The Rastafari find Marijuana Helps Them to be Better Christians

The number of ways one can be a Christian has always been huge. While is seems vast today it has always been this way. The Rastafari go way back to Jamica and the time of slavery. They found marijuana lifted them from their misery and put them in touch with a spiritual life. Their Christian spiritual life, enhanced by ganja, took them back to their beloved homeland in Africa. 

Now the Rastafari need more marijuana than they are allowed. Someone has decreed some marijuana is OK for their religious ceremonies but not the amount the Rastafari need. I cannot understand how it can be freedom of religion when government with its Christian values makes decisions that the "sincerely held" beliefs of the Rastafari it needs more ganja is ignored. 

Native Americans were finally approved to use the drug peyote in their religious ceremonies. I think it is even allowed in prisons for native religious ceremonies.

Academics have tried to date the earliest use of mind-altering drugs. There are cave drawings dated 4,000 years ago paying homage to the mushroom. The drawings are interpreted as worship or something spiritual. Early records of white European conquest of the American conquests found its inhabitants chewed leaves that gave them a boost.

Christianity is all over the map about the drug, alcohol. Psalm 104:15 tells us wine produces a "glad heart and shiny face." All readers know there are branches of temperance in the faith and branches of "wine is good." I've read some contemporary services include beer. If wine is OK why not beer and whiskey?

The church I grew up in was, at that time, a temperance branch. While members whispered about other members' drinking no one admitted to it. Coffee, with the drug caffeine, was praised without end. I remember many conversations about that wonderful drink, coffee.

It's fun to remember my medical student friend who had graduated from Southern Baptist, Baylor. Southern Baptists are officially temperance. At parties my friend would imitate his professor religion who told of the wine drank by sheep herders. "The Bibles uses the word 'wine' but it was grape juice and not fermented, not at all" he would preach. My friend would then explain the "miracle" of how grape juice could be carried in a warm skin bag for days and not ferment.   

When I visited Bangladesh some years back I learned of the leaf, betel or pann, chewed there. In Africa there is khat. 

Evidence that gods and religions of all kinds are more real in the mind when the mind is given a boost from drugs. Let freedom (of religion of the mind) ring.