Why Pastor Adeboye May Not Be A Liar – A Kind of Defence.

 Pastor Adeboye may indeed not be a liar. First, a caveat for those on whom simple irony may be lost. This (me) irredeemable anticlerical defender of the faithless has not suddenly become a friend of the church – nor that of Pastor Adeboye. I would not even deign to damn the ageing ‘man of God’ with faint praise. Nonetheless, I would not be surprised if someone only glanced at the title and went away gloating to himself: Ah, the atheist old dog has lost his bark and bite – he has been brought to heel by God!

Recently, a few faithless folks have been ‘blaspheming’ Pastor Adeboye. Not only has he been called out as a fraud, but he has also been labelled a liar. As for being a fraud, clearly he is an Abrahamic shepherd whose large robes have a million pockets in which he stuffs the shekels and tithes he collects from his sheeple. To be sure, Adeboye cares nothing for ‘liberation theology’ or for what I'd call feeding-the-hungry gospel. He obsesses over tithes and how obligatory they are. Recently, I saw a video where he called on the Nigerian thieving political elite to remember the suffering poor – it was like watching a ham actor struggling to sustain the role of Fagin. Adeboye would rather be friends with Dives than with Lazarus, and there he was snivelling at Dives to forgo the measly droppings from his high table for Lazarus.

As for being a liar, this is far more complex. Anyone who said he drove a car for 200 miles with an empty tank would lay himself open to critique, and he would only have himself to blame if he was called a liar. Fifteen years ago, the empty-tank abracadabra piqued my curiosity. Even though I did not use the word ‘lie’ to describe the implausible assertion, I called it into question – maybe because this cloud-headed sky pilot’s miraculous ‘testimonies’ were not as well-advertised as they are now.

Thanks to the internet and social media, Adeboye’s incredible God-induced figments have become viral fodder for ridicule and mockery. And rightly so. Let’s start with the pièce de résistance. The old man purports to have had tea with God or that God had barged in on him and his good wife and had poured tea from their teapot. As he had done with Joshua, God, in his omnipotence, had flipped the weather and temperature a couple of times solely for Apostle Adeboye – a veritable moveable feast of miracles made only to suit Adeboye’s whims. God had widened a narrow bridge so that Adeboye’s car could wormhole its way round a juggernaut, which had completely hogged the bridge. These are happy-clappy old wives’ tales all right, but then the question may still be asked: Is Adeboye bullshitting? He may not. Before I continue, I would like to say that I will indulge myself in a bit of psychologism here. This is simply because, for all its pretensions to normality and tradition, religion – particularly the so-called ‘revealed religions’ – is received psychosis.

So, is everyone who is religious mad? I will use a paradox to answer the question. The story of Emperor’s New Clothes loses its gist in a town where everyone struts around in their (naked) glory. In such a town, to be clothed is to be mad. Nothing exemplifies this more than the psalmic foolery that is still being echoed down millennia by bible-bashers, which goes, ‘A fool says in his heart that there is no God.’

To a god-worshipper, godless people are not only foolish, but they are also stark-raving mad. Pray, what could be more foolish and schizoid than kneeling in the corner of your room and murmuring to the wall but deceiving yourself that you are appealing to something called God? Or believing such nonsense as a talking donkey (and my Christian friends would never accept that The Donkey in Shrek does indeed talk!). Or the virgin birth. Or the resurrection. Or a man seeing an angel who dictated an unoriginal piece of mythology to him. Or the story of the same man riding a winged horse into the clouds. Or the parting of the Red Sea. Or the utter bunk of Noah’s ark. What religion has done is to make foolishness legit. Religion is an illusion, says Freud; God is a delusion, says Dawkins.

One of the two books I alluded to above is the wellspring of Pastor Adeboye’s inspiration. The import of saying Adeboye is lying is that his reasonableness has been taken for granted. However, just because someone is a former maths teacher does not mean they are an Einstein of reasonableness. It takes a certain self-awareness to lie – to fabulate. Fabulation is another word for lying. To fabulate is to invent false and fantastic tales or fables, just like the first tellers of the Adam and Eve story when they came up with the Garden of Eden horse-manure.

There is another word: confabulation. It’s easy to see this as a pun, a play on con, or conman, and fabulation – a conman who uses tall tales from the Bible and the name of God to steal from the people, for instance. But I am not playing with words. Shrinks use confabulation to describe fabricated rememberings believed by the fabricator to be true. Does Pastor Adeboye believe that a bridge widened into a vast swathe to let his vehicle magic its way round a truck that should have steamrollered it? Maybe. Does he believe that he had tea with God? Maybe. Does he believe that God changed winter into summer for him? Probably. The pastor has been so steeped in the psychosis of religion that he may very well be confabulating rather than fabulating. It's all a function of delusion. Or maybe it's a conflation of fabulation and confabulation. God, as we all know, moves in mysterious ways.

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