EXISTENCE OF GOD (Post 6)

'The fool who has said in his heart, there's no God above.'

I reckon that, given what last week’s article touched on, a lot of us might find it hard to relate to that issue. You do choose all your actions, you’d say; you are aware of what your religions recommend but at the end of the day, your preferences hold sway. Well if that’s the case, then you are hypocrites professing one thing in public and doing another in private. This is what is referred to in religion as sin and for which the religious go to God for forgiveness. No ardent and truly religious person can make a choice for themselves; the choice has already been laid out by their religion.

But nonetheless, you all retain the option to sin – which is the expression of your own free choice – and at the same time, have the safety net of a God who would always take you back and ensure you have eternal life in heaven.

Recognise this? Why yes; your ‘supreme God’ has now quite surely been allotted the same role as those lesser gods of our old traditional religions – a role of utility.

God has simply been made into an object of use by the majority of those who are religious. How?

Well, you need God for success, prosperity, protection from your enemies (everybody seems to have at least one of these) protection from evil powers, good health, and ultimately a guarantee of eternal life. Does this make sense? Of course it does.

It would be a tragedy for an average Nigerian to end up in hell after their first hellish existence on earth. This is the thinking behind the religious fervour of many of us, whether we know it or not; whether we admit it or not; whether we like it or not.

I think it is utterly shameful that we have been so battered that we’ve given up on this life and, instead, look fervently to the next.  

Now, let’s deal with the principal reason why I don’t believe in the existence of God as well as all manner of the supernatural. Look at the whole phenomenon of religion and worship that humans have nurtured for as far back as humans first appeared; it exists as a substantial subjective reality to believers. However, to analyse religion for its truth value, we have to bring it to the realm of objectivity. The ‘reality’ that religious experiences hold for people for instance, the girl who claimed to have witnessed an apparition of the Virgin Mary in Aokpe, Benue State must be put into everybody else’s spotlight.

Now we know that the brain is a sophisticated machine capable of interpreting large amounts of different types of data either that being accumulated or stored in memory simultaneously. Naturally, overlaps and misinterpretations occur in varying degrees of frequency depending on the individual. There are thousands of mentally ill patients in hospitals who have experienced an imaginary friend, thought they were somebody else or seen God, Jesus or some other equally supernatural character. Are we to take their experiences as objectively true then? If we were to put a lot of the Saints of mediaeval Christianity under investigation today, we’d be likely to find a healthy number of them especially someone like Joan of Arc as having had mental health issues. Joan, herself, admitted to hearing voices which were taken then to be spiritual revelations; today, we know different. Today, we call that auditory hallucination, something that may point to the onset of Schizophrenia.

What about the classic miracle the Catholic Church claims to have happened in Portugal at Fatima in 1917. The Virgin Mary made the sun spin and dance in the sky to the horror of all, about 70,000, watching. There, you may say, an event witnessed by a multitude of people.

Well, I’ll say if 70,000 people of one mindset were staring at the sun for any period of time, the sun might spin in their eyes especially if there was a suggestion sweeping through the multitude that such a thing wrought by the Virgin Mary, no less, was happening.

Secondly, if the sun objectively and really did spin – we won’t talk about the damaging pull of gravitational force that might have caused – the Newspapers of Fatima and Portugal should have made a song and dance about it. Everyone in Portugal and most in Europe should have seen it happen; it would have gone down as one of the wonders of the twentieth century and be the object of thousands of documentaries today. After all, Portugal is not that removed from every other country, is it?