'G' For God?

I've been asked this question a few times: Why do I use the upper case ‘G’ when writing about the monotheist deity? I think the answer to this is simple. The monotheist God is no less the name of a thing than Sherlock Holmes or Big Brother, and if I do not begin the names of these two fictional characters with small letters, why do it in the case of Yahweh or Allah or Olodumare – or God? To show that I do not believe in It, or that It does not exist? Well, I do not look up to Sherlock Holmes for moral or intellectual guidance (in spite of his keen intelligence!), nor do I believe that Big Brother is more than a figment of Orwellian imagination. 
By the same token, if I write the initial letters of the title of a fantasy novel like Lord of the Rings or Stephen King’s It in capital, why begin the word Bible with the lower case (except, of course, in the case of the figurative bible: the bible of foodies, for instance). I write the ‘G’ in God in capital because whether It exists or not, It is an entity. I’ve seen someone write ‘Ogun’ and ‘jesus’ in the same sentence. I was rather amused because so far as I am concerned, both figures are semi-mythical, and while Jesus has the advantage of being scripted (though he might as well be fictional), Ogun is orally storied. 
But then I am not being prescriptive or anything - let’s not turn this into a kind of Swiftian war between upper-casers and lower-casers. If it takes your fancy, write God with the small ‘g.’ After all, ee cummings wrote everything in lower case - it might as well be a matter of style and expediency in this age of textese. Why go to the trouble of tapping ‘caps lock’ to write about a deity you dislike, even abhor, the deity you want to damn, that you want to give some well-deserved slapdown. For a lot of people, it is also lexically trendy to write God with the small ‘g’, it is now a noticeable inflection in atheist-speak, one of whose salient characteristics is lippiness. But I think the parodic belittling that the small ‘g’ is supposed to achieve if the article ‘the’ is used before ‘god,’ or even ‘that,’ so that it reads this way ‘the god who created the world in six days.’ Although, in my opinion, it is better to differentiate, for clarity, the monotheist God and Its polytheist friends with upper and lower cases (being proper and common nouns), it is fair to say it’s easy to deduce the deity the users of the lower case ‘g’ are writing about when it is used, what other god would atheists have time for if not the so-called ‘sky-daddy?’ Indeed, that great philosopher of Language Game, Ludwig Wittgenstein, would be proud of lower-casers.
I’d like to believe I am not a purist, I make free with language. Unlike prescriptivists, I believe nothing about verbality should be fixed. So why not slip into the emerging in-thing of using the small ‘g’ for God? I don’t often do this because I suspect that there is an underlying and unsuspected fear beneath the foregrounding of the lower case ‘g’ for monotheist God. Oh no, not the proverbial Fear of God, but the fear of embarrassment. Fear of what fellow ‘unbelievers’ might think of you if you constantly write ‘God.’ Fear that you might be seen as still having a vestige of belief and faith in God, that you still think It is - or why else would you dignify It with capital ‘G’ if you said you did not believe in It. But the fear I am talking about is subliminal, slippery and reversed, because if you ask anyone who writes God with the small ‘g’ that she does that because of fear, she’ll say no and may go on: ‘I just don’t give a fuck about god’ – which, again, is true, just as the subfear of being judged for being too polite with and about God. 
I use the big ‘G’ for the human-creation that is God because I believe it is better to do this and yet be objective and clear about your lack of belief in It. I use the big ‘B’ for the human-written Bible and Quran because I believe it is possible to do this while pointing out the absurdities, contradictions, archaisms and fictions in the books. I use the big ‘J’ for the biblical Jesus because it might as well be the name of a ragtag roving rabbi who lived some time ago in Palestine, or the name of an entirely imaginary man-god like Zeus. Wouldn’t it be silly of me to write ‘zeus’ in order to prove that he never existed and that he was a creation of Greek imagination? What could be more compelling and pointed than Dawkins’ pronouncement on ‘God?’: ‘The God of the Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust..’ and so on

Philosophy Masterclass from my 5-Year old Son

There is a trinity of books that I like and find associatively memorable. Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. And an out-of-print book entitled Travels with A Son. The first two are classics in their own right: the pacy epitome of philosophy chic, Zen, and the lavishly dark The Road. These two books have one thing in common, summed up in the title of the third, Travels with A Son. While stylistically workaday, the latter has its own charms - for me, at least. Father and son travel through West Africa, my native land. I read two of these books even before I had a son, but there is something at once latent and lateral about the romance-tinged desire to go on a journey of some sort with my son (the first of two), maybe a philosophy-flavoured one as in Zen or a touristy ‘grand’ trip as in Travels with A Son. McCarthy’s ‘road’ and apocalyptic counterworld is a different literary beast - it is fiction, no less fascinating, though, for its exploration of father/son fellowship.

