ellauri108.html on line 67: While pronouncing the tetragrammaton is forbidden for Jews, articulating "Jah"/"Yah" is allowed, but is usually confined to prayer and study. In the modern English-language Christian context, the name Jah is commonly associated with the Rastafari.
ellauri108.html on line 94: Jesus is an important figure in Rastafari. However, practitioners reject the traditional Christian view of Jesus, particularly the depiction of him as a white European, believing that this is a perversion of the truth. They believe that Jesus was a black African, and that the white Jesus was a false god. Many Rastas regard Christianity as the creation of the white man; they treat it with suspicion out of the view that the oppressors (white Europeans) and the oppressed (black Africans) cannot share the same God. Many Rastas take the view that the God worshipped by most white Christians is actually the Devil, and a recurring claim among Rastas is that the Pope is Satan or the Antichrist. Rastas therefore often view Christian preachers as deceivers and regard Christianity as being guilty of furthering the oppression of the African diaspora, frequently referring to it as having perpetrated "mental enslavement".
ellauri108.html on line 160: There are various options that might explain how cannabis smoking came to be part of Rastafari. By the 8th century, Arab traders had introduced cannabis to Central and Southern Africa. In the 19th century, enslaved Bakongo people arrived in Jamaica, where they established the religion of Kumina. In Kumina, cannabis was smoked during religious ceremonies in the belief that it facilitated possession by ancestral spirits. The religion was largely practiced in south-east Jamaica's Saint Thomas Parish, where a prominent early Rasta, Leonard Howell, lived while he was developing many of Rastafari's beliefs and practices; it may have been through Kumina that cannabis became part of Rastafari. A second possible source was the use of cannabis in Hindu rituals. Hindu migrants arrived in Jamaica as indentured servants from British India between 1834 and 1917, and brought cannabis with them. A Jamaican Hindu priest, Laloo, was one of Howell's spiritual advisors, and may have influenced his adoption of ganja. The adoption of cannabis may also have been influenced by the widespread medicinal and recreational use of cannabis among Afro-Jamaicans in the early 20th century. Early Rastafarians may have taken an element of Jamaican culture which they associated with their peasant past and the rejection of capitalism and sanctified it by according it Biblical correlates.
ellauri108.html on line 235: Sub-divisions of Rastafari are often referred to as "houses" or "mansions", in keeping with a passage from the Gospel of John (14:2): as translated in the King James Bible, Jesus states "In my father's house are many mansions". The three most prominent branches are the House of Nyabinghi, the Bobo Ashanti, and the Twelve Tribes of Israel, although other important groups include the Church of Haile Selassie I, Inc., and the Fulfilled Rastafari. By fragmenting into different houses without any single leader, Rastafari became more resilient amid opposition from Jamaica's government during the early decades of the movement.
ellauri108.html on line 250: As of 2012, there were an estimated 700,000 to 1,000,000 Rastas worldwide. They can be found in many different regions, including most of the world's major population centres. Rastafari's influence on wider society has been more substantial than its numerical size, particularly in fostering a racial, political, and cultural consciousness among the African diaspora and Africans themselves. Men dominate Rastafari. In its early years, most of its followers were men, and the women who did adhere to it tended to remain in the background. This picture of Rastafari's demographics has been confirmed by ethnographic studies conducted in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
ellauri108.html on line 270: A smaller number of Rastas are found in Muslim-majority countries of West Africa, such as Gambia and Senegal. One West African group that wear dreadlocks are the Baye Faal, a Mouride sect in Senegambia, some of whose practitioners have started calling themselves "Rastas" in reference to their visual similarity to Rastafari. The popularity of dreadlocks and marijuana among the Baye Faal may have been spread in large part through access to Rasta-influenced reggae in the 1970s. A small community of Rastas also appeared in Burkina Faso.
ellauri108.html on line 281: Rastafari attracted membership from within the Maori population of New Zealand, and the Aboriginal population of Australia. Rastafari has also established a presence in Japan, and in Israel, primarily among those highlighting similarities between Judaism and Rastafari.
7