No-name religions and state regulation
A GOOD friend of mine, now married, doesn’t wear a wedding ring. She didn’t get one and didn’t want one. She doesn’t think she should wear a wedding ring because she is repulsed by the pagan origins of wedding rings.
You could ask me to what religion she belongs, and I would tell you that she is a Christian, but it doesn’t mean Christians don’t wear wedding rings.
Someone else I know doesn’t wear mixed fabrics. At all. He wears 100 per cent cotton, 100 per cent of the time. He lives according to the 613 laws of the Old Testament.
Again, he is a Christian, but it doesn’t mean Christians don’t wear mixed fabrics.
To go further, a well-known media practitioner, who also identifies as a Rastafarian, does not wear shoes. And again, it does not mean that Rastafarians don’t wear shoes.
It is easy for religious people who let priests, pastors, and popes think for them to assume that the religious views of others, like theirs, are confined to church doctrines. There are countless numbers of people across the globe who believe in something that simply hasn’t been labelled yet. And soon enough, once enough people within the same region join them in their beliefs, a label will eventually follow.
Jamaica booms with religiosity. Despite having a largely Christian population, people are anything but uniform in their thinking. Denominations of all kinds abound, and within these denominations, little pockets of sub-denominations. That tends to happen where people have access to religious text that they can read on their own and interpret themselves – a luxury that didn’t always exist.
I wonder what happened, perhaps in the early 1900s, when the first Jehovah’s Witnesses on their death bed declared that they would not be accepting a blood transfusion because of their ‘religious beliefs’. Did the doctors engage the patient in a heated debate, or did they make a call to the psychiatric ward? Either way, today, there is a robust movement of Jehovah’s Witnesses across the world – more than eight million strong.
INTERESTING ARGUMENT
What is the point here? Not long ago, it was determined by the Supreme Court that a little girl who was refused entrance into the Kensington Primary School last year because her parents refused to cut off her locs,did not have her constitutional rights breached. That is one issue that can be discussed, but the argument that stood out to me was that the court did not accept that this girl’s locs were an expression of her Nazarene beliefs. Very interesting.
The court, apparently having been previously unaware of what the Nazarene vow was and having been unaware that some Jamaican people subscribe to it, determined that whatever her beliefs actually were, they didn’t preclude the possibility of her cutting her locs. If she couldn’t say she was a Rastafarian, then she couldn’t qualify as having religious views that prohibit her from cutting her locs off.
People’s consciences are not limited to the dictates of well-defined religious groups. People do go to bookstores, buy religious texts, read them, and use the Internet to arrive at all kinds of conscientious conclusions about God, the world, and man. Trying to corner people into declaring a church or religious group with which they are affiliated in order for their self-proclaimed religious views to be taken seriously is just another subtle attempt at conscience control.
With that said, I’m also intrigued as to why one would need to go to one’s pastor to get a letter of exemption explaining why one should be excused from working on Saturdays or why one should be excused from having to get a certain vaccine. Can’t people speak for themselves? One does not need a pastor in order to have religious beliefs. And it is uncertain whether one even needs religious beliefs in order to have a pastor.
This is why a recent suggestion that was floated by numerous clergymen to have all churches incorporated and registered under the law needs to be seriously rethought. Last week’s bizarre events at the Pathways International Kingdom Restoration Ministries have only given an added impetus to the call for tighter regulations for churches. However, we really need to get out of the culture of knee-jerk reactions every time there is a tragic or otherwise dramatic event.
Firstly, religious beliefs are not nearly as discrete as to have well-defined groups of believers in all cases. What one believes today may also not be what one believes tomorrow. And to go further, one may not even know what one believes since during periods of transition, people are often very unsure of what their doctrinal convictions actually are. Consequently, ‘churches’ and other religious groups open and close with the seasons.
People should be free to put their minds and consciences to work in determining the god they will worship and in what ways, and that has nothing to do with state regulation. Some will argue that churches posing a threat to the well-being of their subscribers is reason enough for the Government to start keeping tabs on the country’s churches, but if laws are in place to prevent crimes and other excesses, why would churches need to be singled out?
While it is easy to make victims out of those who are indoctrinated with harmful ideologies, people have to take some responsibility for their choices. It is easy to blame the one washing the brain, but people also make conscious choices about who they turn themselves over to for shepherding. And in many cases where we believe people are in need of saving, they simply don’t want to and, therefore, cannot be saved.
Live and let live!