Now I am done with the God-debate: It's Pointless.

I have just finished reading Gary Cox's The God Confusion: Why Nobody Knows the Answer to the Ultimate Question, and I think I am now done with reading books about God - for or against. Gary Cox is an agnostic, an atheistic agnostic who prefers to be called an agnostic, so his book is more against than for it. In fact, The God Confusion is a well-written and philosophical counterargument about the dusty entity called God. You could describe the book as popular philosophy, and this is not to undercut the integrity of the contents or the bona fides of the author, a reputable philosopher, but to stress his uncomplicated, slightly primerlike writing style.
Cox grounds his agnosticism in philosophy or being a philosopher because, according to him, doubt should be the default position of every thinking person. He thinks atheism is as absurd, if not impossible, a position to take as theism - you cannot strike the attitude of negating the existence of a god whose nonexistence defines your position; therefore, he gives short shrift to 'new atheism' and its popularisers like Richard Dawkins. But like the secular philosopher he is, he is not particularly interested in setting Richard Dawkins or his imaginary enemy, God, down from the pedestals on which some people have installed them. He only tries to offer empirical and invariably contrary datums to the question of God.
The God Confusion is worthy of review, but I will let that pass because that is not the point. As a matter of fact, to attempt to review or critique this book is to squelch the very purpose of putting this down. However, while solidly ensconced in his sceptical stance, Cox upends the many fanciful building blocks of the entity called 'God.' The idea of God. The concept of God. Ontological argument. Cosmological argument. The Unmoved Mover argument. Theodicean argument. Teleological Argument. Evolution. And many more. And the many dramatis personae in the God superdebate. Bishop Berkeley. Anselm. Pascal. Voltaire. Descartes. Darwin. Aquinas. Augustine. Nietzsche. Kant. Hume. Durkheim. William James. Freud. Even bit players like Aristotle, Gaunilo, Wittgenstein, Plato, JL Mackie. Cox's conclusions are balanced and unhysterical but surefootedly agnostic and sceptical.
However, in spite of the book's satisfactoriness, halfway through, I had a sort of reverse epiphany: now I am getting bored by all this, I thought. This eternal God Argument. By the time I finished the illuminating book, my mind was made up. I will not waste time and dissipate mental heat on books about God again - I am done with them. This is probably an unintellectual attitude, but seeing the number of books I have read, pro and con, about something patently a chimaera, I thought it was about time to pack it in. Note that The God Confusion is a play on Dawkins's The God Delusion, which itself is an allusion to Freud's religion-is-illusion observation. Being the urtext of 'New Atheist' thinking, Dawkins's The God Delusion has spawned mostly alliterative textual responses, what I'd call 'Delusion industry,' anything from the two theocentric 'Dawkins Delusion' to the utterly misbegotten 'Deluded By Dawkins.'
The God Confusion is in a different league, as it neither seeks to counter Dawkins nor recompound his heady atheistic absinthe, it's only a book which points out the irrationality of thinking, or believing, in any being called God. I am an agnostic of sorts, so that argument agrees with my thinking. But even a fine, well-written book like this would not help relieve the intellectual bloatedness I now suffer about the question of God, having ingested and engorged spoonloads of treacle, bile, pap, and even heaps of crap, owing to a hunger for understanding, clarification, for better insight into the nonthing described as 'God.' From the Bible to the Qur'an, to GB Shaw's Black Girl in Search of Her God, to Kierkegaard and many books by atheists, agnostics, philosophers, and theologians. A few weeks ago, I picked up Karen Armstrong's The Case For God (why she used 'The' and not 'A' I don't know). Armstrong's lawyering in God's behalf is very much in character: slipperiness, jargoneering, a shuffling of apriorism and aposteriorism, clever apologetics, heavy deployment of 'dead languages,' I mean Latin and Greek. God the Being itself is ipsum Esse subsitens, God as the Prime Mover...the Necessary Being is quod omnes dicunt Deum. I guess it would be seen as facetious if I translated the latter into 'God is a Fat Bearded Cunt,' but then that was as much sense as Armstrong's book made to me. Not too long ago, I read Terry Eagleton's 'Culture and the Death of God.' Now, this is one of the more cryptic and difficult parts of Eagleton's high-tone tomes. In the book he stylisedly skirts the death of God and he uses an elaborate trudge through the lush historical meadows of the French\English Enlightenment, German idealism, and Romanticism to confront, in a backhanded way, the death of God.
By the way, every book written by every atheist, agnostic, apatheist - antitheists in sum - in the last 150 years or so has been a kind of variation on, and a rehash of, searching intellectual firstfruits of freethought by early 'disbelievers' like Baron D'Holbach and Jean Meslier, or a comparatively latter one like Ludwig Feuerbach. Although I will continue to read books about the inanities of religion, which, of course, will always carry with it the negation of God and its existence, I don't think I will again spend time reading any book that seeks to prove or disprove the existence of God. Now, so saturated with the anodyne reagent of God-debate, I might very well go John Updike's Dale Kohler one better and try to extrude a cast-iron God from the entrails of my computer.
In spite of having always preferred the label agnostic to atheist, I have never truly been an either\or person - 'either-there-is-God-or-there-is-no-God' person. By the time I reached high-noon as a nonbeliever in God or gods a few years ago, the golden mean had become neither\nor, and it still is: I no longer err on the side of doubt nor certainty. For me, the question of whether there is or there is no God is superfluous, time-wasting waffle. This attitude somehow bears on what some have described as ignosticism or igtheism, meaning, broadly, that the lack of a clear definition of the term 'God' tends to make any debate about it unnecessary. Oh, I am not about to suggest that I should be described as an ignosticist or igtheist or a contratheist or antignostic etc. An alternation between agnostic and apatheist is just about enough. Is it? So, how would you describe yourself if you spurned all debate about God because you thought it was nonsense? An I-dont-give-a-fuckist.

