To Buttress My Earlier Point (Post 15)

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

To buttress the points made in the last article, below is an excerpt from an issue of Amnesty magazine on the much maligned rights of Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual people in Africa. There are a few myths surrounding our perception of GLB people that are quite like what my previous article referred to.

Myth 1: Same sex activity is alien to African culture
Africa, like the rest of the world has a long history of same-sex sexuality and transgender identities. A cave painting in modern day Zimbabwe depicting sex between men is over 2000 years old while marriages between women have been documented in over 40 ethnic groups in sub-Saharan Africa.

Myth 2: Homophobia is part of African tradition
Laws criminalising 'homosexuality' are largely a direct legacy of colonialism: they had no basis in local customary law. The colonising powers and imported religions encouraged Africans to view dislike and fear of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual people as a sign of progress and civilisation. Today, the religious right in the USA actively funds and promotes homophobia in Africa.

Myth 3: All African clergy are homophobic
Religious leaders have contributed to the oppression and persecution of Lesbian and Gay and Bisexual people in Africa. However, several religious leaders, mostly Christian and Muslim, have called for religious and social acceptance. Examples include Bishop Senyonjo in Uganda and Archbishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa who famously said he would not worship a homophobic god.

Amnesty (2013) Out in Africa. Making Love a Crime: homophobia in Africa, 2013, 178. p14-15

Tell Me More (Post 14)

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

And so what else might we be hanging on to – as if for dear life – that we are reluctant to get rid of? Well, it is hard to know where to begin; however, we could start by looking at the explosive phenomenon of culture or as is commonly put ‘African Culture’. I won’t bore anyone about the silliness of that phrase when it refers to a continent so large, vast and riddled with a variety of peoples with a lot of differences. So, I will bring it closer to home. Whilst in Nigeria, I often heard it said how such and such is not ‘part of our culture’. Usually, what was referred to were human behaviours and choices frowned upon by our religions eg women baring the flesh, smoking, sex before marriage etc. You can fill in your own examples of what you may have heard to be not ‘our culture’.

I have often wondered just exactly what this phrase meant as culture is not a very solid and fixed thing; it is fluid, changing to suit the times and to provide answers to certain expressions of human society. It has struck me that a lot of human vices have earned this phrase ‘not our culture’, anything from prostitution to internet fraud.  However, I digress. At this point, I would like to relate the story my father told me of how in the 60’s he would always bring presents home to his family from Europe. What his grandmother always favoured and he always got her was tobacco because she was big on the stuff. She, like her daughter, my grandmother were greatly renowned traders who later went on to build houses and own property. These women grew up in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, at a time when the influence of the colonialists was not that widely felt.

My great grandmother was a woman who used tobacco and who took charge of her financial affairs, things that might be referred to by many in Nigeria today as ‘not our culture’. My grandmother followed in her mother’s footsteps and they must have been a snapshot of women of their time – powerful, independent and reckoned with. What about the cultural traditions of many African societies where women dressed, on occasions, exposing parts of their body wearing not more than a covering for the breasts and waist beads? And why wouldn’t they when, along with the men who went about with a bare torso, they lived in a very hot climate that would not make it comfortable for a lot of clothing? I realised that a lot of what we call ‘not our culture’ actually have no such basis in fact. If anything, what we refer to as ‘our culture’, is actually foreign and came with the colonialists who brought Christianity with them.

This was an imperial England that was a very unequal society with a strong class system and women had very few rights. This England was very influenced by Christianity and pushed for full covering for women (helped by the fact that it is a cold country), agreed with the biblical injunction for ‘wives to submit to their husbands’ and for ‘women not to dress in men’s clothing’ and generally ran a society where men were in charge. We see the same in very religious countries all over the world today. The British transported these values to their colonies whose original cultures and systems and religions they regarded as ‘barbaric’. This was an England whose religion would not allow for female priests but regarded our traditional religions as 'barbaric' when they were less discriminating and oppressive to women. (Recall the priestess Chielo of Agbala in 'Things Fall Apart) 

But my father’s generation who grew up in the 50’s and 60’s lapped all this up, embraced Christianity and these values and passed on to their children how ‘un-Christian’ values are ‘not our culture’. And now, this is the refrain of many Africans and Nigerians who have no clue what their culture really was and what culture it is they now call theirs. So what has it cost us to buy the religion of Europe and stake our destinies on a God we never had a history with, a God transported to us with the sword and with domination? Well, it has cost us a lot indeed – first the erosion of our real culture and second, as will be covered in the next article, it has cost us our language!

