← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Walter Yannis
Thread ID: 6083 | Posts: 5 | Started: 2003-04-10
2003-04-10 11:26 | User Profile
This appeared Thu Apr 10, 2:12 AM ET [url=http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030410/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/haiti_voodoo&cid=589&ncid=716]Yahoo![/url]
Walter
By MICHAEL NORTON, Associated Press Writer
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Haiti's government has officially sanctioned voodoo as a religion, allowing practitioners to begin performing ceremonies from baptisms to marriages with legal authority.
Many who practice voodoo praised the move, but said much remains to be done to make up for centuries of ridicule and persecution in the Caribbean country and abroad.
Voodoo priest Philippe Castera said he hopes the government's decree is more than an effort to win popularity amid economic and political troubles.
"In spite of our contribution to Haitian culture, we are still misunderstood and despised," said Castera, 48.
In an executive decree issued last week, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide invited voodoo adherents and organizations to register with the Ministry of Religious Affairs.
After swearing an oath before a civil judge, practitioners will be able to legally conduct ceremonies such as marriages and baptisms, the decree said.
Aristide, a former Roman Catholic priest, has said he recognizes voodoo as a religion like any other, and a voodoo priestess bestowed a presidential sash on him at his first inauguration in 1991.
"An ancestral religion, voodoo is an essential part of national identity," and its institutions "represent a considerable portion" of Haiti's 8.3 million people, Aristide said in the decree.
Voodoo practitioners believe in a supreme God and spirits who link the human with the divine. The spirits are summoned by offerings that include everything from rum to roosters.
Though permitted by Haiti's 1987 constitution, which recognizes religious equality, many books and films have sensationalized voodoo as black magic based on animal and human sacrifices to summon zombies and evil spirits.
"It will take more than a government decree to undo all that malevolence," Castera said, and suggested that construction of a central voodoo temple would "turn good words into a good deed."
There are no reliable statistics on the number of adherents, but millions in Haiti place faith in voodoo. The religion evolved from West African beliefs and developed further among slaves in the Caribbean who adopted elements of Catholicism.
Voodoo is an inseparable part of Haitian art, literature, music and film. Hymns are played on the radio and voodoo ceremonies are broadcast on television along with Christian services.
But for centuries voodoo has been looked down upon as little more than superstition, and at times has been the victim of ferocious persecution. A campaign led by the Catholic church in the 1940s led to the destruction of temples and sacred objects.
In 1986, following the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier's dictatorship, hundreds of voodoo practitioners were killed on the pretext that they had been accomplices to Duvalier's abuses.
2003-04-11 02:13 | User Profile
Seeing how Haiti is the economic, cultural, political, and environmental cesspool of the Carribean, you don't suppose that their religious beliefs and practices have anything at all to do with their squalid condition? Na, must be whitey's fault. :afro:
2003-04-11 03:46 | User Profile
As per the 2000 Census, Brooklyn, N.Y. harbored 200,000 Haitians, which is very likely a serious undercount. Furthermore, those figures are now more than three years out of date and did not include the many illegals among them. Thatââ¬â¢s just one borough in one city in one state.
Observe that the U.S. is rapidly devolving into a dark, savage place unfit for human habitation. Expect Voodoo to be officially sanctioned here in the U.S. eventually, too. Thereââ¬â¢s precedence. The Supreme Court declared Hialeah, Floridaââ¬Ës mid-nineties attempt to ban the practice of ritual animal sacrifice by Santeria [Afro-Cuban Voodoo] followers unconstitutional. Mind boggling! These gate-crashing alien things make no attempt to rise from the cultural primordial slime they wriggle around in, so the highest court in the land orders us, to sink into it with them--shut up, and learn to live with their sadistic ââ¬Åcustoms.ââ¬Â
Weââ¬â¢re approaching the point at which the Court may find it politic--due to changing demographics and mores--to sanction other atrocities, e.g., cannibalism, even human sacrifice in the guise of religious freedom and ancestor worship.
2003-04-11 05:37 | User Profile
As AMREN pointed out a while back, the media are studiously ignoring the bi-centennial of Haiti's successful insurrection by black slaves and the ensuing genocide of the French aristocracy.
200 years of black majority rule turned Haiti into the undisputed a**hole of the Western Hemisphere.
Haiti is a clear illustration of what happens to any place (Detroit, Washington, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe) when blacks rule. Disease, poverty, superstition, ignorance, slavery, torture, environmental ruin.
We should try to "celebrate" Haiti's bi-centennial as much as possible - it's great propaganda for us.
Walter
2003-04-12 03:09 | User Profile
I just saw a news report that Haiti is demanding $22 billion in reparations from France. When the blacks kill everyone and steal everything thus turning the richest colony in the world into a mud hole (at one time doing more trade than all of the United States), they'll later be demanding reparations (ignore billions in aid they've already been given).
In 1838 when Haiti became independent of France Haiti paid 90 million francs to France to compensate plantation owners.