Deconstructing Prayer Before Connecting to The Internet

Almighty and eternal God,
who created us in Thy image and bade us to seek after all that is good,
true and beautiful,
especially in the divine person of Thy only-begotten Son,
our Lord Jesus Christ,
grant we beseech Thee that,
through the intercession of Saint Isidore,
bishop and doctor,
during our journeys through the internet was  , we will direct our hands and eyes only to that which is pleasing to Thee
and treat with charity and patience all those souls whom we encounter.
Through Christ our Lord.
Amen.

I couldn't believe the above when I saw it. An English translation of Prayer Before Connecting to the Internet was originally written in Latin by a certain Father, John Zulsdorf. This was and may remain my greatest WTF moment this year. I thought it was a kind of popish joke, the work of a clowning lapsed Catholic, probably Dave Allen. If you know you'll be 'tempted' when you use the internet, why use it? Why not get yourself cloistered, throw on a hairshirt or a sackcloth blouse, and whip yourself all day? And the Guardian spirit of the Internet! Isidore - who lived hundreds of years before the Internet was dreamt up.
I know that religion, more so Catholicism, is an anachronism, but to try to father the guardianship of safe browsing on a medieval religioso is the height of religious pomposity. And what has happened to freewill, the theological cheat that Christian apologetics always try to palm off on us? Because if having a computer in your house, a phone in your pocket, or a tablet in your bag is a matter of choice, shouldn't the choice be left to you what you would do on the phone or computer?
A man could very well pray that 'Lord, as I go out to sit and drink some wine on the porch of my house, help me to avert my eyes from the sizable derriere of neighbour's wife when she walks past.' Now the problem is, the man had consciously gone out into the porch to stake out the ass of his neighbour's wife. Before you blame the man for exercising his free will to sit on the porch in the first place, reread the line in the 'Lord's Prayer' which says, 'Lead us not into temptation, deliver us from evil.' If God had had the power to lead the man into temptation, despite his silly little prayer, who is to say it wasn't the great 'He' who had made him commit the 'sin' of leching after the ass of his neighbour's wife from the first time he saw the woman, or saw the ass itself? By the way, if people still read the 'Lord's Prayer' and can't see the absurdity embedded within it, why would a Catholic priest not write Prayer Before Connecting to the Internet and not expect anyone to read it with a straight face? Would anyone?
Think of a callow pubescent Catholic boy brainstorming for pristine, clean internet sites to visit, praying to Saint Isidore to help him direct his eyes and mind to nothing but...But what! The Sound of Music? Sister Act? Who knows what he would find on the tenth page of 'Sister Act' search result? Perhaps a sorority of nuns cavorting with a brotherhood of friars - or even cavorting among themselves with sapphic abandon. Let's face it, when the Catholic Father Zulsdorf sat down to write his prayer before using the internet, the mortification of porn, or the flesh, couldn't have been far from his God-clouded imagination. Since I know there's no avoiding what the priest seeks to suppress, I'd advise the Catholic youth that instead of wasting his time on such a prayer, he should recite the last movement of WB Yeats's poem, Long-Legged Fly:

