Rasta Jesus Will Totally Smoke With You
Source: WordPress
Imagine if Jesus had six kids, carried a sword, and held the rank of Field Marshall in the British Army. Are you picturing that? Okay, now imagine you’re high as a kite and your Savior lived recently enough to be a fan of The Jeffersons. Meet Ras Tafari, aka Haile Selassie, aka “the Lion of God.”
Selassie says “Sup?”Source: Skepticism
Rastafarians, who number between 200,000 and 900,000 (note the margin of error) revere Haile Selassie as the (formerly) living avatar of God. In Rastafarianism, there is one God (Jah) who presents Himself to mortals via Jesus Christ (Yeshua) whose spirit animated Haile Selassie (Ras Tafari), the former emperor of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) until 1976, when he was overthrown, murdered, and buried under a latrine (bathroom).
One of the factors driving the veneration of Selassie was the growing “Back to Africa” movement that spent the 1930s growing around Marcus Garvey. Though Garvey himself was a Methodist, he often made pronouncements to the effect that an African messiah would someday arise. In this religious tradition, Selassie—who is, remember, Jesus Christ—came into the world to save the descendants of African slaves living in exile in the New World. His apparition was the Second Coming, and he was to lead his children back to Africa.
Source: Etsy
Through all of this, and to the day he died, according to some sources, Selassie denied his rather surprising claim to divinity. According to Selassie, when he visited Jamaica in 1966 and saw the throngs gathered at the airport to revere him as God, he felt a certain pressure to respect their beliefs, but urged Rastafarian elders against viewing any mortal as divine. Again, it will come as no surprise to students of religion that nobody listened, and that worship of Ras Tafari continues to this day.
