Can someone explain the religion Rastafari?
Rastafari is a movement of Black people who know Africa as the birthplace of Mankind and the throne of Emperor Haile Selassie I — a 20th Century Manifestation of God who has lighted our pathway towards righteousness, and is therefore worthy of reverence. The Rastafari movement grew out of the darkest depression that the descendants of African slaves in Jamaica have ever lived in — the stink and crumbling shacks of zinc and cardboard that the tattered remnants of humanity built on the rotting garbage of the dreadful Dungle on Kingston’s waterfront. Out of this filth and slime arose a sentiment so pure, so without anger, so full of love, the Philosophy of the Rastafari faith. Freedom of Spirit, Freedom from Slavery, and Freedom of Africa, was its cry. Religions always reflect the social and geographical environment out of which they emerge, and Jamaican Rastafarianism is no exception: for example, the use of marijuana as a sacrament and aid to meditation is logical in a country where a
Rastafari developed among an oppressed people who felt society had nothing to offer them except more suffering.[3][7] Rastas may regard themselves as conforming to certain visions of how Africans should live,[3][8] reclaiming what they see as a culture stolen from them when their ancestors were brought on slave ships to Jamaica, the movement’s birthplace. The messages expounded by the Rastafari promote love and respect for all living things and emphasize the paramount importance of human dignity and self-respect. Above all else, they speak of freedom from spiritual, psychological, as well as physical slavery and oppression. In their attempts to heal the wounds inflicted upon the African peoples by the imperialist nations of the world, Rastafari continually extol the virtue and superiority of African cultures and civilization past and present. The doctrines of Rastafari depart radically from the norms of the conventional modern western mind,[3][9] a trait of the movement deliberately en