Evolution? What Evolution? (Post 13)

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

I have only just returned from Nigeria; while I was there, I became acquainted with some of the issues that are being debated at the heights of government. One of these issues was the push by Cameron and the US for Nigeria to legalise or support Gay unions. Anyway, this has not been received well by many, if not a majority of the Nigerian people and I had a quite interesting discussion about this with my brother in law. Somewhere in our conversation, he veered into the God/Bible issue which is quite difficult to argue against without bringing in Evolution, so I did. The interesting thing is that - and I have mentioned this in a previous article - evolution is still not properly taught in our schools, if at all. It is quite like there is a concerted and collective effort to keep the nation ignorant of what is a demonstrated scientific fact - like gravity. I should know because I studied Biology in Nigeria and evolution was glossed over almost like a third hand account of what some people said. It wasn't focused on and taught like I learned of gravity and the laws of motion, like the causes of disease and the circulatory system. But maybe, this isn't for all schools; maybe, there are some schools where people are taught properly.
There can only be one reason for this; the Federal Republic of Nigerian believers have not and are reluctant to accept evolution as truth because it inherently challenges their comfortable religious beliefs. We all reinforce these beliefs by banding with people of similar opinions, especially as these people are all around us - yes, everyone else.  How do I spell this out? Evolution is a fact, one that has been painstakingly desmonstrated and proved by science over and over again. The only aspects of evolution that science is still working on are the nitty-gritty, the why's and when's; the event itself has been robustly proved. Oh, there are arguments against evolution, mainly by creationists who sometimes field 'scientists'. Even the Bible alludes to evolution as things are created at different times, with humans coming last, although, why a Creator wouldn't simply create everything at once, beats me. No real scientist can deny evolution as all they would have to do to disprove evolution is show fossils in the wrong developmental era; as some scientist pointed out: "Show me rabbit fossils in the Cambrian and I will abandon the theory of Evolution". For Evolution is about a sequence in the appearance of living things from minor to greater complexity, with links and relational structure.
I am appalled to think that we are living about four centuries behind the educational knowledge of many countries in the world; we are in denial, quite like Christian Europe was when Copernicus and Galileo demonstrated that the Earth moved round the Sun and not the other way round. The similarities are so clear; history repeats itself once again. Those two scientists were persecuted by Christianity and silenced just as Evolution is being silenced today by a very religious Nigeria.
We refuse to accept demonstrated facts and instead choose to believe in religious theories that have no way of being proved right or wrong. We feed thieving and exploitative religious leaders who are rising up in vast numbers every minute and polluting the average Nigerian mind with superstitions and panicky messages of Hell, the Devil, Witchcraft, evil powers, the Enemy etc. These leaders understand that as long as people are running scared - and what better way to drive people to God than through fear - they will stay loyal to the church and will pay their dues. And my people keep getting destroyed for lack of knowledge. (Reference by a Christian please)
So dear reader, if you want a little light on your understanding of Nature, God and the origin of life on Earth, then you want to read up on Evolution. There is plenty of literature out there, sadly, not many might be readily accessible in Nigeria - but maybe I am wrong. Read up on Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins but most importantly, question your own beliefs in every way possible, beginning with the most basic question of all - why you hold those beliefs. If a belief doesn't make sense or serve a concrete purpose - is there a chance it is simply bullshit? And if you hold this belief simply because it makes you feel good and you are willing to admit that to yourself, then you must be ready to keep telling yourself you really do believe because you may really not. 

