Hello Nigeria (Post 1)

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

I am Nigerian and I am an atheist. As it happens, I seem to belong to a rare breed of people, hard to find by design and even more difficult to stumble into by accident. The Nigerian Atheist is elusive in their purest form because they are generally confused by the religious melee around them, constantly bombarded by the frequently supposed and sworn feats of the supernatural and silently threatened to be misunderstood – at the very least – or seen as arrogant, stupid and misled.

So I am writing for you Nigerian atheists since like you, I bemoan daily the plight of our Nation that is hampered by religion, along with its henchmen – superstition and ignorance.

This is not to say that all religious people are ignorant – far from it. It is just that while some minds open to belief in the supernatural have been found to be very informed and to have achieved respectable heights in knowledge, standards generally devolve from there. In a nutshell, the more ignorant someone is, the more open they will be to faith. Or how else does the phrase ‘blind faith’ originate?

But let’s not hack away at the religious; that is not what I am about. Believe me when I say that I am not writing to divide but to unite. Unity, in my opinion however, is easier when there are fewer barriers to breach. Our ethnic lines – which shouldn’t have – have already proved to be much of a hassle and our religions have evidently only added to that problem, a very unnecessary addition in my view. I won’t bore you with details to highlight the problems underlined by our religious divisions, either real or as a product of political exploitation; any living Nigerian knows them already. And I certainly don’t assume that all the strife in the country will cease with an absence of religion – that is too facile a hope.

I only aim to educate (dare I say that) on the option of atheism and the thinking behind it. I aim to question our staunch reliance on the world of things unseen while we abandon what is right before us. And I hope to prod minds into thinking a little differently from and outside the pressurised box that our broken Nigeria is. Maybe, when we start making more informed and educated choices for our lives than what religious faith requires, we will inevitably be drawn towards a firmer sense of accountability and responsibility – about the one thing that the country generally lacks.

Every week, therefore, this column will display an article to show the devastation, oppression and stagnation our religions have orchestrated and sustained in our history as peoples and as a country. I will open up and defend the option of atheism not only as the way to go but, perhaps, the only safe way left to us Nigeria. And, of course, I expect the views I express will be controversial but you don’t get change without a measure of chaos. I have been ashamed for far too long of a Nigeria steeped in religion but lacking in the basic human qualities of knowledge and self-advancement and attributes of empathy and co-operation.

Of course, some might be thinking now how I must be a fool and such a thought, for them, would be well founded as it would be based directly on the Bible, wouldn’t it? ‘The fool has said in his heart, there is no God above.’ Please don’t expect me to give you book, chapter and verse; this is not a biblical discourse.

Because of quotes like the one above, the bible has become the bestselling book of all time; it affirms that they are fools who deny God and, I suppose, it would have nothing but praise for those who choose the bible as the word of God. Plainly, it is very self-advertising. This time, however, - and quite unusually - the ‘fools’ are in the minority.

So, I will begin by making a defence for us fools, touching on the bible a lot as it is the one religious book I am familiar with and as it did the labelling of us with the word ‘fool’. But don’t mistake me to be anti-Christian; I have far more time on my hands than that. I am anti-religion and vehemently decry the bypassing of reason that we Nigerians demonstrate each day, giving credence instead to things for which there is no proof or any plausible logic.

So we’ll begin with choices. I mentioned earlier about informed choices. I strongly believe that underneath those lies a depth of self-awareness that marks out the enlightened individual. Whether we are religious or not, the question is; did we make a definite choice for either path and if we did, was it an informed choice or a suggested one?

Because even though the religious demographic in Nigeria suggests otherwise, I am very sure, being Christian, Muslim or whatever else is not genetically inherited.