CunningLinguist

and we can nibble on a wall or two even.

i hadn`t planned on posting again for the day, but this required getting off my chest.

i just had dinner delivered. pizza. hawaiian. the delivery guy asks “are you going to eat that?” i look at him puzzled as to why i would order something, pay good money and not eat it. the bewilderment at his question was obviously showing on my face, he adds, “there`s ham on it”

and it dawns on me, my hair. right.

since i moved here i`ve come to realise that in jamaica, rastafari holds the patent on dreadlocks or something equally insipid. this is not the first time it`s happened.

ok let me back track, if you don`t know according to what sect of rastafari you belong to, you don`t:

eat meat at all

eat swine

eat salt

eat food prepared by a woman menstruating

i`m sure i`ve missed some but it basically changes depending on who your talk to.

on with our story. yes, on with our story.

i went to burger king one day for lunch and order a whopper with bacon and cheese, again the question, “you sure you want that?” i shrugged it off.

but in the last week, i`ve had to answer the same question posed to me by various people i interact with on a daily basis. the conversation goes like this:

“are you rastafarian?”

“no.”

“ok”

“are you christian?”

“no. i don`t deal well with organised religion”

“ok.”

“so why you have your hair like that?”

“because straw… [insert odd look here] nevermind, i made a decision to grow my hair, a social experiment, a statement…”

“oh ok”

and the conversation usually degenerates from there.

i have to laugh or i`m going to cry, as i said last week, assumption is the mother of all fuck ups. dreadlocks does not a rastafari make. i`ve never been a vegetarian, i eat pork. lots of it actually, as often as i can.  i`ve been growing my hair for eight years and will probably cut in two years. i haven`t made a decision about that yet. so i can safely say. i predate revlon rasta trend by about at least a good two years. and while i`m on the topic about assumptions people make about me because of my hair which i forgot to mention last time, i`m not a some jacque st. john caribbean stud either, but that`s the subject of a whole other post.

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dreadlocks, rastafarian

it`s sunday and i haven`t got fuck all to do all day. i`m loathe to say i`m bored, but that would pretty much sum it up. i have no desire to flick mindlessly through the channels. i could walk to the office and while the hours online, but i don`t want to start the precedent of being in the office every weekend.

i have some shirts that need ironing but without iron or ironing board there`s no way that`s getting done. there is really nothing for me to do around here. i had breakfast and i cooked and had lunch, had a post lunch nap and bath.

all this sitting around idly has me thinking about church. i`m not a regular churchgoer, i think i can be pleasantly described as a hatch, match, dispatch churchgoer and even then i`m picky about those that i do attend. for the thoroughly confused; hatch, match, dispatch translate to baptisms, weddings and funerals.

i`m a lapsed catholic which i suppose makes me the worse sort religious cynic. i honestly believe everyone has a right to their beliefs but my issues start when your religion starts to encroach on my freedoms and is used as a basis for intolerance.

i wasn`t always like this. i was baptised catholic, even though my mother was a methodist, what it meant is that every weekend i was in church twice, i would go to mass on a saturday and then off to service with my mother on a sunday, so i was pretty much covered on all bases. i went to a parochial school and by the time i was nine i was an altar boy, i made my first communion with the boys in my class. i went to another parochial school for my high school education and was pretty much a good catholic boy, well with the exception of ducking the mandatory religious knowledge class in my first semester at school and the pornography club i was running by my third year in school [another story for another day]. i was still an altar boy, i did mass at least three times a week. i even had thoughts of becoming a priest. i hadn`t had any run-ins with the child-molesters the church is famous for breeding and i still said the  apostle`s creed and believed it wholeheartedly.

all that changed in my final year of high school. in my caribbean history class i started to question the church`s track record in the new world, you know; the magna carta, forced conversions, genocide, slavery, then as i read more, the inquisition, their stance during world war II, you get the picture and then my parish started hitting on me, culminating with my expulsion from the confirmation class because i spurned his advances.

i started to question, first i just questioned catholicism, but i started noticing the same levels of hypocrisy and double standards were part and parcel of religion. then i started doing research on christianity and that opened a whole new can of worms. i`m going to raise a point here that most people either don`t know or chose to ignore; until the advent commercial printing, the bible was hand-copied by a select few priest and even then distribution was limited. so no matter what version of christianity you practise today, the bible you use is based on a version originally approved by emperor constantine and amended as seen fit by various popes up til the reformation.

another amusing fact [especially in light of various christian organisations, decrying halloween as a satanic/pagan ritual] is that all the major christian high holy days or holidays are actually just conversions of pagan festivals. beltane became easter, the winter solstice became christmas. makes you think doesn`t.

but before i come off as biased, i feel the same about all religions. religion is a construct. go back far enough and you`ll find some power-brokers, politician, king, elder, whatever, telling people how and what to believe. it helps keeps the masses in control and always to the exclusion of someone.

all this doesn`t mean i don`t believe in a force greater than myself, i believe. i just don`t need someone telling me how to believe. and yes i am a hypocrite. my children are baptised and attend church regularly. why you ask? so they get can get the same platform i had, when the time comes, they too will question or maybe they wont, but they would not have been deprived on an opportunity.

believe it or not, this foul mouthed, arrogant, sexually starved, tattooed, pierced person before you was once and innocent, believing, unassuming wee lad.

i was a good catholic, i went to church every week, i was an altar boy, i even at one point considered joining the priesthood. i went to a catholic all boys school as well. my innocence was not lost to some sticky fingered, pedophile in the church. no i lost my innocence and childhood naivety in my caribbean history class, close the time i lost my virginity as well come to think of it.

i had a teacher who encouraged us to ask question. to defy convention and i started to wonder about the magna carta and why the native peoples of the americas were slaughtered in the name of god and why slavery was encouraged. basically why the church allowed so much evil to be done in their names.

at first i asked these questions of myself, but i had no answers, so i turned to my books and other books in the library but they only uncovered more atrocities committed in the name of `god`, so i turned to the priest who ran our school and they just seemed uncomfortable as the toed the line with rote responses. the more questions i asked, the more disturbed i became, i tried to be a good catholic but it wasn`t in me any more, how could i believe in something so corrupt.

i started reading the bible but the incongruities became more glaring to me and the questions i was asking began to reflect on the bible itself. i turned to islam but their track record wasn`t much better.

i realised religion on the whole was an opiate. the basic tenets were established by power brokers and politicians to help keep the masses in line.

i don`t take anything at face value, i don`t believe everything the news tells me to and i still question, on a daily basis. i question organised religion, i question politicians, businessmen, i question the news which is paid for by advertisers. but i work in a business where we sell lives and half truths for a living. it doesn`t necessarily get me the answers but it helps me perceive them better when they do appear.