Evolution (Post 12)

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

Now we have thrashed out the issue of the beginning of the universe, let us move to the creation of all life on Earth. What is the alternative if not God? Could it be chance?  Well, like I said in earlier articles, this is a most often quoted misunderstanding; the fact that evolution doesn’t need and cannot have a designer does not mean that it is the action of pure blind chance. The thing is evolution is in itself an absurdity, the oxymoron of nature itself, for while it is indeed filled with random and unpredictable creative events, it is geared by its very nature towards well built and efficient mechanisms so that it looks like these mechanisms were ‘designed’ with a purpose in mind.

Evolution is succinctly defined in the sentence “What works, stays.” What we need to understand is that for every species of living organisms alive today, thousands have gone extinct. Evolution is not magical, it is simply a natural process of refinement, adaptation an d extinction. It is quite like the course of any life, we are born weak and ignorant, we grow, learn, adapt to our environment. Some of us adapt better either by luck or by talent and bloom; others don’t adapt as well and fade either into poverty or ill health or early death. But in the end, we all die. This is evolution; at some stage every species will become extinct just as they were born; it is series of life cycles encompassing species of different life forms.

What Darwin observed when he first began thinking about Evolution was that in the Galapagos Islands was a proliferation of different types of one animal spread across a not too huge area. He wondered why God would go to the trouble of making so many different types of the same animal with different qualities. Over time and with experiments, he realised that it was the difference in their environments that had made that animal evolve into different forms. Living things are quite capable of changing over time and what animals are found in a place or situation is determined by what qualities help them survive in that place or situation – ‘Survival of the Fittest’.

So from the earliest days when life first appeared, it has and still is a random combination of cells in genes that make individual life forms. But what this means is that there is a diversity in make-up of life that there is sometimes one or a few with qualities that others lack. Added to this is the fact that random genetic mutations can occur that give organisms a quality or (handicap) that others don’t have. In the right situation, usually one of stress, the organisms with the right quality survive and pass their genes on to their offspring. Given enough time, they and their offspring become predominant in that area. So evolution which is a blown up picture of the cycle of birth, growth and death is not blind chance even if made up of chance events. It is a trial and error process that picks out every success in hundreds of errors and improves on that success while replicating it. It repeats this process over and over again over millions of years that its achievements though painstakingly slow seem like the work of a Supreme Designer. What is more, evolution has been proved without doubt to be a scientific fact, one that every educated person in today’s world should be quite familiar with.

God Or Chance 2 (Post 11)

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

Well, if it isn't God responsible for all things and it isn't chance, then what is it? Well, I say, evolution is - and it is not the same as chance. But before I begin on evolution which is purely biological, let us look at a far bigger problem, the origin of the universe. The allure of believing in a designer for the universe is in the fact that it provides us with the satisfaction that there was some intention in our creation and, therefore, some purpose in our existence, that is – we were destined to be beforehand. This is also declared in the bible - "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you," God said to either Jeremiah or Ezekiel. 

I will cut to the chase and say that it is a well known fact that our planet is so delicately fine tuned in location, atmospheric conditions and composing elements that if a there'd been a most infinitesimally small alteration, there would have been no life ever on Earth. This is one thing that simply just happened - yes, by chance. Our planet just happened to be formed with the Big Bang in exactly the right location and with all the right conditions for life. Some clever folk have snorted at this and expressed their dissatisfaction in the metaphor - "Saying that nature with all its order happened by chance is like saying if we gave chimps typewriters, they could produce the works of Shakespeare by chance!" 

Yes, yes, the chances of a planet like ours occurring by chance are very small indeed; it would be like winning the lottery jackpot ten days in a row. But what people fail to see is that we are dealing with infinite time here. Mathematically, as long as something is possible by however small a margin even if it is one chance out of several billions, if given infinite time, it will definitely happen. What's the proof? The proof is we would have to get to the end of eternity to claim that it hadn't happened! So, if I have infinite time to play with, I will at some point win the lottery jackpot ten days in a row! This is basic Mathematics. 

