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? 

Logic of Choices (Post 5)

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

Please bear with me Nigeria. I will soon come to the one thing I am sure is brewing at the back of your minds – my reason for not believing in the existence of God or the supernatural.

But first, let me thoroughly thrash the issue on choices. I began by imploring us to seek to make informed choices and waded into the likely reason for our current religious choice, a reason which I think is quite warped.

And then, I touched on the God of the Hebrews who has been inherited as the God of the major religions – a God who governs our day to day lives with rules; ten commandments for Christians and whatever else it is for Muslims.

Since this God has also made clear that there will be reward for those who stick to the rules and punishment for those who do not, I’d like to dwell a little on the logic of choices.

A lot of Christians and, perhaps, religious people might be acquainted with the notion of freewill, a quality of all humans. As a matter of fact, this freewill was supposed to have been in play when Adam and Eve (by Christian tradition) chose to disobey God and eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. We will visit this whole story in its literal and metaphorical interpretations later.

Anyway, this is how God set the stage; humans have got freewill, freedom to choose between good and evil – in other words, God’s laws or their own. Whatever choice they make bears its consequences; in fact, the bible clearly states ‘I have set before you life and death. Choose life therefore and live.’ Again, please don’t expect my biblical excerpts to be all set out nicely; this is not a bible study article.

Now, let’s analyse freewill. ‘Will’ refers to the rational ability to make a choice; ‘Free’ refers to freedom from any retribution or reward for that choice from an outside party.

By the logic of choices, therefore, a choice really given to freedom cannot have its consequences outside the choice itself. I’ll explain more clearly.

If I cruelly allow my child the freedom to choose between playing with that sharp knife he loves or that rubber ball he is bored with. I am really saying, ‘I wash my hands off you here; whatever you reap from your choice is your problem.’

I call this cruel because parents, until their children are old enough to lead their own independent lives, are not supposed to give them freedom of choice even though the kids get to possess full powers of will from about the age of seven or eight.

So, parents are more likely to say; ‘You are free to choose between doing what I say which is not to go out after 7pm or not. But if you disobey my rules, there’ll be hell to pay.’ That hell is two-fold; one from the act itself as the child might encounter some danger if they went out after dark and from the parents who would exact severe punishment. Sounds familiar? Yes, this second set of options sounds quite like those offered by the biblical God; it is not a really free choice.

Free choices must find their consequences within the choices themselves, for instance, the child cuts himself with the sharp knife or has a boring but safe play with the rubber ball. Or better still, in a democratic election, people should reap the consequences of their vote from the conduct of the elected rather than from a terrorist gang who punish or reward them for their choices.  

Once the consequences arise from outside the action like from the parents punishing the child or from God sending people to hell, it ceases to be a free choice.

So there is really no freewill in religion. There is will, no doubt but it is meant to be directed without question at an already determined path carved out by the God of that religion.

Now, if will is not free, it is not really will, is it? If I have the ability to choose but I can’t really choose freely but, instead, am expected to pick what has already been chosen as the way by God or face his wrath in hell, then I don’t really have the ability to choose, do I? In essence, I am not really living and acting in a fully human capacity since I lack freewill.

Shameless Proliferation (Post 4)

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

Last week’s article has reminded me of something else, something that is the most irritating of my grievances with the religions that plague our country today – that they are foreign.

We surely wouldn’t have been any better off if we were still worshipping natural entities like trees, lightning, rivers – no, but it would have been us deluding ourselves. Now, what we’ve got is the West deluding us. This does not refer to Islamic North whose adaptation of Islam from contact with desert traders and travellers is quite more honourable than the colonial emasculation of Africa through which the South received Christianity.

So we happily swapped one fairy tale for another. We tell ourselves that Christianity offers us the true God; some even go so far as to narrate how Christianity wasn’t the sole preserve of Europe and how it had come to Europe too from outside. Yes, but guess how Christianity spread throughout much of the known world then – via the influence of the Roman Empire which was also a form of colonialism.

But maybe we could excuse ourselves and say, we are simply human. What has happened with the spread of Christianity to our country is something that’s happened all through Europe and to other races as well. Yes, we can say that but remember, Europe never had a precedent to learn any lessons from; they were in history as it was happening. We, however, have refused to learn from what we know is the history of Christianity – the political tyranny of Church and State in the middle ages; the crusades against Islam; persecution of minorities like the Jews; the inquisitions and burnings and finally apartheid and colonialism.

