RELIGION AND LIFE

Animal Farm at Conference in Washington

Caribbean heads of government converged on Washington D.C for a meeting with the Caribbean Diaspora. The meeting was nothing short of window dressing. I attended the three-day conference; but I left at the end of the second day. I left early because of my disappointment with the way it was organized. It was obvious to me (and I discovered from conversations with many others that they felt the same way too) that the conference was little more than a social gathering of "experts" and "who’s who" in various sectors of the Caribbean Diaspora. In other words the conference was obviously not organized to seriously put in place a machinery to address the many issues confronting the Caribbean.

TWO CREEDS BEGGING ANSWERS (CONCLUSION)

I concluded Part 1 with a brief description of Gnosticism. I said that man is a divine spirit trapped in this corrupt material universe and in a corrupt physical body. I also pointed out that both the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds were affirmations of faith by those who felt that it was threatened by certain prevailing errors. In this Part I shall discuss those "errors" and the extent to which the Creeds are consistent with Jesus’ teaching. A creed is an affirmation of faith, which emphasizes beliefs that oppose other beliefs the affirmers consider errors and, in some cases, heresies. Early Church fathers, like Iranaeus, considered Gnosticism a heresy. The first belief expressed in The Apostles’ Creed is that God made the material world:" I believe in God the Father Almighty. Maker of heaven and earth." This profession of faith was meant to counter, what its framers considered Gnostic error. The error in question was the view that the material universe is evil, and therefore, not made by God. Of course, the framers of the creed were following the Old Testament, Genesis 1:1 which states, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."