That girls at puberty may find
The first Adam in their thought,
Shut the door of the Pope's chapel,
Keep those children out...

By the way, if prayer before using the internet does work, Arab countries will not be recording high tallies of visits to pornographic sites - extreme, kinky ones, for that matter. These are countries where praying five times a day is mandatory. However, somehow, between those quintet of devotions, the antsy denizens of Greater Levant still find a way to commit the grave sin of onanism with the aid of their computers and whatnot. Or maybe they are not exactly praying that Allah should help them avert their eyes from earthly infidel whores online. By the way, why should anyone who has three scores and some virgins waiting for him in the afterlife waste his time on porn?

'So you think there is no supernatural force, the metaphysical?'

I have been asked a few times: So you think there is no supernatural force, metaphysical force, unseen energy, etc.? I'll give a brief answer. One man's supernatural force is another woman's mumbo-jumbo, and what you consider 'the metaphysical' may not be more than what an illusionist will conjure from his bag of tricks. Derren Brown is a British illusionist who always tells his audiences that what they are about to watch is no more than tricks, the sleight of hand and plain illusioneering (which includes endlessly fascinating mathematical magic). To many people, Derren Brown can only be nothing but a jujuman, a wizard, someone who got his wondrous 'powers' from mammy wata (water nymph) or from behind a burning bush or some otherworldly thing. But this is not the case: everything Brown does can be unpacked. In my book, Schopenhauer's Child, I describe him as a mindfuck artist. He does that very well: mindfuckery. Which is another name for metaphysical claptrap. One of his easier routines is hypnosis and mind control. To many, you can only make someone 'go to sleep' or behave in specific ways with juju or by some kind of fetishised drivel. But even I, though magically untrained, am au fait with the trick of hypnosis; it has nothing to do with the supernatural; it's a suggestional trick of the mind.
So, can anything be described as preternatural, hyperphysical or paranormal? The simple answer is No. Anything possible, doable, conjurable, and achievable is natural, immanent within nature, not extranatural. I'll use astroscience - simply because it's science - before I begin to speculate on voodoo, animism, miracles and other forms of superstition. Many pragmatic achievements in space travel and orbital mechanics are decidedly and literally out of the world. Not only cargo-cult islanders who see England's Prince Phillip as God would marvel at the science of space travel, but the majority of other humans, including those who understand the physics, would find it intriguing - and even if humans were to conquer Mars, tame it, transplant themselves there, that would count as a phenomenon, a signal human phenomenon. Although the trajectory might be squiggly, tortuous and complex I will always double-back agential responsibility on the human.
Besides the fantastic accomplishments in space science, the antics and farcicalities of voodoo, juju, and muti are paltry and insignificant. But hundreds of millions of people, many from my dear continent, still take these things seriously despite their overappropriation of foreign religions like Islam and Christianity. As it is, these Middle Eastern religions have further metastasised belief in Africa's primal shibboleths. But for the sake of philosophical argument, I will not dismiss out of hand what millions and millions of people hold true; such absolutism does not have a place in philosophy, not even in science, although secular positivists like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking uncompromisingly and rightly pooh-pooh supernaturalism. Even then, using philosophy to prove or disprove supernaturalism is all but impossible - which is why the occasionally forced consilience between philosophy and theology is forbiddingly loose. The weakest link in the vast galaxy of Immanuel Kant's philosophy is where, in Critique of Practical Reason, he clumsily tries to manipulate transcendence and God into being.