I travelled with my five-year-old son a few days ago. Oh, but the 4 am world I took him into was unlike Cormac McCarthy’s understated chaos in The Road. The London we drove into was a semi-empty world, sparsely peopled by zombie-quiet early-shifters, mostly smileless immigrant faces. I wanted to go and collect a car some 300 miles away. I set out in another car, but since no one can drive two cars at the same time, we switched to a red London bus somewhere along the line before finally settling in another red Virgin train at Euston.

We arrived in Hartford, collected the car and set out on a return journey to Kent. Would the five-year-old help relieve the drudgery of almost a quarter of a day’s journey? Well, perhaps in no better way than he relieved the train journey outwards. Daddy, where are we going? Why did we leave your car in London? Do trains speed faster than cars? I am bored. Can we go and see whether the restaurant is open now? Is the train going fast? I am bored. When are we going to get there? One minute? Two? How long is one minute? The poor boy is yet to grasp the speculative economy of time – he always lops time into simple nano-units. As for the antsiness - how else do you want a boy of five to orient himself to a suddenly messed-up biorhythm?

He was more settled during the return journey. While I was not too eager to begin a 4-odd hour drive, my beloved urchin was looking forward to the stops that I promised him at KFC or some other fast-food joints. I zapped the car radio from one channel to the other, impatient with everything I found; I was also looking for something that would interest my son. Anthemic Coldplay’s Paradise? Beethoven’s 7^th on Classic FM? And there was my favourite leftwing rambler on a talk radio station taking calls about the illegality of human taxidermy in the UK. I hate the idea of swaddling children up inside a draped cot of moral and visual pleasantness (a bed of roses, as it were); I’d rather they see the world for what it is - good and bad, ugly and beautiful. But I would not subject my eternally ‘bored’ son to a long radio discussion of why human cadavers are not stuffed and mummified for display purposes.

Then I’d run into Michael Jackson’s Man in the Mirror on a retrocast station.  

Me: You know who this is?

Son: Michael Jackson.         

Me: You like him... His music?

Son: Yep. (A pause) What year was he born?

Me: 1958.

Son: When was he a toddler?

Me: Late 1950s... Early 60s.

Son: When was he a boy, a boy like me?

Me: In the 1960s.

Son: When was he a teenager?

Me: 1970s.

Son: When was he a man?                                                                                   

Me: 1980s, 90s and the noughties.

Son: And when did he die?

Me: 2009.

Son: Why do people die?

Me: People have to die, or else there will be no houses for babies and toddlers to live. The world will be too full.

Son: Sometimes babies and toddlers die.

Me: Yeah, they do.

Son: Why?

Me: That’s...

Son: It’s not nice to die.

Me: Often, it’s not.

Son: Do people wake up when they die?

Me: No, they don’t.

Son: But Mrs Watson (his teacher) said Jesus woke up when he died.

Me: Did she?

Son: She said Jesus was woken by his father. Is that true, Daddy?

Me: What do you think?

Son: I don’t think it’s true. People don’t wake up when they die.

Me: No, they don’t.

        

Femi Fani-Kayode: 'God's' Gift to Nigerian Women?

 In a curious way, I find Femi Fani-Kayode fascinating. Intriguing might be a better word, really. If I were to write Stracheyan portraits of certain Nigerian personalities, Femi would be factored in as the surprising and divisive choice for an Eminent Nigerian. My interest in Nigerian politics and politicos reached the nadir of utter uninterest a few years ago. To me, someone like Fani-Kayode is as representative of the thieving run-of-the-mill Nigerian political class as James Ibori or Bode George. I think it is a waste of time and brain cells writing or talking about the pack of them.  

