Rastafari Heresy

According to the Wikipedia article on the Rastafari movement, "Rastafari are criticised, particularly by Christian groups, for taking Biblical quotes out of context, for picking and choosing what they want from the Bible, and for bringing elements into Rastafari that do not appear in the Bible."

This seems comment-able... From the point of view of this class, we keep hammering on the idea that there's nothing ELSE to do besides interpret Scripture texts the way culture and opinion dictate, and there is no CORRECT way to look at these texts. This seems to make the "Christian groups" here slightly hypocritical -- all that the Rastafari groups can be criticized for is having interpretations of Scripture that differ (albeit in ways the Christian groups find heretical) from others. On the topic of 'elements that do not appear in the Bible', the lines Christian groups draw around what is "the Bible" is as arbatrary (though not meaningless) as anything -- a book in my library, "The Gnostic Bible" (which I'm disappointed isn't being studied in this class) is a huge fat collection of early Christian mystical texts that didn't make it through the "bible committee" so to speak.

A thing I like about the Rastafari movement is the fact that they (though this might seem so transparent just because they are a modern movement) sort of guiltlessly take Scripture and turn its meaning into what is most useful to them. The individualistic character of Rastafarianism seems to make it almost infinitely mutable.