In the same way that the burden rests with theists to prove the existence of God, so does it rest on the believer in juju to prove its virtues, efficacy, and, above all, preterhuman potency. But proving this is as impossible as proving the existence of God. If someone came to me and said a young girl who died yesterday was killed by a witch through invultuation - sticking pins and needles in her mini graven image - I would tell the person to prove the truth of his statement to me. In the best of all philosophical worlds, proving or disproving this assertion would necessitate a rollout of arguments, which might include anyone from Aristotle through Hume to Sartre, anything from causality to counterfactuality. But we do not live in the best of philosophical worlds; we do not even live in a philosophical world; as a matter of fact, maggots like paranormal investigation, shamanism, and other religions not only thrive on the corrupt meat of antiscience but also on the ordure of antiphilosophy (in its pure literal sense). If no concrete evidence has been provided for any kind of 'paranormal activity,' if no one has been able to win the 1 million dollars prize for solving the Miracle Question from James Randi Foundation, if no substantiation has ever been provided that the 'witch who cackled last night when she flew past caused the death of my neighbour's child' then I will never get any tangible and satisfactory explanation from the person who purports that a witch had killed a young girl. Hume's scepticism about what he called 'the idea of necessary connection' still holds true today, and nowhere is this more relevant than in the attempt to anchor the galleon of reality in the quicksand of irreality. All I would expect from the dewy-eyed supernaturalist is obfuscation, mystification and a regress into infinite idiocy.
If I felt pain, a growth, anywhere, for example, I'd prefer to go and see a doctor who would make the correct diagnosis and prognosis rather than a babalawo, a sorcerer or a witchdoctor who would maunder about a poison-tipped arrow shot from the invisible bow of an 'enemy,' who would then fob snake oil on me after extorting shedloads of money. Or a 'pastor' or 'prophet' who would offer another kind of greasy placebo. There has also been a rather clever argument that juju, or mojo, might work owing to a sort of telepathic synchronicity between wishful thinking and wish fulfilment, that in societies which believe in these sorts of things, a critical mass of magical thinking might on occasion trigger results. The submission is if Africans stop believing in fantasia like curses and spells, juju and whatever horseshit is out there, they will no longer have no effect - just as it has happened in Europe over hundreds of years. Is this really the case? Did the slippery hacceitas, thisness, of witchcraft, spell-casting, and vampirism ever come near the testability, for instance, of Newton's laws of motion? Did alchemists ever find the philosopher's stone, the elixir? Did 'witches' ever use broomsticks to fly in Pendle, and were there 'possessions' in Loudun? A mere browse through the protosadistic and sinister document called The Malleus Maleficarum would show the houndlike cussedness, the utter ignorance, at the heart of the medieval embrace of superstition and the supernatural in Europe.
For argument's sake, let's put the problematic of causality aside, cool the ardour of our scepticism and hazard belief in the supernatural, but then the measliness, the limitations and the poverty of the signifiers of 'fancies' like witchcraft are enough to short-change any argument for their importance. Even if juju, or witchcraft, did succeed in killing one person, or two, or three, could it have been useful in winning the First or Second World War, or even any war for that matter? A Yoruba politician who was once seen as the embodiment of juju, the incarnation of an ancient Yoruba shogun-like General with occult powers, was routed and blasted to eternity with the guns of young soldiers during a coup after his mojo failed him; he had picked up a gun and used it to defend himself - to no avail. And just as Christian miracles and faith healing cannot help bring back a missing limb, witchcraft can only do so much in killing anyone. This is the biggest argument against superstition, its insignificance, its blurred myopic scope - the worm's-eye view captives have of the world around them. Put a coven of shamans and sorcerers in a dark room with a group of physicists and electricians and challenge either side to bring forth light...

‘What god do I worship, what do I believe in?'