However, I must confess that I have been buttonholed by Femi Fani-Kayode a few times – and not so much by his politics as by his sociology. He seems like the sort of man you would like to meet in a pub or ‘beer parlour’ and have a long, beery and blokey chat with – that is, if he were T-shirt casual. But then something also suggests itself to you when you read Femi’s works or see him speak – particularly when he is suited, you get a glimpse of someone who furtively anoints himself with the ointment of cant and artifice, reminiscent of a pentecostal pastor.  

I occasionally read his essays, and while I find some of his views slightly off-the-beaten-path and idiosyncratic, I think he makes as much sense as any rational being. He is opinionative, all right, but who among us is not... to varying degrees?  Even his overt-covert Yoruba nationalism should not just be dismissed out of hand. It is no more than an idiosyncratic and useful ventilation of the Nigerian question. But then that is politics, Nigerian politics, which I refuse to have any truck with for now.

And what is Femi’s sociology? As it happens, two instances of Femi’s sociologising have had something or the other to do with women. A couple of months ago, I happened on a thread on Facebook wherein a tattle of tireless Facebook denizens were wrangling over the propriety of Femi’s seemingly paltry aside that he’d had the honour to ‘date’ three Igbo women. One of these women was Bianca Onoh, later Bianca Ojukwu. So far as some of the commenters were concerned, Fani-Kayode had committed not just a castration-worthy offence but hanging treason: he dared boast that he was once romantically involved with the widow of the Nkemba, the Dim, the Generalissimo of the Republic of Biafra: Bianca, the sculpturesque grand dame who had become the Nigerian Ambassador to Spain at the time picayunish Fani-Kayode blurted out his long-doused ardour for the former Most Beautiful Girl in Nigeria.

I was amused by some of the responses to Fani-Kayode’s retrospective and needless kiss-and-tell. And it was clear that tendrils of ethnic atavism had begun to weave themselves around the Facebook thread. You could pick up the raging, if suppressed, static: a jumped-up Yorubaman dared insult the widow of Nkemba! This was when I thought I should not comment and leave well alone. Because however much balance I tried to bring into the flame war, there was the possibility that I would be seen as taking the side of someone from the part of the country where I, incidentally, also came from.

But then, while it was rather foolish for Fani-Kayode to introduce his bygone boyfriendhood of three Igbo women into an argument about ethnocentricism, the indignation some people showed over his particular mention of Bianca Ojukwu was comical. Now, I am coming from an ultrahumanist, albeit commonsensical, position where I see every human as biologically equal. Before Bianca began to bear the imperial spousal cachet of noli me tangere as Ojukwu’s Wife, she was a young, beautiful woman – and free, free to date anyone she liked.

No, I might have been challenged, I thought. It wasn’t about who Bianca dated or not dated; it was the pointlessness of Fani-Kayode’s resurrection of the phantoms of these late relationships. A counterargument which would have held some water. But I would have posited: what if Fani-Kayode is a cad (pardon the archaism, it is the mot juste), an amoral, cavalier kiss-and-teller? After all, what he did was less obtuse than the tomfoolery of a comedian telling jokes about 90-year-old grandmothers begging to be raped by a group of young armed robbers. Perhaps Fani-Kayode only wanted to aggrandise himself as a kind of semi-retired cosmopolitan Casanova who could count three Igbo women among his conquests! I remember Fani-Kayode bringing up the image of another modern cad to my mind – silver-tongued James Hewitt, who only stopped short of describing in graphic detail how he shagged Princess Diana.

A few days ago, an old friend sent me a Facebook round-robin, an upended confession written by Femi Fani-Kayode. It is called ‘A True Story.’ The ‘true story’ is about how he fought off the seductive wiles of a friend's wife, who was detained at the pleasure of Obasanjo’s government. Fani-Kayode begins the essay with a reference to his poem, ' Power of Women’ – a title which recalls Chinweizu’s farcically misogynist treatise, Anatomy of Female Power.

