Is Rastafarianism A Proper Religion?

My daughter asked: Is Rastafarianism a proper religion? Although I could guess what she meant, I told her to clarify: What do you mean by 'proper religion'? Something like Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, she said. Oh, I see. Briefly, I set it into perspective for her. There's no such thing as a 'proper' religion. A religion is a religion, whether it is Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Sangoism, Mormonism or Rastafarianism. No hierarchy whatsoever. All religions are spawns of the imagination, figments of fear, delusion, ignorance, or straight-out battiness - or the throwup of phantasmagoria as in the case of Peyote Religion.
I don't think worshipping an Emperor of Ethiopia who was clearly bemused by it all is more ridiculous than the worship of a wraithlike ahistorical figure called Jesus who, in the stories written about him, was somewhat confused whether he was the 'son of man' or the 'son of God.' Nor will I use the attributive 'proper' to describe a religion whose followers take as holy writ a pieced-together chapbook of ancient tales, injunctions and diktats, all said to be spoken by an unbodied voice to a man under a rock or dune in Arabia. Although some Buddhists take themselves too seriously, the religion itself stresses maya - illusion -and it does not rejoice in blowing the sweet-sour raspberry of heaven and hell or bloviating about a draconian singular god.
If you grew up in Africa in the 1970s and 80s, you would - or might - go through a phase of Rasta consciousness. There was Bob Marley, of course, helming the 'Zion train' of dreadlocked Reggae-making Jamaicans who popularised and proselytised Rastafarianism. There was cannabis, the main constituent of Rasta eucharist, oodles of it. Impressionably enough, under the influence of this 'herb', I tried to listen and stomp to Peter Tosh's 'Legalise It' and 'Bush Doctor' while sporting scrubby unconvincing dreadlocks. Something I never quite understood was the deification of Haile Selassie, the late Emperor of Ethiopia. While recognising the Jamaicans' connection with Africa, I thought there was something off-beam about them making a god out of an Ethiopian monarch. Considered the scion of Solomon, he was also believed to be their King of kings, Lion of Judah. I remember asking myself: even if Selassie was all of these things, how are my Jamaican brothers and sisters connected to Judah or King Solomon? You see, there is an overlap between my deconstruction of Rastafarianism and rejection of Christianity. I could see some parallels between Selassie and Jesus - or between those who made both out as gods of some sort. There is the same mass delusion. Same hero-worship. Same idolatry. Same aggrandisement and over-identification with a father figure. Same embrace of absurdity and unreason.
In a recent post by a Facebook friend about the absurdity of God-belief, I commented that 'I can't get my head around the idea of God and religion.' Someone replied, 'Bro, smoke some weed.' I couldn't help but chuckle to myself. Sadly, I am now teetotal when it comes to pot-smoking. But then, having grown older and mellower, I think it might indeed work. If I dosed myself up with Fela Kuti-size rolls of skunk, I might, like Amerindians stoned out on peyote, begin to hear the call from God, see Moses and his burning bush, David, Solomon, Elijah. I might even glimpse Haile Selassie.

How I Became a Christian... Not.

Yesterday, I made an absolute burnt offering of a slice of bread which stayed in the toaster a few moments too long. I was about to toss it into the bin when I glimpsed the Face - that familiar, popular, bearded, iconic face. It leapt out at me so keenly that I nearly convinced myself that the stippled tracings I saw on the piece of burnt bread cohered into that stock face of Jesus. It was Sunday morning, and I could very well have gone on to zap a secular, carefully and thoughtfully constructed edifice of Reason and Irreligion, christianise myself there and then, make a 'spiritual' sea change, embrace God and his dearly beloved son and doppelganger, Jesus.
Let's pursue the counterfactual. It was indeed Sunday morning, and, alas, I saw the face of Jesus of Nazareth charcoaled across one side of the slice of carbonised bread. A voice descended from heaven and told me to stop being a bullheaded Saul and become Paul, Jesus of Nazareth's chief bullshitter, to stop being a scapegrace and enter into God's grace-scape, to stop being an unbelieving asshole and become part of the flock of Christian sheep. Amazingly, the voice had an effect - affect, more like - and I began to speak in tongues, sing and dance, glorifying and jitterbugging for Jehovah. Drunk with rapture, I sauntered off to a church, the nearest evangelical ark, to confess my sins and profess faith and born-again belief. Everyone was happy for me, and I became an effigy of the lapsed atheist, a lost rogue ant who found his way back to the teeming anthill. After all, it was only last week that someone I had not seen for years, aghast at how irreligiously unregenerate I still was, again forecast how I would truly become not just a Christian but a pastor. Tandem with this prediction, I made a beeline for pastorate after becoming a Christian. And miracle of miracles, within 24 hours, I became a 'Man of God,' ordained and all that. Praise be!
But it didn't exactly happen that way. The burnt toast with the cloudy outline of something that I couldn't very well persuade myself was a face that did not have that effect. And it could not. But let's proceed with the assumption that I discerned a face, and apparently the face of Jesus. Which Jesus? That of the Nazarene, who may or may not have lived in a place called Judea 2000 years ago? As we all know now, the received Jesus physiognomy could very well have been that of Cesare Borgia or that of Max Von Sydow or Robert Powell, whose lean, handsome, if hippieish, face still graces the walls and altars of evangelical churches. I knew that even if any image was singed on the incinerated slice of bread, it would be anything but that of a man from 2000 years ago or anyone from any time. It might well be a small, charred, nondescript surface whose random ridges and lines vaguely described a hairy face.
Which brings to mind a particular Jesus' optical illusion. You stare at some Rorschach-esque images for a minute or so, and when you lift up your head and focus on any wall around you, you see Jesus. I knew a Christian person who took this optical mindfuck so seriously that she thought Jesus had indeed popped up on her wall, who weaved the sign of the cross and breathed a momentary Jesus-themed prayer, who thought the illusion shouldn't be repeated often as it might offend Jesus and God, that it might amount to blasphemy, like calling the name of the Lord in vain. And thereby hangs the whole sorry tale of religion.
However, just as there isn't any Jesus on the wall and it's all fancy, there can't have been any Jesus face etched on burnt toast. When you say you see Jesus on the sea-lapped sands of a beach, or in a frothy cup of cappuccino, or in the areolae of your girlfriend's tits, you have only seen what your mind trickily tells your eyes to see. It's pareidolia, a relatively recent subcategory of apophenia - the tendency in humans to see patterns and meanings in random objects, in smoke and clouds.