God Will Not Help Nigeria Until... (3)

For the more theological, a rare attribute among evangelicals, a plausible explanation might be that God has no hand in the state of the country as those who are destroying it have the benefit of free will. In that case, why pray to God at all to help the country if he would not affect, for better or worse, what a large group of thieves are doing to the country? Why not rely on the political robbers' free will to turn over a new leaf? 

What can be achieved intellectually with the handmaiden of God – or that bendy synonym for God, religion? With the best will in the world, maybe something. Religious inspiration might produce a passionate apologist like C.S. Lewis and his charming books, which make significant efforts to simplify (and amplify) belief but only succeed in doing the good old thing: preaching to the converted. In Nigeria, where there is no such scribal religioneer as Lewis, religious genius only produces prosperity tracts and one-dimensional manuals prolifically written by General Overseers. The sum of human knowledge and advances is mainly secular. A physicist would find it easier to explore the genealogy of the universe if he did not believe that someone, or something, created it four, five or six thousand years ago. Indeed, many of the Christians in the developed world no longer take very seriously the fable that God made the first man and woman from dust, but in a country like Nigeria where the religion was passed to us second-hand – if not third-hand – with instructions to take everything we were told in good faith, scores of years later most people still bear in their heads this blissful yarn and other tall tales from the presumably unimpeachable source called the Bible – and the Qur’an.

The identification of religion as innate in the African is a stereotype about which Africans themselves seem to rejoice. Among the Nigerian evangelicals, for instance, there is now a thrill of entitlement that they are heir to the deed of ownership of Christendom, supposedly abandoned and left fallow by its European owners. But if religion is a good, sweet thing, as it is assumed to be, then we appear to be having too much of it, and too much of anything, as everyone knows, is not a good thing. A hangover or constipation may be the price to pay - and confusion. This is why I don’t think there is anything anyone can do about the May God help us mantra that we often repeat. Bandying God’s name is a function of a deep-seated and misguided metaphysics of a society steeped in the daily ritual of petty religiosities, a society that has psyched itself to the specious seductions of revelation and belief. I almost always sympathise with those who end their articles or speeches with May God help us because I see it as another way of saying I give up on Nigeria. Here, God is a weasel word, a verbal cop-out, a grand elaborate waffle.

Possibly, it was taken more seriously and less ironically when early Nigerian statesmen were saying the same thing. I read the beautifully written essays and memoirs of a late politician and leader. I was marvelled – rather staggered – by how many times he alludes to God, how many times he offers up to God, making out God as the ultimate judge, the resolver of the troubles simmering in Western Nigeria then, and I mean the Christian God because often such references are crutched by ‘Our Lord Jesus’. I refer to this because I believe the current Godfest can be traced to those days when not even a single one of Nigerian premier statesmen thought of rejecting the religion of the coloniser, the tool the coloniser had used to entrench herself. But parading oneself as a Christian was about prestige as much as being a brainwashed necessity; it was about being ‘in’, about moral gentrification. To belong in the patrimony of the elite club left by the colonialists, being a gentle, educated Christian was a requirement.

How sweet it would have been if there were one or two freethinking mavericks among those men who came after the colonisers. Although that was what Nkrumah set himself up to be in Ghana, I am not sure his ‘scientism’ has trickled down to those living in the country today – most Ghanaians are as superstitiously gospelled-up as Nigerians, if not more so, according to a recent poll which puts Ghanaians atop countries in which people profess one religion or the other. Did their late president, John Atta-Mills, not depend on ‘Prophet’ T B Joshua to ensure or foretell ex-cathedra that he would be elected Ghanaian leader? He had to return to ‘Synagogue’ Church for thanksgiving, and this was a university lecturer from whom one should expect a degree of reasoned detachment. One wonders whether Joshua was able to predict the passing of Attah Mills as he self-puffingly credited himself for predicting the death of another African leader, the Malawian president, Bingu Wa Mutharika (here is how I put it in May, two months before the Ghanaian president died: ‘I wonder whether the pastor, who has variously been accused of sorcery, was able to foresee any Macbethal sting in the tail of the Ghanaian presidential good tidings.’)   

As a matter of fact, I don’t think it would have mattered today whether Nigeria’s old politicians were deep-dyed atheists or fire-belching ‘heathens’. Evangelical Christianity is like a raging idea whose epoch has dawned on Africa, Africa’s own great, if not brave, new world. This would not be out of place if it was not so mistimed, trendy, and thoroughpaced in its spread. I see this as no more than a consolation for limitations. In most modern societies, some do find religion interesting. Many do not. But in the 21^st century, it seems everyone in a community of tens of millions sees religion as something so important that they even think a god is going perform every sort of miracle in their lives or that religion is the most important thing in their lives, when religion becomes the ruling ethos, then there is a problem. 
On a large scale, the problem may be an inability to take on more challenging things. Although there may be religious magians with a talent for ‘miracles’ or theologians who would go out of their way to rationalise religion and God, and even people may find comfort, real or make-believe, in both, there is something essentially simple-minded and can’t-do about a society for whom the two things are seamlessly, even exclusively, important. For instance, however gifted you may be, if you spend most of the time reading the Bible, literally taking to heart that God created the world in six days several thousand years ago, there is no way you will accept, even closely access, cosmology or evolutionary biology, the sort of attitude that is displayed by some fringe American pseudoscientists who built a virtual museum where humans and dinosaurs live together. If you believe man was made from dust or clay by some god or the other, there is no way you will be able to create artificial life in your laboratory. If you believe – with the monomania that evangelicals display – that the Bible (or the Koran) is the only book worth reading, there is no way you will be able to parse the difference between Homer’s and James Joyce’s Ulysses. There is no way you will discover the poetry, the élan, of both books. The greater risk of overimmersion in several unguents and the befuddling incense of religion is the poverty of intellect.

Even then, God may very well decide to help Nigeria. Since he is ‘omnipotent’, this is not beyond the realm of probability. We may all wake up one day to discover that a miraculous Passover-like operation has occurred during the night. Now, not the firstborns of those who have plundered our wealth will be wiped out, but the culprits themselves and their often accessorial spouses. There will be an ethicide of old-testament proportions, a pestilential clear-out that will sweep away tens of thousands of political fat cats, incumbent and past office-holders, presidents, governors, senators, soldiers, rep-men and women, council chairpersons, contractors, hangers-on and various parasites. We may discover that the good Lord has let abroad his angels with flaming swords and that under cover of darkness, the men and women feeding on Nigeria’s expansive open sore like leeches and maggots have been cut down, bar none. On the morning after such wholesale immolation, we, the ‘sinless’, shall appreciate it more if there is a vast 3D screen hanging somewhere from the clouds on which all the despoilers can be seen toasting in the fieriest corner of hell or how they are struggling to squeeze themselves through the eye of a needle, to enter heaven. Only then will I be willing to accept that God has decided to help Nigeria and make Nigeria a model of providential favour. Then I may be tempted to finish everything I write or say with May God help us.

God Will Not Help Nigeria Until... (2)

The advent of the industrial revolution in Britain coincided with when men like Thomas Paine began to see through religion for what it is. His Age of Reason still makes reasonable reading today as it did at the time it was published. When the book came out in 1794, Britain was furiously industrialising and religion was subtly backtracking, men like Paine began to question what God had got to do with anything. The transatlantic Paine made some impact with his writings in America as he did in Britain. His sojourn in the United States converged with the acme of America’s revolutionary ferment and this had inspired his Rights of Man.

Today there is the myth that the so-called ‘Founding Fathers’ – hey, there were Mothers too – midwived the United States using Christianity as their frame of reference. Nothing can be farther from truth. Certainly, there was a kind of revivalist mentality at the time, but this can easily be put down to the air of triumphalist redetermination of history that America has, today, done to a fine art. America was the Promised Land, the New Everything, the New Jerusalem and Mecca for erstwhile British subjects. But the architects of America’s independence and constitution were far less religious than some would like to believe. Thomas Jefferson was more of a deist than a theist. George Washington was more of a closet freethinker in the sense that the word was used then.

The men who ‘founded’ the United States may just as well have put a seal on their decisions in a Masonic temple rather than a church, which are not the same thing, in spite of wrinkles of whispered kinship. And it was spelt out from the first that there would be a separation of church and state. The trope that is imprinted on American money, In God We Trust, was only self-consciously adopted in the 1950s as America’s national motto after a long chequered use, a phrasal relic whose origin is woolly. The words were culled not exactly to proclaim any sincere trust in God, they were only fully adopted in those heady days when paranoid Uncle Sam thought he was about to be upstaged by ‘godless’ uncomradely Comrade Stalin.

Although the extreme religious right do use the ‘godless’ pretext for the Soviet Union’s collapse, the fact is that today, a country like the UK or Holland has more people who are gleefully irreligious than the Soviet in its heyday. The Soviet Union’s failure was the failure of communism, a system whose integrity is often compromised by needless introversion, dehumanisation and hypocrisy, and the fact that its chief praxists always try to make a religion of it. In other words, the failure of communism is a failure of a state religion that has its minor if ruthless gods. Stalin’s Soviet. Castro’s Cuba. Ceausescu’s Romania. Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Mao’s China. Today, China’s leaders are no more or less religious than Mao, but they have been able to take China in another direction. China, in spite of its vestigial, if repressive socialism, now proudly and brutally aspires to be the new Golconda. Needless to say the Chinese are not appealing to any god to help them develop, again it’s all about hard graft (not the sort of rank ‘graft’ we do in Nigeria), a kind of new-age-thin Confucianism is only used as a rough guide to growth.     

I remember a reply I gave in a forum when someone (a Catholic) said that Western civilisation owes everything to the Christian Church. A startling, although not uncommon, declaration, considering how the Catholic imperium still casts a shadow over reason and the quest for knowledge beyond the intellectual rims of the Church, a carryover of its persecutions of scientists – or natural philosophers as they were called – like Galileo and Giordano Bruno. I countered this widely-held misconception with the riff that Japanese might as well thank Shinto ‘religion’ for their 20^th century leap. By the way, those who are working in the overwhelmingly busy anthills of American sciences do not begin their day muttering In God We Trust. Nor do they spend time singing In Science We Trust, they just get on with their boffinage and hope for results.

Now I shall hypothesise the possibility of God. As it is, ‘personal relationships’ between God and his (or her or its) creatures have always been so fraught that someone who is patently ‘sinless’, or rather ‘righteous’, might find himself in the grip of cancerous calvary which no medicine or prayer would be able to assuage, which of course might, again, conveniently call forth the convoluted obfuscation of God’s way being mysterious. Now if the relationship between an individual and God is so tricky, how would it be between him (okay, let’s make God a man, Mr. God sounds good) and something as impersonal as a country? And even if the hypothetical God wishes to favour a country, how does Nigeria qualify? Are the millions of churches and chapels and camps and prayer & worship lean-tos we have erected enough justification? Or how we have made idiomatic mimicry of his name? We all abuse, insult and deceive one another with the constant and perfunctory references to God, as if we are some kind of malfunctioning androids echoing a long-declassified codeword. Our appeals to God are no more sincere than the oaths taken by our politicians to be our servant – they are commonly hollow, magnificent examples of self-hoaxery. Although the bleating of God’s name is becoming louder and deafening, things are getting worse and worse in the country. It is no longer a secret that we love Mammon far more than we know this nondescript slippery thing called God, most of us have built shrines for the former in our hearts and heads while using our mouths to shout God.

God Will Not Help Nigeria Until... (1)

Sometime ago I wrote a tongue-in-cheek article about an agnostic advert splashed on the sides of London buses for a month: There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy yourself. I cannot remember suggesting such a message should be taken to Nigeria, but someone who read the piece had put that gloss on it, he took in earnest a whimsical iffy question I asked whether such a message would have any meaning at all in Nigeria. We all know that for a country as self-deceptively and misnominally secular as Nigeria, such a message would be taken with the sort of schmaltzy hysteria that many Nigerians display when confronted with what they consider as godlessness.

Paid advertisements along such agnostic lines have also been used in other places across the western world. But even beyond the anger and righteous fury such messages might raise in a place like Nigeria, it would be no more than superfluous. This sort of dialectical luxury would be lost on a lot of people in Lagos, for instance. It is not for nothing that serious theological hairsplitting is sometimes called ‘higher criticism’. But then something that I thought would have been fine on the friezes of ‘Fashola’s buses’ had also occurred to me: THERE IS GOD, BUT HE OR SHE OR IT WILL NOT HELP NIGERIA. This marginally Hegelian bee-in-the-brain stung me a few days ago when I again read another article in a Nigerian newspaper finished with the adjuration: May God help us.  While I do understand the automatism of this declaration, it has always interested me – it nibbles at my secular sensibility. Does anyone really think there is any god that helps any country to achieve anything?

Let us take the oldest paradigm used by some Judaeo-Christian naïfs – a raggle-taggle of honorary Zionists, mostly – to shore up God extending his blessing over a nation. Israel has often been seen as a country which has achieved something because of being smiled upon by God. Those who advance this infantile Talmud-ish argument, Christians and Judaists alike, appear to have over-interpreted their bible (and torah), as most Christians do. In that highly historiographed Jewish storybook, the ‘Israelite’ saga is one infused with many chops and changes, laden with as many victories as adversities. The word diaspora, dispersal, is often used for the scattering of Jews from Palestine following defeats at the hands of the Babylonians and persecutions by Romans. It wasn’t until 1948 after six million Jews had been crushed by the Hitler-driven juggernaut of the Second World War that the state of modern Israel was born. It is not beyond questioning, or is it, why God allowed ‘his own people’ to be slaughtered in millions? Well, maybe it is explainable by the cosy theology that God needs to set trials and tribulations before his loved ones – to test their faith, the great alibi of Job’s Syndrome. And the modern state of Israel has achieved so much not by hanging onto spiritual manna from the clouds or having a direct communication with God through a conduit that travels from their synagogues to heaven, they have achieved significant autarky by sheer hardheadedness, determination, drive and brilliance.

Frenchman Simon-Pierre Laplace, who flourished in the 18^th century, remains one of the greatest mathematicians the world has ever known. Upon presenting the French Emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, with a copy of his book on celestial mechanics, Napoleon asked Laplace where in his mathematical work could he detect the ‘hand of God'. As if returning a careful repartee, Laplace replied, ‘I have no need for that hypothesis,’ God being ‘that hypothesis’. Now Laplace did not exactly set out to dismiss God as an entity or non-entity (that was not his concern), he was only stating that what he understood, or was made to understand, to be God had no place in, and contributed nothing to, how he reached his conclusions. Laplace’s ‘conclusions’ are variegated, substantial and timeless. The Frenchman lent his name to more than a dozen mathematical formulations which have largely extended the span of the ‘Agent Intellect.’ This separation of God and intellect has been the driving force of Western scientific advancement – in the same way that the separation of Church and state is often the rule in statecraft.

Nor had Einstein any need for the God hypothesis when he was working out Special and General Theories of Relativity. I picked Einstein’s name deliberately. A lot of Christians have latched on to his God does not throw dice and other ambiguities to assume that he was religious. A godly Einstein, though pragmatically pointless, would have constituted a polemical vainglory for religionists. But contrary to what some would like to believe, Einstein was a secular, open-minded scientist who saw nothing wrong with using God to garnish purely atheological conclusions. Anyway, since even a lush-leaved towering tree like Einstein – an iroko, we might call him in Yoruba – would not make a forest, it would not have mattered whether Einstein was religious or not. For some time now only about five percent of first-rate scientists believe in any sort of creative god. Just as no one needed any prayer before inventing something as simple as a clothes-peg, so will prayer be unnecessary before a comprehensive cure is found for AIDS. The phrase, Genius is ninety-nine percent hard work, one percent inspiration, supposedly said by Thomas Edison, has been overused through the years, and there seems to be some truth in the declaration.

Before anyone would use the homeopathic fallacy of the one percent coming from God and then percolating into the ninety-nine percent with grand effect, I would say that in a theological sense, numinous – divine – inspiration is not likely to produce something as unscriptural and as useful as the contraceptive and a million other things. 
A couple of years ago, the renowned American biologist Craig J Venter, with the help of his team, announced that he has been able to produce artificial life in his institute, a life nipped from a molecular mess otherwise called ‘Darwinian soup’, something other scientists quickly recognised as probably how it may all have begun several billion years ago. Since it was impossible for Darwin or Venter or even that Jewish demiurge called Yahweh to have put the ‘soup’ together all those light years ago, the condiments must have self-selected, as molecules and proteins do. This is something that may put the final nail on the chronological coffin in which Adam and Eve have lain for some time in the commonsensical world. And all right, ‘divine inspiration’ prods people to speak in tongues, to spew gibberish, it provides delusionary balm and helps a Nigerian pastor, for instance, to perfect the act of selling pseudoscriptural snake oil and making massive money from it. What else does it do? I am not sure because if it did more than what I listed above in place like Nigeria, the country would have become a technoscientific wonderland today, a paragon of futuristic innovativeness, full of prayerly, if inventive, geniuses.

   How far are we from the world – some 40 years ago – in which a friend of a great-uncle, an elderly man, coming in from a searing tropical sun, exclaimed the glory of God when a twirling ceiling fan cooled his sultry hairless head and licked the sweat on his tubby torso?  A few months later, I heard an old woman endlessly glorify God when she beheld a colour TV that my dad just bought. And today one still hears the wellnigh racialised idiocy that while ‘white people’ use their witchcraft to make things like computers and phones, we (Africans?) use ours to kill people – as if every one of us is a kind of witch sinking his or her Dracula fangs into everyone around in a witch-kill-witch world. Should anyone be told that witchcraft, like its twin kin, religion or superstition, has nothing to do with the invention of the television and how it works? In reality, there are only computers, televisions, cars and other ‘miracles’ of science and technology on one side and, on the other side, their makers: boffins and scientific ‘wizards’ by whom the uninitiated are bewitched.

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A couple of years ago, I wrote a long essay entitled God Will Not Help Nigeria Until..., a secular-humanist reason-fest (the religious would call it reason-rant). But, for reasons I explain in my new book, Schopenhauer’s Child, I put the essay in cold storage. At first, I wanted to use it as an epilogue to the text. However, I thought it did not add anything to the book; it would be superfluous. In a relative sense, the essay is long, beyond the limits of a mere op-ed, so I have decided to carve it into three parts. The parts will be published here in my blog.

     But, before then, I will reproduce the first two paragraphs of my book here to give the reader a hint of why the article, although concluded, was put in abeyance.

I finished writing the essay and went through it a few times before the news came that my sister had cancer and that it may have metastasised. During the weeks before and after the diagnosis, gradually, it was borne in on me how, in the most desperate moments, fear, superstition, sentimentality and doubt might easily insinuate themselves into the head of someone who prided himself on being deeply imbued with the sensibilities of freethought, ruffle the limpid calm of someone who saw such old ‘humane’ disciplines as philosophy and literature, and a latter one like psychology, as consolations. With the least pomposity and arrogance, I imagined I had risen somewhat above being a blind and shackled captive to at least the first three of the quartet of emotions. As a self-confirmed agnostic, doubt is a given, a necessary quirk; it is my moral business end. But, after the diagnosis, for six weeks before Adejoke finally succumbed, doubt and a reasonable dollop of fear had pre-empted other emotions.

The essay had nothing to do with cancer. It was one of the occasional secular-minded arguments I set out on a website. It had nothing to do with death either, which might have brought on the unease, the fey underfeeling, that such an article would translate into prescience if my sister’s illness ended tragically. The essay, inordinately lengthy and idiosyncratic, was entitled God Will Not Help Nigeria Until… Like most of my articles about religion, God and the eminently godly population of my country of birth, this was written with some degree of petulance – not anger, not condescension. But then, any time I decided to write about undue religiosity among Nigerians, some impassioned truth-crunching, a bit of philosophe-like preening, helplessness, and even playful irony always found their way into it. The essay’s argument was simple: the title was a quibble. The conclusion was that God – who had momentarily put me in the mind of Samuel Beckett’s Godot, which, or who, probably has nothing to do with God – would certainly not help the country, nor any country for that matter. And why would I stop myself sending out such an article before I even knew my sister was seriously ill?

In the first chapter of Schopenhauer's Child, I endeavoured to explain why I did not go ahead to publish the essay. And dear reader, do not try to extrapolate anything from the above passages. Buy the book when it becomes available.