This question, unexceptional though it seems, plumbs the depths - the depths of depthlessness. Fewer people ask me the question now than, say, 25 years ago - this may have to do with the fact that I now live in a country where you don’t need to worship any god or believe in any religious idol or any newfangled Neoplatonic idea, or seek the validation of a heavenly superwanker, aka the Almighty, to be reassured of your humanity.
But then, occasionally, a religionist (a Nigerian often) does fling the question at me. A few days weeks ago, I was again assailed with the rather needless poser. Below is the give-and-take:
'What god do you worship? What do you believe in?’
'Why must I worship any god? Why believe in any deity?'
'One must believe in something, anything.'
'Why?'
'Because one must.'
'Why?'
'One cannot just be like that?'
'Like what?'
'Be without anything – without God, it’s like being empty.'
'Empty of what?'
'Of God, spirit...'
'Do I look spiritless to you?'
'Not that kind of spirit, the spirit of God.'
'Aha, that.'
But I had stopped because I could not continue the metaphysics-light exchange with the person beyond that point. For one thing, I’ve made the decision not to engage with anyone who possesses neither the liberal imagination nor the moral breadth to know that the choice between belief in God or gods and belief in the existence of dogs is not exactly analogous to a choice between Gog and Magog - or argue with someone who could not cotton on that her declaration that I was ‘empty of God’ was doctrinally self-defeating. Kenosis is a theological term for ‘self-emptying' - particularly how Jesus, the Nazarene, is said to have emptied himself of divinity and godhead to become human. If Jesus made himself 'empty,' why could I not?
Okay, enough irony. Enough of digressive strawmanship. Not believing in God or not worshipping anything does not make me ‘empty.’ As a matter of fact, I have never felt more ‘full,’ whole, more self-contented and relaxed, within humanly possible bounds. And let me repeat: I do not need religion or God to achieve plenitude; all I need is to get to grips with my inner Buddhahood. Needless to say, I am not a Buddhist (even though I see the point of Arthur Schopenhauer’s dalliance with Buddhism, I have no interest) and no time for any new-age east-meets-west eyewash. 'Inner buddhahood,' if you will, is a playful metaphor for chilled-out godlessness. But then I am still often asked what I believe in because it is received wisdom in most of Africa to see belief, faith, worship and sacramental mush as an existential necessity.
And what about the gods and religions of the Yoruba world? After all, I am Yoruba, and someone had once made a curious assumption that my rejection of Semitic religions and their ethnocentric god equals an embrace of Ogun, the iron-clad Yoruba deity, or Sango, the belcher of fire and brimstone, or any of the scores of he- and she-gods in the Yoruba pantheon. This thinking is not as far-fetched as it seems. The eminent Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka makes a virtue of being an Ogun votary. I will not second-guess what Soyinka finds in Ogun (although it's easily parsable), but I have never felt there is a need for any back-to-the-roots posturing; I am as unconcerned about Jesus or Mohammed as I am about Ogun or Obatala. And if I do not see anything in the divinities of the Yoruba world, I can't see myself gathering with tunic-wearing 'neopagans' to worship the sun at Stonehenge or becoming a Freysgodhi, although I have been giving Jediism or the Way of the Jedi, a cool and considered thought lately. What with the hoopla around the latest instalment of Star Wars! Well, if I wrote it down for a Yoruba person that I am a Jedi, the likelihood is that I would remind her of the trots, okay, diarrhoea, before Star Wars because that is what the word 'jedi' means in the language. Oh, this is becoming too anal-expulsive now.
And being from a society in which there is the instinctual desire to mystify everything masquerade reality behind the shroud of the supernatural, the unsayable, the unreachable, the unknowable, it is not unlikely that some would surmise that I may very well belong to a 'secret society,' that I am an allegiant of some fraternity or some hugger-mugger cult. But then the very thought of this is as laughable as giving a thought to becoming a serious devotee of Dudeism or the Church of SubGenius and its great god, Jehovah 1. Even then, these latter two 'religions' make more sense to me than any fraternity or cult with its self-important, sobersided ceremonials. After all, I like the Coen brothers' The Big Lebowski, which is the matrix of Dudeism, and I find Momus, the true god of SubGenius, amusing.
So what god do I worship, to which religion do I belong, and in what faith do I have? To answer 'nothing' to all these questions is to snare myself in the ideological slough of nihilism - nothingness for its own sake - which is a philosophically tricky situation to place oneself in if nihilism is broken and ground down to its brutally dusty lowest common denominator. But then, I do not worship any god or belong to any religion. As regards faith,  I have none except faith and belief in humanist ethos, sustained neither by ritual, worship nor by a cacophony of self-indulgent pieties. This is why I would not also think of becoming a member of August Comte's Positivist\Humanist Church, a needless parody of Abrahamism, or even its hipper, newishly laidback offspring, The Sunday Assembly.