Fani-Kayode tells the ‘true story’ of how he went to visit the wife of the jailed friend and how the woman had tried all she could, including stripping off, to seduce him. But Femi, an upstanding and devout man that he believes he is, had resisted like a kind of 21st-century Joseph fighting off Potiphar’s wife; he had pleaded and reasoned with the woman and had (of course) prayed! When all of these availed nothing, he had fallen back on his security detail, who was at the ready outside and, like the Praetorian Guard, the men had stormed the woman’s house to save Mr Fani-Kayode. Now, rather than coming across as a cad, Fani-Kayode would like to be seen as a man of honour, loyal to his friend, and strong enough to vicariously mortify the flesh of his poor friend's wife. That is what comes across from the tenor of the essay.

Fani-Kayode makes the point in the essay that what shocked him about the nonevent was the loathing and disgust the woman expressed towards her husband and how she confessed that she was only sticking by him because he was rich. Although Femi does not express this, I suspect this is a critique of not only the woman but women in general, particularly Nigerian women, with whom Fani-Kayode has more contact these days. But would I, for instance, have been surprised by the woman’s behaviour? No. She is human, and humans do curious and unexpected things, including trying to seduce their spouse’s best friend or expressing detestation and disgust towards their husband or wife. As a matter of fact, one of the most depredating cankerworms that eat into the fabric of marriages is Disgust – it is the antithesis of Love. 

Even then, Fani-Kayode’s shock is understandable, although it is hard to suppress the hunch that the essay is also a tad self-serving. Because while the man has the right to write anything he likes, the question may still be asked: What is the point of it? To let people know that women are not to be trusted? A cautionary tale about women’s capability to deceive, lie and dissemble? Of course, the essay is slyly phallocentric. Having offered a prayer up to his God to ‘help us all, particularly we men,’ Fani-Kayode couldn’t have been sending out his quasi-biblical message to women, or could he? After all, within the Judeo-Christian tradition in which Fani-Kayode proudly belongs, both men and women are supposed to read the story of how Eve inveigled Adam into eating the ‘fruit of knowledge’ and marvel at its profundity. But what I really find funny about the whole piece is how Fani-Kayode avows and re-avows the discretion he has displayed so far about what happened between him and the woman. Really? I mean, this guy describes where the woman’s husband was when she tried to snare him; he let it be known that the nearly cuckolded man is a politician, an influential politician.

And what did he tell his bodyguards after they’d saved him from the Nigerian avatar of Jezebel? Probably something – on the off chance, I’d add. Would Fani-Kayode have let go of the opportunity to further enigmatise himself before his henchmen: a keen lover of women who had suddenly rejected a member of ‘the fairer sex’? And did he really scruple at writing ‘A True Story’? Did he have any Hamlet-like introspection: To write or not to write? Probably not. I think Fani-Kayode knew exactly what he was doing; he knew that in spite of his feeble attempt at making the woman nameless, it wouldn’t take a supersleuth or a summa-cum-laude graduate of Sherlock Holmes Studies to work out who the woman was or at the least, who her husband was. But here is the dramatic irony in ‘The True Story.’ Chances are that Fani-Kayode’s friend, the husband of the femme fatale, will read the story, and he must be a prize bonehead not to deduce that the Parable of a Good Friend is, in the obverse about him and his beloved wife. So Fani-Kayode writing that he has kept the secret close to his heart is absolute bull, Irish bull - or even pure bullshit because he must have been well aware of what he was doing; he knew he was about to carry out an elaborate stage whisper.

Which is why I find Fani-Kayode intriguing. While I wouldn’t go as far as describing the politician as a consummate bullshitter, to a degree, he has the flair and facility of one. You only need to read a few of the articles on his website to pick this out. But then again, why would I not find a Nigerian politician who writes poems and prose-poems interesting? I am, after all, a litterateur. As an essayist, Femi Fani-Kayode is prolific and promiscuous in his interests. His prosaic poems, taken together, read like a cross between The Psalms and Songs of Solomon. There is one entitled ‘An Ode to Jezebel.’ Okay, this is an ironic piece of free verse. Still, it represents, more than all, the author’s moral attitude to women, a monologic psychopoetry, a pious jeremiad against a certain woman.

I have also gleaned from Fani-Kayode’s website that he is a very ambitious, politically ambitious man. Uncommonly enough, he dabbles in culture. In other words, he is sidling towards positioning himself on the plinth of Plato’s philosopher/king. Well, his feet of clay might not give him a solid foothold on the plinth. He also writes poems, I mean those slobbering ditties, so he may not even be allowed in the Republic.     

          

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.