Space out there had infinite time to play with; it was therefore possible for anything, however unlikely, to happen. And so, our universe and our planet were formed and here we are. I cannot tell you what caused the Big Bang; that is beyond my knowledge. Read up on what scientists are up to today; I hear they've recently discovered the 'God Particle' or Higgs Boson. But I can tell you that if you cannot subscribe to a Universe that came from 'nothing' because you think that that is ridiculous, then you cannot and should not subscribe to a creating God because, it is even more ridiculous on two counts – one, it is an unseen, unobserved and unverified entity and two, God who would be even more complex than the universe would also need an origin. And if you say that God, for which there is no evidence, had no beginning or came from nothing, then you admit that it is possible for something to have no beginning or come from nothing. So why not the universe which, at least, we can see and we have verified as real. In a nutshell it is more difficult to 'create' God than to create the Universe.

Science claims that all reality (everything that actually exists) is knowable and within reach of the human experience. Science can make this claim because before we can say something cannot be known, we would have to know that thing first and know that it cannot be known. 

In essence, I did reach some conclusion that could be labelled as the five A’s:

All reality is knowable   

All precise reality is known, deductible and obvious

All general reality is elusive

All general unknown ‘reality’ is object of research

All precise unknown ‘reality’ is imagination

Until it is known or deductible and/or obvious, it cannot be categorically termed ‘real’; of course, that is no claim that it is certainly unreal but a claim that it is the object of research as long as no precise definition of its attributes, traits or functions has been arrived at before the results of research show it to be so.

Therefore the only precisely defined reality we know should have been made explicit by research; any other is simply imagination. Every unknown reality under research such as the cure for some illness cannot have a precise enclosed definition and, thus remains a general reality – elusive. No general reality can be known; any known reality has to be precise. And as naturally follows, there can't be a precise but unknown reality; if it is precise, it is ipso facto known; any precise but unknown reality is imagination. 

To explain, if we know a lot about it - its attributes, qualities, likes, dislikes, feelings, actions, commands and yet, it is not readily reachable by objective human scrutiny or science nor is it openly observable to research, then it is imagination. 

God Or Chance (Post 10)

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

This article is the start of a breakdown of the reasons why I don’t believe in a God or even in the supernatural and it is an attempt (successful for some people) to answer those questions that many of us pose for the existence of God.

My education both formal and informal through the years and especially on the history of humankind has unravelled the very peculiar nature of the human mind – that of enquiry. At first, we began with unfounded theories on almost every aspect of human existence – birth, death, sex, relationships, disease, community, nature and the human person. These theories are beliefs, so named because they hadn’t been based on hard evidence, simply on association, subjective feeling and often times, helplessness. 

So, people concluded, therefore, that since we humans who were at the head of visible creation were not responsible for the origin of the world and nature, that it had to be something else, more powerful and much smarter than us. And simply because this being could not be seen, this being was a spirit. Naturally, we endowed this being with all our own characteristics – of thought, rationality, will, emotions, but we bulked these qualities in this being to perfection. We called the being God and then gave it a few more absolute qualities – all powerful, all knowing, all present, absolutely perfect, eternal, infinite. This was the easiest and quick fix answer our brains could find to the question of the origin of all things. And this trait is useful. We needed a platform to build our knowledge from and this is why we form theories. The destructive thing though is to go on to accept these theories as fact without testing them out and rigorously studying them to eke out the objective truth.

There have been many such theories held up by our religion that Science – the arm of human enquiry that does this testing – has shown to be untrue. A notable one was the belief in the middle- ages that the earth was at the centre of the universe and that the planets and the sun revolved around us. This belief was drawn simply from the other belief that we humans were specially created by God as written in the bible. Therefore, all of the universe must have been created around us! Furthermore, Joshua had commanded the sun to stand still during a battle to crush the enemies of God, therefore, the sun must move! As at then, these were enough evidence for a geocentric universe. Religion was so sure that these beliefs were fact that when the scientist Galileo proved otherwise, he was persecuted by the religious.

