Over at Fleming’s main blog, we were lightheartedly debating Rastafarianism in the comments section of his post on Jehovah. This morning I awoke full of my dream, which had some relevance to his comments, but I will bore my own non-existent readers here rather than his real ones there.
This new blog is designed to have shorter and more spontaneous posts than my established one A Wayfarer’s Notes. I’ll pretty it up (tart it up as we say in England) in due course—I mean the template, pictures and so on.
OK, the dream. I was at a gathering of members of the cult to which I used to belong. Open-air audiences were assembling in front of two main stages, as at the Glastonbury pop festival (at which my former cult leader spoke from the stage, in 1971). But I didn’t bother. Then some acolyte gently suggested that I didn’t need to be where I was (in some hut, watching someone look after a baby left there by its mother) but do something useful myself, or else wait in devotion for the Master to appear.
It was one of those delicious dreams in which you are half awake, half aware that you can do as you like and not have to conform to the crowd. Do you get those? I could have replied to the acolyte with my real feelings: that the Master was none of my business and I was none of his; that it was my life, and I would go where the spirit moved me from now on.
But I just mumbled and stayed where I was, for even in the dream I did not want to do anything to burst the bubble of infatuation that gripped the other cult members. Yes, I realised that religion requires infatuation so that you are blind to its flaws. This explained what Fleming said about Rastafarianism:
I’m not impressed with a God incarnate who died of respiratory complications and is not reported to have risen from the dead, even if he did wear a pretty uniform. I mean, how can you worship a God incarnate who is no longer carnate?
I find it comical yet awesome that the raggedy dreadlocked Rastas worship this dead man (the late Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie) in a pretty uniform and claim he is not dead at all. Comical and touching and enlightening too. Helps understand religion itself. Helps understand Christianity. How could Christians worship a man who was so despised by the authorities he was publicly executed? We don’t find it unbelievable simply because we have been conditioned to it all our lives. The improbable becomes the main article of faith. The gallows is hung on gold chains round necks as a fashion accessory or declaration of commitment.
Hey man, if we can believe so many impossible things before breakfast, what can we not do, at least in imagination? This is how all art and literature flourishes, as well as dictatorships and confidence tricksterism of all kinds.