We may say that these have nothing to do with the message of Christianity, no but the white men who brought that message to us relied on our observance of the Christian tenets to exploit us. This is how it is expressed in jest: When the white men came to Africa, we had the land. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed; when we opened our eyes, they had the land.

I am sure most of us have heard this before but we take it as a very sophisticated joke, we laugh heartily and go attend to our personal Jesus.

The most gratingly annoying thing I find, however, are people who talk of us Africans having to re-evangelise the West. The Pope has, patronisingly, in one of his many letters lent support to that same fact. But, of course, he would; Africa and the third world as it happens, are fast becoming a major source of the Church’s income; oh yes, he would.

I am amazed that we would presume to think that we know better than Europeans about the religion they introduced to us in the first place. If they have dumped religion in the bin of history, why would we think we can revive it? If anything, we make ourselves out to be fools doubly, and that’s how proponents of this stupefying view are seen in the West - trying to sell a typewriter to a person who has got a computer.

I was actually told by a friend once that the only reason why the West is as advanced as they are now is because of the faith they had in the past, that God is rewarding them now. I needn’t mention that I let them know that that was the dumbest thing I ever heard, not even from fools. The exact opposite is clearly the case; when God died in Europe, they moved on.

Not that the Pope and the Catholic Church do not have competition in Nigeria South; they sure do. Has any industry been more vigorously developed in our country’s history than that of the search for God? Our cities and towns are packed with churches of every kind, size and strength; from ramshackle makeshift structures to magnificent cathedrals, pastors, preachers and priests let out thunder promising the masses miracles or favour in return for their membership and fees either as tithes or regular offering.

And how does this mammoth industry sustain its revenues? Simple – by making sure people understand the penalties for not belonging, for not believing, for not giving to God. God will abandon such people as they chart this hard life on earth, the pastors say, and even worse bar them in heaven.

And this is the clincher, Nigeria; there is no way to prove them wrong. You have to die to find out if the pastor and the bible are right or wrong. And if we are wrong, these men of deception say, the consequences would be dire – eternal punishment. Who wants to take such a chance? Not many, not especially a suffering people like we are. Therefore, like lambs we are led meekly to the slaughter.

Laws of God (Post 3)

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

I’ll tell you why we have different religions; we do because we are all different not just in the way we view the world and perceive our experiences but also because of other wider influences like our environment.

If everyone around us is Muslim, if all we see in our area are mosques, if we are confronted daily with Muslim programmes on TV or the radio and if all of this happened from childhood - a highly impressionable stage of human development, then naturally, we are quite likely to believe in Islam. Period. And that is how and why most of us have chosen our faiths.

So when, Muslims vehemently defend their religion up North and Christians forcefully push with theirs down South, all I see is a bulk of ignorant people who have never really questioned their faith, challenged their belief system or really identified their motives in ‘pursuing’ God.

Oh and don’t take any criticisms of mine too hard; being ignorant is not a crime – it happens. We are all ignorant at some level or another; of one thing or another. Staying ignorant though is another matter; it is the sin against knowledge that cannot be forgiven. And I am not asking anyone to shirk their religion as a step towards getting out of ignorance; no, I am asking everyone to think, to learn, to gain knowledge and when you have, then, make an informed choice on your way of life. After all, there are many in Europe who don’t believe in God and don’t know why; they are just as ignorant.

So, to sum that rant up, don’t be a Christian, Muslim or whatever else simply because everyone else is. That is simply sheepish.

Anyway, let’s get back to the main issue – Religion as a whole, that belief in the supernatural or in a supreme being who created the Universe and everything in it.

One of my first problems with Religion is the fact that people at some stage in the distant past assumed that because a supreme being must exist, they ought to worship him. Does the first necessarily mean the other – not in my opinion.

But people began praising and thanking this being for their lives and fortunes until they actually ‘discovered’ rules with which this supreme being would want them to lead their lives. And it gets better, these rules would determine if they got rewarded or punished.

Actually, the main religion guilty of this rule-led doctrine that I know of was Judaism, from which sprang Christianity and Islam. I can’t remember a traditional African religion or any ancient religious cults of Europe and the middle-East where the gods enforced any rules directly over the lives of the people. Oh, and most of these ancient religions also had a concept of a supreme being; Olorun for the Yorubas and Chukwu for the Igbos. And do you remember that passage in the bible where the Athenians are shown to have had an altar raised to the ‘unknown god’?