But the biggest uproar by religious people came when Charles Darwin formulated the (then) theory of the evolution of species by natural selection. And to this day, there are many countries, including Nigeria, where evolution is not taught properly in schools leaving us in a very dark place, stuck two centuries behind the rest of the advanced world. Many of us still erroneously see evolution as synonymous with chance. Some still ask questions like: ‘Why haven’t we seen any monkeys, chimps and gorillas change into humans or something else? These questions show our very poor depth of knowledge in a scientific fact as solid as that of gravity. Imagine, if we knew as little of gravity as we do of evolution. How embarrassing would that be and how disgraceful of our education system? And it is disgraceful that we have neglected and still neglect to instruct our children in true science because we hang on to our religious beliefs that have no foundation whatsoever in fact.

Our Selfishness (Post 9)

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

Once more, I must assure you that I have not forgotten my assertion that there is another alternative to the two options we often give for the origin of things – God or Chance. It doesn't have to be between these two and I will definitely revisit this topic at a later date.

From where I left off last week, it is evident that our religiousness is more to do with a selfish outlook on life. We expect a lot from God or the supernatural especially against the backdrop of a nation that offers us nothing but turmoil, danger and death. It is only natural therefore that we are very quick to see any odd event in our favour as the hand of some God who is out to take care of us. We stay worshipping, waiting for this sign of personal favour and when we have desperately interpreted some occurrence as that sign, we stay worshipping excitedly expecting some more – Alleluia! God is on our side; He definitely watches over us; we are favoured!

Don’t get me wrong; I must always remind you Nigeria that this is not an anti-Christian write-up. I only use Christianity that I am well familiar with as an example to show how religion can be inherently empty and should be handled with cynicism. This is especially necessary in our country where our religions have formed a huge divide among us that has been exploited by politicians time and time again to fatal, devastating ends.

Like I said previously, ignorance is the soil on which belief in miracles grows and this in turn breeds superstition. Such a concoction provides a very fertile environment for all kinds of unspeakable atrocities by humans who have reverted to base animal instincts as we Nigerians have often demonstrated in despicable outbreaks of violence between Northerners and Southerners.

So when we have shirked all kinds of religious adherence, not only would we have moved one step closer to a more unified nation but we would be of a higher level of thinking, one that would, in itself, make us more humane and give us the ability to actually see the advantages of co-operation in developing our country.

You see, when we can accept that there almost definitely is no God out there who watches over us, that it makes no sense that we would survive the death of our brains in any kind of afterlife, that the only life we can realistically expect to live is this one here, then we would be being intelligent enough to actually begin to live in the present and perhaps, that would be a giant step into our true liberation.

Back to this selfishness of ours in our religiousness, I once had the horrifying experience of being in an armed robbery attack. I was staying with a family living at the top of a four storey building in a very Christian neighbourhood, full of Igbo traders. A forty man robbery team were assembled outside the walls of the compound and were taking their time in boring holes in the walls for access. They stayed for four hours pillaging homes and beating up their victims. They even took time out to shush a Church nearby at prayer before carrying on with their business.

I was a Christian at the time and joined the family in hysterical prayer as we waited for the thieves to get to us. Thankfully, the robbers didn’t and in the morning, we began giving thanks to God as Christians would. So what was the difference between my host family and the others who were attacked? They were all Christians. Were my host family any holier? Some Christians would claim so in a fit of self-righteousness but how can you prove that for sure? Has there not been even one good worshipping Christian in the millions of people who have died in the preventable disasters we experience – road accidents, robbery attacks, violent ethnic clashes?

And what do the survivors say? Well their prayer is a template that has etched itself in the fabric of Christian prayer all over the country. It begins with thanking God for every good thing that’s happened – ‘we are alive and healthy Lord; many are in hospitals, many have nothing to eat, many are dead. Thank you Lord.’

Apparently, God has paid more attention to those praying people than he did to the others in hospitals or the ones dead. This is false consolation.

Wake up Nigeria; it is only a matter of time before, in all likelihood, someone else might make that same prayer about us. We are all going to be ill, in hospital and dead someday.