world of good spirits and angels and of evil spirits in rebellion against God was a part of the teaching, with a chief evil spirit, such as Christendom had recognized. Mohammed preached with insistence that prime Catholic doctrine, on the human side — the immortality of the soul and its responsibility for actions in this life, coupled with the consequent doctrine of punishment and reward after death.

If anyone sets down those points that orthodox Catholicism has in common with Mohammedanism, and those points only, one might imagine if one went no further that there should have been no cause of quarrel. Mohammed would almost seem in this aspect to be a sort of missionary, preaching and spreading by the energy of his character the chief and fundamental doctrines of the Catholic Church among those who had hitherto been degraded pagans of the Desert. He gave to Our Lord the highest reverence, and to Our Lady also, for that matter. On the day of judgment (another Catholic idea which he taught) it was Our Lord, according to Mohammed, who would be the judge of mankind, not he, Mohammed. The Mother of Christ, Our Lady, "the Lady Miriam" was ever for him the first of womankind. His followers even got from the early fathers some vague hint of her Immaculate Conception.1

But the central point where this new heresy struck home with a mortal blow against Catholic tradition was a full denial of the Incarnation.

Mohammed did not merely take the first steps toward that denial, as the Arians and their followers had done; he advanced a clear affirmation, full and complete, against the whole doctrine of an incarnate God. He taught that Our Lord was the greatest of all the prophets, but still only a prophet: a man like other men. He eliminated the Trinity altogether.

With that denial of the Incarnation went the whole sacramental structure. He refused to know anything of the Eucharist, with its Real Presence; he stopped the sacrifice of the Mass, and therefore the institution of a special priesthood. In other words, he, like so many other lesser heresiarchs, founded his heresy on simplification.

Catholic doctrine was true (he seemed to say), but it had become encumbered with false accretions; it had become complicated by needless man-made additions, including the idea that its founder was Divine, and the growth of a parasitical caste of priests who battened on a late, imagined, system of Sacraments which they alone could administer. All those corrupt accretions must be swept away.

There is thus a very great deal in common between the enthusiasm with which Mohammed's teaching attacked the priesthood, the Mass and the sacraments, and the enthusiasm with which Calvinism, the central motive force of the Reformation, did the same. As we all know, the new teaching relaxed the marriage laws — but in practice this did not affect the mass of his followers who still remained monogamous. It made divorce as easy as possible, for the sacramental idea of marriage disappeared. It insisted upon the equality of men, and it necessarily had that further factor in which it resembled Calvinism — the sense of predestination, the sense of fate; of what the followers of John Knox were always calling "the immutable decrees of God."

Mohammed's teaching never developed among the mass of his followers, or in his own mind, a detailed theology. He was content to accept all that appealed to him in the Catholic scheme and to reject all that seemed to him, and to so many others of his time, too complicated or mysterious to be true. Simplicity was the note of the whole affair; and since all heresies draw their strength from some true doctrine, Mohammedanism drew its strength from the true Catholic doctrines which it retained: the equality of all men before God — "All true believers are brothers." It zealously preached and throve on the paramount claims of justice, social and economic......