Well I'm glad that you can respond to it in a coherent way that you are happy with, and I'm certainly not challenging your right to do so. However, unfortunately it just so happens that I don't feel capable of doing anything similiar myself. I'm wholly confident that many aspects of my life would be regarded as supremely Babylonian by a comitted Rasta, and not just of who I am, the background I'm from, but because of things I do, things I've actually made a choice about. And the thing is, with at least some (if not all) of those things, I feel that I'm justified in doing them, they're things that I've thought about and come to the reasoned conclusion that they're the right thing to, so there we have a genuine clash of beliefs.
The whole concept of Babylon is in fact one of things I disagree with most strongly in Rastafari, it's such an unhelpful, Big Other type of idea, no better than old hippies wittering on about the System or the Man - the idea that there's one single, coherent thing that is at the root of all of your problems in life, and that belief in that thing allows you to comfortably divide the world up into 'them' and 'us', just doesn't ring true with any of my experience of the world. I'm also strongly opposed to any belief system which promotes the idea of a 'chosen people', or a chosen land/nation. Since I've been slagging him off a bit as per usual, I should say that this is something that k-punk is very good on, the idea that 'there is no good ethnicity' and that the false belief in such cannot form the basis for a politics.
Finally, whilst I don't doubt the scriptural accuracy of your claim that there is no single 'right' way to follow Rastafari, I would have to say that this doesn't match up with my experience of Rastas expounding their beliefs, or indeed with the commentary of experienced observers like yourself.
Edit: but, y'know, I'm honestly not having a go at all. I'm just trying to explain why I personally don't feel comfortable with closely associating myself with the Rastafari faith, even on a cultural/political level.
watch this then tell me that babylon is some kind of hippy grumbling.
http://www.lifeanddebt.org/
Last edited: