Did God Really Save Patrice Muamba's Life

When Bolton Wanderers footballer Fabrice Muamba collapsed at White Hart Lane while his club was playing against Tottenham Hotspur, it was clear that something had gone wrong, and as time snailed on it became clearer still that something had gone wrong in a serious and grave way. It later transpired that the young man had suffered a cardiac arrest and that he was not just seriously ill in a hospital, he was in extremis. Early on, his heart had ‘stopped’ for 78 minutes, so his condition was touch-and-go. But a few days ago, after a month in hospital, Muamba was discharged from the hospital, a zapper fitted to his heart.

     Although he took a picture with two doctors who helped save him both on and off the pitch, Muamba has been repeating in interview after interview that it was God who saved his life and that his recovery was a miracle. Now Muamba has the inalienable right to say his life was saved by anything or anyone, but something that I have noticed, reading the interviews carefully, is that the young footballer has been stingy with his praise of the doctors, nurses and paramedics who might just as well have done Patrice's god’s work for him.   

     Did any god save Muamba’s life? Before I continue, I would like to repost here an exchange on the Facebook page of a fellow humanist and friend, Deo Ssekitooleke. A Christian friend wrote to Deo:

     Deo’s Christian Friend: ‘I am sorry to learn that you are sick. God is looking after you and I urge you to take medication and please one of these days, kneel down and pray for this world because it is said that God listens to prayers of people who do not usually go to church.’

      Deo: ‘Thank you very much. But science and modern medicine helped me to recover. The pathogenic organisms that attacked me for their selfish ends had to be neutralised or killed. Prayers or psychological comfort can always come when everything has failed. You cannot stop a hungry lion that has come to eat your goat for its survival with prayers. Likewise hungry bacteria or viruses cannot be stopped by prayers. When you catch fish from water and you have appetite for it, there is no way it (the fish) can pray to its god for you to leave it to live for another day. Life is a struggle for the fittest. The bacteria within want to survive you to produce new offspring to represent it in the new generation of the genetic pool. It cannot wait for your prayers to your god when it is eager to maintain its genetic survival. Humans may invent prayers but they have not prevented the death of over 100 billion humans who have ever been born but died. ...now another 7 billion are waiting for their death, including the death of their children and great-grandchildren.

     I wonder whether one can easily overlook the fact that ‘Deo’ translates as God in Latin. But that is beside the point, the answer Mr Ssekitooleke gave to the piously presumptuous believer/question-asker is so quietly sensible, courteous, pellucid, intelligent, even exemplary that I now consider it as one of the subtlest ripostes I have read for some time. But what really seized hold of me was the puncturing of the religiose balloon the question-asker had let loose, a man who said, God is looking after you and I urge you to take medication, as if the two things had anything to do with each other. A man who also said to Deo, kneel down and pray for this world, as if someone who was sick should bother his head praying for the world.   

    Anyway, if  Muamba had been suffering from any kind of viral ailment, I would have suggested that the answer Deo gave is enough to dampen the footballer’s ‘I-thank-God-for-my-recovery singsong. But the problem was with Muamba’s heart, which is as serious a medical matter as any. The young footballer could have died right there on the pitch, but he didn’t, and he didn’t because his body, his constitution, wasn’t ready to succumb. And because some people went out of their way to help him live - doctors and nurses that Muamba often neglects to thank.

     For philosophical reasons, I might even concede that a certain god may have saved Muamba’s life, the god he believes he speaks and prays to and who does such things as waking up people from the dead. Immanuel Kant’s ‘noumenon’ - unperceived and uninterpretable ‘thing-in-itself’ - would come in handy here. But then again, I would argue that even if such a god existed, he did not save Muamba’s life. Why Muamba of all the people who were on death’s kill list for the day and who died on the self-same day Muamba was pulled back from the brink? Or did he pray better than those who were taken away?

     The theology of exceptionalism in which a few would think their equally puny lives were saved at the expense of tens of thousands of lives does indeed grate, it chafes. Apart from being an arrogant way of viewing life, it is also downright insensitive, ungenerous, if not callous. Even if  no one died on the pitch on which Muamba’s life was saved, he could easily have spared a thought for others who were suffering, whose lives the all-benevolent god was not about to spare. He could easily have remembered children in such hospitals as Great Ormond, children who are innocent martyrs to every kind of pain and terminal condition.

     The young man could have shown more curiosity and probed into the nature of what happened to him, he could have tried to catch up on what the odds were of surviving a cardiac arrest. Instead of thanking the Jewish god and calling his recovery a miracle, he might just as easily be grateful to Asclepius, the Greek god of healing and medicine, a mythic deity whose record of  ‘power of healing’ the writers of the gospels plagiarised when writing about Jesus of Nazareth.    

Buridan’s Ass: A Paradox Redux

Temi mentally pulls up short. For moments she fights shy of an involuntary seizing-up of her motor nerves. Her legs, most of all, have gelled with irresolution. A decision to stop walking altogether would have checked this sudden onset of lightness she feels – but there is a shade of qualms in her thinking. Her heart is as light as lint: it shuffles like an apoplectic’s in its cage.

In a way Temi is smitten. She has just lit on a one Zimbi pound banknote. The money lies on what may have been the pavement of a rugged dirt-road, one of ten thousand untarred roads in Zimbi City. The note is slightly stippled with dust and dirt, and only just visible. It is about two meters away. Like everyone with a lack, it would have possible for Temi to see a piece of brown paper and momentarily believe it to be an aquamarine banknote, willing herself to see paper as money. But she is affected the other way: when she ought to be sure that what she is seeing is money, Temi still thinks it may be mere paper. She cannot believe she has found a luckypiece this morning: she has not often been this fortunate. She sees the banknote with such jaundiced eyes that she goes beyond the common whim to objectify where there is no object, to subjectifying where she has clearly seen an object. This is also very human. But then she resolves in her mind that what she is looking at is money.

Temi’s main lack is money: not money to buy jam and the sweeter things of life, but money to buy bread, a mere loaf. The eighteen-year old is on her way to where she hopes to be hired as one of the fifty drawers of water at a construction site. She has not eaten this morning. She did not eat last night, either. Every member of her family fanned out to odd-job earlier, and all her hopes of eating a breaktime brunch are concentrated on the airy possibility of borrowing money from someone on the site, who she will pay back after she gets her wage.

And here now is money before her, lying there so innocuous and inviting in the dust. But as Temi moves towards the banknote her mind suddenly becomes the moral equivalent of a broken car windscreen, cracked into a spectrum of montages by the soundless impact of a little stone. Of course, one Zimbi pound can’t buy more than a square breakfast, and that is what she will use the money to buy if she can pick it up. But Temi’s mind splits apart concerning whether she should pick the money up or not; then her mind subsplits still, antlers of indecision bucking up before her. While she knows she can eat her morning fill with the note, something holds her back, an invisible straitjacket and shackles, bands of inscrutable scruples.

This is not an empty street. Houses are on either side. Vehicles and motorcycles go past her. Temi glances back to see if anyone is coming up to her. There is no one close. It is still early morning, the street has not begun to teem with people; even the early birds are few and far away from her. She can simply step forward and pick up the banknote. But there are houses at the sides of the road, and the money lies close to the front of a bungalow. An aged woman peers out of the bungalow’s window like a forgotten inmate of Kafka’s Castle who has suddenly seen the light of day. A man and a woman stand at the door of another house, perhaps arguing over the inadequacy of the money the man has given the woman to buy stew-things in the market.

There is another man. He stands several metres up the road, wearing a smart powder-blue shirt and a pair of black trousers. He appears like someone on the way to work– the sort of work a man would dress so formally for on a Saturday. He seems to be waiting for a taxi at the side of the road. Of everyone around her, this young man is the only person who may stand between Temi and the money, although he is not standing that close. If she decides to pick up the money he may not even know she has picked anything up, and he certainly does not physically stand between her and the money.

Temi’s indecision reaches silent-scream pitch as she stands next to the money. To take it or not? She needs money. She is hungry. But how will she go about picking up the money? What if others are watching besides those she sees now? Some impish boys might be doing this for fun: dropping the money and hiding, lying doggo to watch someone pick up the money then bursting out with a cry of “Drop it, thief!” She winces at being shouted at as a thief. Even if she has not gone out of her way to break into a place to steal, picking up the Zimbi pound note will amount to stealing-by-finding: about as antisocial in her way of thinking as being caught in a state of semi-undress in one of the city’s parks making love with a boy. She remembers that a girl and a boy were caught doing that recently.

Temi’s moral outlook might be seen by a cool observer as verging on the saintly. She holds it not so much because of the tough-love upbringing her poor father gave her and her siblings, but because she had long found she could just as easily shrug off little temptations like allowing herself to be deflowered when she was fourteen, as a big one like going away to work in a brothel – something a couple of girls who used to live in her street did when they dropped out from secondary school years before. Those girls were from families as poor as hers. One of them returned home recently, ravaged and wracked with AIDS.

Perhaps the inability to make those small and big decisions now makes it difficult for her to simply bend down and pick up the money: she is too morally hampered. She isn’t sure she would be able to scoop the banknote up even in a lonelier road than this. How will she do it? Make a show of bending to scratch her ankle? Wish for a freak wind to scrape up the money and drive it against her midriff, where she can clutch it in her hand?

Temi remembers a kleptomaniac classmate she had. That light-fingered girl would not think twice before snapping up the money. Temi almost regrets that she does not have the brass the thieving girl had, though the girl suffered a lot of disgrace for her misdemeanours. Temi imagines such brazen kleptomania would be a welcome disinhibiting factor now. She knows nothing would prevent that girl claiming that the money she picked up was hers, even if it was an obvious booby-trap.

Perhaps inspired by the thought of the girl-thief she knew, Temi decides to turn back round and pick up the money. She is very hungry. But as she turns round she sees a girl of about her age wearing a pair of blue jeans and shirt, standing right on the spot where Temi saw the money moments ago. Temi watches the young woman genuflect as if to greet an older person. But in a flash, her upper body poised on her haunches, the girl picks up the money. As it disappears into her jeans pocket her eyes meet with Temi’s. She smiles, slightly prettifying a gaze that’s half-dazed and dusky, as if from an overnight party. She brushes past Temi, almost bodychecking her, still smiling in a way that suggests she is repressing a chuckle. It occurs to Temi to stop the girl, to buttonhole her, to pull at the tail of her shirt and tell her she has just picked up money Temi just accidentally dropped. Temi again begins to grapple with her moral antlers, this time over how she will prove it is her money. Did anyone see her drop it? Who but her saw the girl pick it up?What if the girl denied picking up anything?

“Finders keepers!”

Did she hear that? The phrase strains into her head like the dog-end of an echo. Temi breaks off her worrisome detour into devices she might use to get the money from the girl. She cannot even begin to do anything like that. Even now the girl is sailing down the street away from her.

So Temi walks slowly towards the construction site. The hunger seems to be raging now. She wonders whether she will be able do a stroke of work that morning if she does not have a bite of something first. She also wonders if she is not now too late to enlist for the piecework. The construction site always teems with people looking for jobs.

© Adebowale Oriku 2012

An Argument with a Jehovah’s Witness about God and Religion.

Yesterday a pair of Jehovah's Witnesses knocked on my door. Anyone else would have shooed them away, but I think talking to Witnesses often offers an opportunity to do a bit of chaffering with God-worshippers.

The older of the men asked whether I believed in God. I shook my head quietly - more to indicate that I'd rather not talk about this. But I knew that Witnesses are a tenacious lot, they were not going let go just like that, so far as they were concerned I might as well be a future Witness.

The man asked what my opinions were about evolution. I answered that evolution is a more plausible way of explaining how everything came to be than 'creation.' Now the man did something unexpected, he opened his Bible and gently removed a feather from within its pages.

Jehovah’s Witness: I ask this question from people I talk to. This feather belonged to a bird, any idea what the bird was?

Me: (Without hesitation) A pigeon, I believe.

Witness: Ah, well you are the first person to get this right. Congratulations. And do you know which part of a pigeon the feather came from?

Me: From the wing (that was pretty obvious, if you knew anything about birds).

Witness: And that’s true too, it’s a pinion feather. Do you know why I brought it out?

Me: (I thought I must wax clever-cleverer now) Because you want to prove to me that there is an Intelligence behind everything, every design.

Jehovah’s Witness: And that is exactly what I want to do.

Me: Okay.

Witness: (Carefully kneading the feather) You see how intricate this feather is, how beautiful. (The witness stopped here, dipped his hand into his bag, brought out a magnifying glass, and gave it to me). Now use that glass to look at the feather. Look at the construction of it, the craft, the woof and warp.

Me: (I took the glass and feather, studied the feather for a few moments and returned both).

Jehovah’s Witness: Don’t you see how perfectly made the feather is? Can you make this feather, or even something close to it?

Me: No. I can’t make the feather, any more than I can make an iPad. I believe the latter was made by a man called Steve Jobs - with the help of his many brilliant assistants.

Witness: Steve Jobs made the iPad, but God made the feather.

Me: Oh, I get it now. So how do you know anyone called God made the feather? After all, I easily knew Steve Jobs made the iPad – or at least he showed it to the world as something that came from his technological stable. I would not be so trivial as to demand that God should come out and tell us that he made the feather. And you know, the God you believe in might as well have made the beautiful feather you are holding there.

Witness: (The man looked bemused) It’s not just the God I believe in, but the true and only God, the Intelligent Designer.

Me: Have you read Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker?

Jehovah's Witness: No. I am not interested in anything written by Dawkins. God is not blind, he sees everything and makes beautiful things like the feather.

Me: All right. And he is also the God who made a beautiful thing like a newborn baby.

Witness: (Now growing more confident) Yes, God made babies too. Don’t you see how wonderful the whole process of procreation is? From conception to birth, and the perfect baby that comes of it.

Me: (The Socrates in me began to kick in) Every newborn is not actually perfectly made, I am sorry. A lot of babies are born with disabilities, and some of these disabilities are so extreme and cruel that they belie the hand of any intelligent designer. And there are still-born babies too. Who would kill what they burdened a woman with for nine months? Moloch? God?

Witness: But…

Me: You would not tell me that the not-so-perfect babies were made as foils for the perfect ones, would you? To show that God could make something as perfect as a ‘normal’ baby.

Witness: But God moves in mysterious ways.

Me: I know that. (Now I thought it was time to factor in theodicy, ‘the problem of evil.’) You see, I came from Nigeria and many of the roads in the country are hotspots of some of the most gruesome crashes. When I was about twenty I was travelling through a motorway with my dad and we ran into the smouldering wake of a pile-up - six vehicles had formed large ball of crash-point. Upwards of a dozen people died, their crushed bodies were flung here and there. Then I saw the baby, you wouldn’t know what it was until you got closer. It was a most dreadful sight, I had never seen anything like that, the gore, the monstrous mangling of the poor innocent baby. Imagine the suffering, the agony this child who was no more than a couple of months old would have gone through in its last moments.

Jehovah’s Witness: Well, I think we should go now.

Me: (I said to them even as they left) Don’t you have copies of Awake to sell? (And I truly wanted to buy the magazine).

Witness: Next time.

As the two Jehovah’s Witnesses moved off, I remembered what Ivan Karamazov said to his godly brother Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov:

‘Can you understand why a little creature, who can't even understand what's done to her, should beat her little tormented breast with her tiny fist … and weep her sanguine meek, unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her?

No, I can’t understand it. Nor can Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov. Nor can the two Jehovah’s witnesses who scarpered before I could ask them this Karamazovian question.

All right, I think I went a bit far. I could just have told the Witnesses that a baby is perfect and adorable until it begins to suffer from colic and stomach cramps, keeping its parents up for most of the night. An intelligent Designer would not lay a baby open to colic pains a few days after it was born.

        

Is 2012 Truly the End of the World?

I watched a US television report recently and one of those who were at a Republican Party event ended a brief interview with a curious and somewhat glib non-sequitur: it will ultimately not matter who wins the Republican Party nomination because the world is coming to an end on the 21st of December anyway. Anyone who wins the November presidential election will not even be sworn in, by January next year all will have become dust. 

My somewhat automatic reaction was to say to myself: oh, America. The place is never short of cranks - or kooks as they would say - especially when it comes to matters that bear on religion, matters like God, the beginning (or ‘creation,’ if you will) and of course eschatology (the end).

In modern times, no country has produced more end-timers than the United States. Some of these doomsday prophets are merely pesty and self-indulgent like the poor old fundie, Harold Camping, who swore by his eternalist God that the world would come to an end on May 21 of 2011. And there are crazed apocalypse orchestrators and scenario-setters like the baneful Reverend Jim Jones who murdered more than a thousand of his followers while incanting a lot religious balderdash.    

The germ of the notion that the world is coming to an end in 2012 originated from the time-honoured calendar of the Mayan people of South America, and perhaps more than any before, the end-time talk has bulked into a vast mushroom cloud of inconsequential hoo-ha. There is no point trying to rehearse the runic Mayan algorithm which made a lot of people to conclude that the world will end this year.

Historically plausible and sophisticated as the Mayan calendar is, it cannot foreordain anything more than fairly predictable cycles of the moon and the seasons (just like the received Gregorian calendar), and even if one reads the calendar closely what people have interpreted as denoting the end of time is only the end of a cycle and the beginning of another age, another epoch.

End-of-the-world predictions may just as well be old as homo sapiens, or as old as when humans began to invent religion and gods - particularly the invention of ‘organised’ religion and a monotheistic God who plays a wacky and wicked game of solitaire using its supposed creatures as objects, pawns. From bemused soothsayers of any bygone biblical empire to modern-day half-clever Jesus-freaked doomsayers, the notion that the world will one day be extirpated has never been out of currency.

Both the Qur’an and the Bible harp on the end, but the description of the pending apocalypse in the Qur’an is one of the most inhumane, antihuman and sadism-soaked literature I have ever read. If any god had indeed dictated such things to anyone, then the god must have a mean sociopathic streak in him.

As is usual the Bible’s depiction of what will happen in the end is not as vicious as the Qur’an’s. Or is it? The Book of Revelation revels in arrant bloody-mindedness of its own, but what strikes the reader more is the layered phantasmagoria with which the putative author of the book, John, couched the coming Armageddon. George Bernard Shaw dismisses Revelation as the ‘record of the visions of a drug addict.’ In other words, the Book of Revelation might very well serve the sole article of faith for members of the American Church of Peyotism.

Christians, particularly, are still echoing the end-of-time scare which began in ancient Judea even long before Jesus was born. When those people of antiquity could not make head or tail of the meaning of life and the inevitability of death, they invented a singular God alongside rather sophisticated, heavily codified, religions. Coming up with things like 'doomsday' was just one of the ways those who promulgated both God and ways of worshipping him believed they could cry their deity up and give relevance to their religions, it was meant to inspire fear, or what denizens of the medieval world would call terribilita - before the word became synonymous with the more awesome of Michelangelo’s art.                             

Disciples of Jesus couldn’t stop repeating that within their collective lifetime, Jesus would return and sit in judgement over people, that there would be an end-of-time rapture in which the righteous would be charioted away to heaven – that was 2000 years ago. Today, followers of Jesus are still talking about the Second Coming,  they are still catastrophising about the end, about the final judgement.

Now I must be categorical about this. There is not going to be any second coming of anyone - not this year, not for ever. Earth is not going to incinerate this year, either. And from all appearances, the world is not coming to an end soon. I’d rather depend on what mathematics and astrophysics say - speculative as that may be - about the chances of anything happening to the earth soon than wild and wide shots of religion and superstition.

Okay, an asteroid might strike a corner of the earth. But that will not happen this year - even if it does, it is not likely to lead to a global cataclysm. Or maybe the world is going to end this way: Israel will attack Iran and Iran will counterattack by nuking the world as we know it - but then that is as far-fetched as North Korea making any significant dent even if its new rotund leader suddenly loses it and presses the button.

The Red Giant? Well, we still have a few billion years before that happens, before the sun snowballs - pardon the oxymoron -  into an infernal monstrosity and subsumes the earth. What would earthlings look or be like then? Billions of years old cinders. So, indeed, the world might come to an end, but science explains this better than religion - and the probable end is still a great deal of light years away.

(...Continue to Work out your Salvation With) Fear and Trembling

I borrowed the unbracketed part of title of this piece from the Danish philosopher/theologian Soren Kierkegaard who in turn had borrowed it from the Bible. Not being religious,  I take Kierkegaard's theology with - for want of a better description - a pinch of salt, but I like his humour. Kierkegaard was arguably the first philosopher to make running jokes while philosophising.

I am not here to dissect Kierkegaard’s humour because his book whose title I have used has little to commend it as humorous. In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard writes about the ‘infinite resignation’ and self-denying submission which led Abraham to the kind of faith that would not let him hesitate over killing his only son Isaac, the kind of fear and trembling he had to display in the presence of his god.

As a sceptical thinker, I see little reasonableness in Kierkegaard’s dense apology for Abraham’s behaviour. If anyone like Abraham truly existed, I think he was a blundering fool, a credulous filicidal killer-to-be, a knife-wielding schizophrenic who was hearing a voice that was urging him to slaughter his son. Because what father in his right senses would take his son into the bush with a view to cutting his throat? Even in those thousands of years that Abraham might have lived it didn’t appear to be a kosher thing to do.

Okay it can all be set down to faith, blind faith. Which is why I look askance at faith, because I believe it is better to steer clear of anything that will make me do unreasonable things like flying planes into tall buildings or giving away 10 percent of my hard-earned wage to a flamboyant pastor who has dozens of cars and a couple of private jets.

In a slightly nuanced sort of way, during my recent visit to Nigeria I experienced first-hand the fear and trembling that can be induced by religious faith. I went to a pub with my brother Akin and he introduced me to a younger friend of his, Isaac (a pseudonym). You see, Akin sometimes takes on the quirk of introducing me to his friends with tags like ‘atheist,’ ‘agnostic’ and so forth, possibly to let them sit up and take notice. Now he said:

‘Isaac, this is my freethinker brother. His name is Debo.’   

Isaac replied: ‘Ah freethinker. You believe in God, don’t you Mr Debo.’

With a poker face, I replied: ‘As it happens I don’t. For me it is neither here nor there.’

Isaac: ‘Hey Mr Debo, have you ever thought of hell.’

The humble Mr Debo said, ‘Again, nothing can be farther from my mind. We live our heavens and hells here, Isaac.’

And as if I had just there and then grown horns on my forehead and my sandaled feet cloven, Isaac suddenly clammed up. ‘Oh I refuse to discuss my faith with you, Mr Debo. I must not, I can’t.’

Seeing the chance to play the devil’s advocate, I said, ‘But why not? If you are so sure of your faith why should you have any problem telling me about it?’

I don’t know whether this attitude was caused by genuine fear or by the amount of beer Isaac had downed before we came in. ‘I don’t want anything to taint my faith. I don’t want to listen to anything that would make me begin to think , to doubt our Lord Jesus Christ.’

I said: ‘So you don’t want to think.’

‘My brother, I’d rather not. Please can we not talk about all this?’ Isaac was almost trembling now, he appeared to be drenched in fear-sprung sweat.

If we had all been drinking from a common chalice, I bet Isaac would have demanded his own cup. I imagine he had a sneaking feeling that he was wining with the devil.

And who would not feel swollen-headed for having inspired such terror in a fellow man, such fear and trembling!