By Crispin Sartwell

One question that has always nagged at me is how Christianity (for example) ends up dominating much of the world for millennia. This of course is only a question on the supposition that Christianity is false.

But not only do I think it's false; in some sense I think it's arbitrary; that a wide variety of mythical cycles other than Christ's passion and a wide variety of other messiahs could have done as well. Really, you could not throw a brick in the Middle East of that era (or almost anywhere in the world today, for that matter) without hitting some chump performing miracles and claiming the Godhead.

But there are indeed compelling aspects to Christianity: the idea of God made fully human, for example - perhaps Christianity's most characteristic teaching - though it is not entirely unique and is not (obviously, I guess) logically coherent, is a powerful idea.

An interesting lesson about the genesis of religions can, I think, be learned from Rastafarianism, a religion of the 20th century. I say this not to ridicule Rastafarianism: which is as plausible as any religion and has its own extremely compelling aspects. I say this, rather, to understand the phenomenon of religion from an external point of view, as someone who finds the whole thing fundamentally unbelievable.

Rastafarianism worships the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie as God. Selassie is in some ways an unlikely candidate: small and unprepossessing, pretty mild though pretty inefficient, with a grandiose streak but not one that extended to claiming his own divinity. As emperors go, fairly mediocre, deposed, and dead as a doornail. The charismatic origin of the religion, however, was Marcus Garvey, who had a gift of leadership and organization, and who was perhaps the first international star to emerge from the island of Jamaica. Sometimes he talked or wrote in a kind of prophetic style, and through oral transmission, various prophecies attributed to him flowed into common wisdom, as perhaps John the Baptist's did about Jesus.

And when Jamaicans saw pictures of Selassie's coronation in 1930, they interpreted it as a fulfillment of those prophecies. And the sight of a black emperor in a world essentially created and sustained by racial oppression had to be extremely powerful, as was the pro-peasant political rhetoric of Jesus (camel and eye of needle, e.g.). As Nietzsche saw, a situation of profound oppression generates extreme energy: if nothing else, a kind of infinite backlog of resentment that can be suddenly unleashed.

And the ideas that you should look for your salvation here on earth and that "mighty god is a living man" are also compelling as responses to oppression (and oppressive Christianity, in particular, which teaches one patience in the face of suffering, and a spiritual rather than a physical compensation) Then a kind of epistemic stubbornness sets in in which every disproof of the belief system only actually confirms it. The Rastas were no more likely to believe the Babylonian press's reporting about Selassie than Middle Eastern peasants were likely to believe Roman heralds.

Jesus could not die, and his death become simply the occasion for his resurrection. Selassie, of course, is not dead either, and every report of his death is simply a confirmation of the conspiracy

by which his immortality is covered up. Every criticism of him is a lie, and you can see exactly

what the motivation is: the continuing repression of his religion and his people.

Were Rastafarianism to become a great world religion, its origins would soon (and actually have been already, to some extent) shrouded in mystery, and pulling apart the authentic details of Selassie's life (or Garvey's, Howell's, Marley's etc) from the propaganda put forward (and believed) by his suporters and by his opponents would be impossible.

In some sense, almost anyone would do as well as Selassie, and he was no more intrinsically suited for divinity (indeed, perhaps less) than Clara Bow or Warren G. Harding. But he showed up in the right role at the right moment and got appointed.

To be honest, I don't think Jesus was probably any better - in some sense it might have been anybody. But the belief system reached a certain critical mass and had its own

momentum: for one

thing, it had its own structures of justification, by which it confirmed itself continually while muddying its own history beyond legibility.

Meanwhile, Rastafarianism remains (of course, this is only 70 years later), basically uninstitutionalized, and basically a mode of resistance to oppression, whereas Christianity long, long ago became itself a set of oppressive power structures. But while they constitute means of fighting power - economic, political, epistemic - such religions are admirable even if false.

Once they mutate into power structures, however, the self-serving absurdities in which they are couched become intolerable.

But the epistemic point might end up being this: it's the very arbitrariness and perversity of the belief systems that ends up making them compelling, that demands faith.