However though, their worship of their gods, supreme or lesser, has never been shown to directly interfere with social laws. Laws on how the society functioned, on how people treated one another, on politics and economics were totally created and enforced by the community. Take for example, in ancient Igboland; if someone committed murder, that wasn’t directly an offence against any god even though the murderer would be supposed as evil in the eyes of Chukwu or the other gods. But say an unmarried pair has sex, the pantheon wouldn’t give a toss. The community, solely, would take such matters in hand.

These religions were inherently selfish; the gods and the people looked out for themselves; the people honoured the gods, approaching them with gifts for favours, protection or appeasement – not much more.

But enter the Hebrews of the old testament who, by the way were often lured towards pantheism and, unusually, their God begins giving out rules to govern their social affairs. These rules are still used today by many Christians of whatever race or culture.

But it is easy to see that the laws that are detailed in Deuteronomy are simply a collection of Jewish moral and religious codes. Moral codes – to govern their society; religious codes – to guide their worship, just like all our societies have. So, because the author of this book claims that these laws were given by their ‘God’ (what society wouldn’t) doesn’t necessarily make it so.

Choices (Post 2)

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

Everyone usually attaches a location or activity to a significant event. So for example, it is now a treasured piece of information to say where you were or what you were doing when John F Kennedy was shot – when you heard the news.

For most of us who have still got a full head of hair though, our benchmark would be 9/11 – the twin towers coming down. Where were you; what were you doing when the news reached you?

What was the moment you decided to become a policeman, a teacher, a politician, to go back to school, to re-sit GCE, to leave school, to learn a trade, to become a Christian – whoa! Hang on.

If you are from Southern Nigeria, that last question has a very hazy answer. The closest to a definitive answer we get is Pentecostal Christians saying, ‘I have always been Christian but now I have decided to accept Jesus as my Lord and personal saviour, to have a personal relationship with him.’

I say that is the closest because even though Catholics have the sacrament of Confirmation, this sacrament is, in my opinion, mere ritual for often uncomprehending but mainly indoctrinated teenagers.

But that is no Alleluia for Pentecostals. A decision by a Christian to accept Jesus as Lord is like a shepherd deciding to take time to appreciate and savour the taste of lamb. Well done Shepherd! Who saw that coming?

Such a choice is already suggested; the basic premise had already been set firmly in the mind of the Christian – that Jesus is the Son of God, and Lord and that it would be to their own advantage to enter a personal relationship with him. No surprise there.

I remember the day I decided to be non-Christian, a choice that quickly snowballed into atheism. I was standing on a red-brick tiled corridor that connected two walkways of the same hue. I asked the fellow opposite me, ‘Would you be a Christian if you’d been born up North to a Northern family?’

‘No, I wouldn’t,’ he replied.

‘Why are we Christians then?’ I asked back.

‘I haven’t a clue,’ he said. Then he laughed and added, ‘It is all a random thing – your religion is really about your environment.’

For me, it was deeper than that though. I had been asked my whole life to believe stories and doctrines about a religion and a God for which there wasn’t hard evidence other than individual subjective claims of miracles and the bible, which itself was written to promote the same faith, therefore, making it biased. And I would have been asked the same by Islam in equal measure had I been born up North to a Northern family.

If I had no real reason or proof to believe in either faith or any faith for that matter, was I then a Christian simply by suggestion – of my family, upbringing and environment? The answer is, undoubtedly, yes. And if I had no proof for the beliefs of my faith, believing in them would come down to a matter of choice – simply choice.

And then all of a sudden, I felt ashamed. Had I been stupid enough all the years before to wholly accept as true and accurate religious beliefs for which I hadn’t been provided evidence or proof – beliefs that had ranged from the just believable to the downright insane? I, who had always considered myself to be not unintelligent, had fallen for the sort of direction given to kids.

Because, you see, that is essentially what I think of religion – a fairy tale, but this time directed at adults.

Oh! And you may be screaming at the screen now of the ‘reasons’ why you believe in God; perhaps, you call these reasons evidence for God. Fine, I am not going to argue that point just yet. But while all Nigeria in their different religions will unite to ‘show’ me that there is indeed a God, the same Nigeria will break down when they try to ‘show’ me the reasons for their different religions – who is the greatest and most authentic of the founders? Big question. Divisive question.

So then, show me, no show yourself real reasons, evidence and proof why you have chosen your particular religion. But remember Nigeria, there is one un-debatable logic about this: if it is real proof, it will be undeniable, universal and, therefore, accepted by everyone.

So, why then are there different religions in the country?   

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.