Why I am not an Atheist

 I am not a theist. I am not an atheist, either. Although there are many things inbetween, declaring not to be one or the other can only lead to one assumption: I am an agnostic. To some degree, I am - to an infinitesimal degree. For scores of years, atheists and agnostics had a congenial relationship. After ‘Darwin's Bulldog,’ Thomas H. Huxley coined the word agnostic, those who came to describe themselves – or were (still are) described – that way and atheists became fellow travellers on the high road of religionless reasonableness. But in recent times, particularly since the advent of the intensely antitheistic New Atheists, agnosticism seems to have begun to suffer some pejoration, so much so that a lot of people now hesitate at describing themselves as 'agnostic.'

This state of play is unfortunate - it somewhat props up the argument that a certain strain of atheism, otherwise called New Atheism, is almost as intolerant of dissent as any religion. Now let me give potted definitions of atheism and agnosticism. Atheism is the total moral and evidential negation of God, gods and, by extension, religion. Agnosticism, for its own part, thrives on scepticism and doubt, a serious doubt which, taking its cue from Huxley, errs on the side of nonbelief in any god. However, unlike atheism, there are several strands to agnosticism. Although I have only known and identified with 'strong agnostics' - that is, those whose doubt and scepticism are absolute - it is believed that there are also 'weak agnostics' - those who imagine evidence might be found for the existence of God one day. While ‘strong agnostics’ may otherwise be called ‘agnostic atheists,’ ‘weak agnostics’ may be synonymised as ‘agnostic theists.’ Wheels within wheels? Well, there is also the ‘apathetic agnostic’ who believes that dwelling on the existence or nonexistence of God (or gods) is pointless and unnecessary because the likelihood that any god oversees the affairs of the world is in itself nonexistent.

One of the greatest irreligious and finest secular reasoners of all time is Robert Green Ingersoll, otherwise called ‘The Great Agnostic.’ Ingersoll was a brilliant oracle of rationalism, far more impressive and trenchant than any atheist of his generation or even many of those who came before and after him. Huxley himself was resolute in his sceptical agnosticism and was even more ‘godless’ than Darwin. And though Voltaire might see himself as a deist – a believer in the absconded, absentee God, a god conjured up in the first place by reason and not revelation – he was almost as imbued with pragmatic observational insight as the fiercely atheistic Baron d’Holbach.

Not long ago when Neil deGrasse Tyson declared that he is not exactly an atheist, that although he does not like tags, he would prefer the epithet ‘agnostic,’ atheists waxed petulant. They would not even cut Tyson any slack, considering how clear it is that the physicist is a strong/atheistic agnostic. The editor of Sceptic magazine, Michael Sherner, also made a point of describing himself as... well, a sceptic. In an essay, Sherner describes scepticism as the most reasonable position for him; ‘I do not know that there is no God, but I do not believe in God,’ he writes. This would have made him an agnostic if he had not declared earlier: ‘No one is agnostic behaviourally... we act as if there is a God or as if there is no God.’ For all this, 21st-century atheists believe that every agnostic is a confused, weak-willed softie who is waiting to be proven right that god exists. Postmodern, postmillennial new-assertiveness might be the reason why New Atheists no longer suffer agnostics gladly. Taking sheaves of leaves out of the books of atheist bruisers and brights like Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, many atheists want an all-out battle against the forces of religion and superstition, so to express any sort of epistemic doubt about the possibility of a god is seen a cop-out. So why is there a schism between atheism and agnosticism today? For the new atheists, the middle ground is too safe; the mean is not golden; agnosticism, to them, is a halfway house whose back door leads to the realm of religion and God-worship – or at least it has a rear lookout towards belief. All it takes for the agnostic to gain the realm is a ‘leap of faith.’

Naturally, as a secular humanist, I am as nontheistic as any atheist out there. Do I think it is delusional to believe in any sort of deity? Certainly. Do I accept that God is not great? Certainly – I daresay, if he/she/it exists, he/she/it is a sinister protosadist and necrophile.  After all, death and decay are the ultimation of the lives of his poor, choiceless creatures. Does religion poison everything? Pretty much – although since it acts as opiate and pabulum for some people, it has its Machiavellian, if not mephistophelian, uses. So why not declare myself an atheist? Well, though I do not believe that God (or gods) exists, there is no way I can prove anything one way or the other. Using the ethnocentric books of Abrahamites as a guide, Allah or Yahweh might as well exist in the shape of a torturous, callous demiurge. This bloodthirsty, capricious booby-trapper uses his/her/its creatures as pawns on a chessboard on which he plays with his alter ego, Mister Lucifer. So am I really interested in putting myself at the mercy of this fickle filicidal Palestinian god? No. Nor at the mercy of any sort of god.

If you decide to call me an agnostic, I am what you may call an ‘apathetic agnostic.’ The operative word here is 'apathetic,' an adjective of apathy – indifference. But then again, I am more of an ‘apathetic atheist’ than apathetic agnostic because, beyond the tautological character of the latter phrase, if I am pulled up short by someone and told, ‘Hey, God lives in the next street,’ I’ll only say to the person – assuming I allow that he is sane – to go back to God and tell him/her that I think he/she/it is a nasty piece of work and that I am not interested in knowing him/her/it. It makes no odds to me whether or not God exists; I am not questing after any god or gods; I am not interested in gods, whichever vestments they are adorned with. My attitude is that of unconcern. I am an irreligious indifferentist. But unlike many atheists, I am not interested in trying to prove or impress on anyone that God does not exist, as its existence or nonexistence means absolutely nothing to me.   

How do I arrive at this position? Well, although I sometimes describe myself as a sceptic, I am, not to put too fine a point on it, an apatheist – someone apathetic towards theos. Apatheism is a dynamic term that may be used for categorical indifference to God and religion and for mere lukewarmness towards religious practice while describing oneself as religious. Attitudinally speaking, apatheism is mainly used for the overlap of disbelief in God and an uninterest in religion and unconcern about both. For me, apatheism is the satori position of secular sensibility. It is the apotheosis of unbelief and godlessness. Apatheism is a far stronger position to take than atheism because while it correspondingly anchors its premise in lack of belief in God, it clinches its argument with this cavalier, neither-nor, shut-your-face coda: ‘Even if by any chance proof is provided that there is God, I don’t give a cuss about him/it/her.’ Unlike the theists, I see no point in wasting my time trying to defend the indefensible, striving to provide proof for something that is eternally unprovable. And while I am in complete agreement with the views of atheists and ‘strong agnostics,’ I do not think I should spend precious time cutting down an airy-fairy hypothesis or idea like ‘God.’ Even so, every once in a while, I do go out of my way to puncture the myth of God, particularly when God-botherers invade my space with their ludicrous certainties and fantasies. Just as it is conceptually impossible to be agnostic about God and religious belief, apatheism is indeed a ticklish stance to take in a world where a lot of people would like to muddy the faces of others with a cosmetic cocktail of God, religion, superstition and mumbo-jumbo. There is always the urge to stare down the chimaera that is God and religion – and these days, I prefer to do the staring down calmly, coolly, even dispassionately, and that is the whole point of apatheism, the idiosyncratic species of apatheism that I embrace.     

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.