by Okwanya Pius-Vincent

It must first be argued that God is not religion and he is not religious.  Religion relates to the worship of God and since God does not have any other being to worship, then He could not be religious. Let us make one thing clear, man’s attempt is strictly man’s attempt.

The legendary Nigerian Afrobeat musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti in one of his many confrontational songs laid the blames of societal disruption and sufferings on the feet of religion. According to him, people have found themselves exploited by religion. The highly intelligent musician (when he is not under the influence of drugs) probably influenced by Karl Marx exposed what he felt was a calculated systemic exploitation of the masses by not just the political elite, but by the religious elites. The religious elites exhort the masses to “suffer suffer for world and enjoy for heaven” while they enjoy the best in the world. In the song, Fela pointed out that the religious elites took advantage of people’s devotion to make themselves relevant and rich. Decades after Fela’s death, the exploitation has not stopped. It has not even slowed down. If anything, it has sky-rocketed with many people recognizing that religion is a lucrative venture and more cynically that God is sometimes a very silent and rewarding master who we can cheat. The foray into religion is a recognition that ours is a deeply devotional society and consequently pays a lot of deference to our religious ministers and “Men of God”. The men of God are the middle men, the agents who link the people to God. The religious leaders have kept up this view by making God exclusive to them. By the way some of them talk; one could be led to believe that they have God on the speed-dial. The argument is not to prove whether they are right or wrong, the truth is in their minds. However, their capitalization on people’s beliefs and devotions to twist the truths and sometimes peddle half-truths is becoming as recurrent as malaria in tropical Africa. These self-styled men of God have acquired the propensity to bless and curse with reckless abandon. Their many indiscretions have led many astray and the cases of disillusionment have multiplied over the years. A popular case of disillusionment was as expressed by Mahatma Gandhi who quipped that if only Christians behaved like Jesus Christ, then there would be no problem on earth. However, Christains and many religious men and women are the perpetrators of the wickedness, abortions and terrorism that have plagued the society. In a reaction to the stated facts of religious men being contributors and perpetrators of the societal malaise, some religious ministers have resorted to sterile nit-picking and shameful arguments. One of their popular defenses argued that empty words are to be appreciated and believers are expected to turn a blind eye to their ministers’ less than savoury characters. Permit me to digress, the role of God’s agents is not just the easy task of reading and preaching. Anyone can read the Bible, the Koran and the Sanskrit. The basic knowledge and I daresay the important ones are well known to the public and with practice, anyone can preach. Their task is a vocation. It is a call to lead by example and inspire in their congregation a life of truth and sacrifice. In sum, they are called to lead the kind of life that the 21^st century society has made virtually impossible. However, the attendant scandals and multiple indiscretions of these “Men of God” have made it important to separate God from religion.

It must first be argued that God is not religion and he is not religious.  Religion relates to the worship of God and since God does not have any other being to worship, then He could not be religious. Let us make one thing clear, man’s attempt is strictly man’s attempt. Religion as structured by man cannot escape the trappings of the mundane politics and must have to incorporate and accommodate the pervading interests of the day. To further separate God from religion, a recourse to history is unavoidable. In the Holy Bible, the worship of God is determined by the people. In as much as in the times of Moses, God did make specific injunctions on the patterns of worship he required of his people (Exodus 20:22-28). In the later years, God did express his dissatisfaction on the type of religion the people of Israel applied in his worship, God said through Isaiah (739-690BC) that “These people claim to worship me but their words are meaningless, and their hearts are somewhere else. Their religion is nothing but human rules and traditions which they have simply memorized” (Isaiah 29:13). In the above verse, God seemed to have washed his hands off every kind of false religion and false worship. To further prove that religion is human, we have to understand the human events surrounding religious decisions at every instance. The advent of the Christianity in the Roman Empire was received initially with hostility. Emperor Nero (64AD) was quick to persecute and execute christians. However, as the religion replaced polytheism with monotheism, the people came to welcome this religion which seemed to channel all of man’s devotion to one God. Thus, a devotee did not need to buy several rams to offer to each of Zeus, Apollo, Venus and Hades. One needs just to believe in Jesus Christ to be saved. The decision to accept Christianity as a religion may not just be a spiritual decision; it may most likely be an economic decision. Thus, prior to the conversion of Emperor Constantine at around 312AD, the Monotheic Christian religion was popular with the slaves and the soldiers.  People’s welcome of the Christian religion was a covert point of revolt of the poor against the pagan aristocrats. Added to this was the fact that the poverty of the masses has made the multiple and exotic sacrifices to numerous deities of polytheism senseless. Thus at all times, religious decisions are no more spiritual than they are practical. The powers of Christian Catholicism grew and they soon became a political force. The Pope became the Sovereign and the Bishops became his administrators as the line between the spiritual and the secular disappeared to produce a discomforting hybrid; the “seculo-spiritual”. The church that came to sell the pardons for sins (Indulgence) so as to enable the recipient make heaven was most crucially in charge of the day to day affairs of the states. The Kings, Queens and Princes wherever they appeared then were mere puppets. God was used as an excuse to hold lands, properties, collect rents, interests and taxes. It was also historical that murderers and brigands were given a new lease of life and rewarded by the Church who once peddled an idea that killing an “infidel” was not just right, it was righteous. The Islamic religion was not perfect either. They employed the same rationality to undertake an expeditionary campaign to recover Jerusalem. Irrespective of the “Holy Land” balderdash, intrinsically the two major religions were not fighting to recover God’s land, they were campaigning to control the most strategic city of that time. The people were merely pieces being moved across the chessboards by their religious leaders. The schism (the breakaway of churches) when it started were always for political and pragmatic reasons, and not for the romantic and spiritual ones. The Church of England (Anglican Church)n which broke away from Catholicism was a product of a partly doctrinal but deeply political impasse between HenryVIII and the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Let no one deceive anyone, the multiplication of churches which are similar in doctrine is not always a response to a Prophet Samuel-styled response to a higher voice speaking in the Temple. Most of them are just practical and political decisions at best and at worst an economic response of leaders to the times. Crudely put, the leader may just have needed a private jet. God is not responsible for the breakaways, Jesus Christ did say that “A house divided against itself cannot stand” (Matthew 12:25). I do not even believe that God is responsible for the politicization of his worship. God is not the maker of the dogmas and the doctrinal minutiae and neither is he in support of paedophilia. Rationalizing these absurd dispositions using religion is as discomforting as saying that God supports lesbianism and homosexuality. For all the hullabaloos surrounding the USA legalization of gay union, it was at least comprehensible that the gay rights activists did not see any reason to resort to religion in buttressing their bizarre claims. “Deus ex machina” may be permissible in literature, in real life, not so much. God must not always bear the brunt of our human indiscretions. Thus separating God from religion will take a new dimension to further clarify these standpoints.

Separating God from religion will lead us to recognize that there is not just one God, there are two. We have the God that created man and then the God that man created. The God that created man is the real God, the Supreme Being. However, the God that Man created is the “Idea God” (God as just an idea). God as a being is universal in truth and is not explained or reinforced by human actions or dogmas. Different religions may give him different names and the conceptions may vary for the Buddhists who feel that God is not just a being but a state of mind (Nirvana). However, His qualities remain unchanged. The Being God is infallible, benevolent, omniscient and omnipotens. He transcends religion and human ideas. Simply, he is the kind of God that the atheists cannot refute his existence. However, the idea god is a malleable creature of man that has been placed into human framework. The god is powerful only to the extent of his utility in exploitation and endorsement of human selfish tendencies. The idea god is a god that exists but does not exist. The kind of god that creates a man free from the shackles of his conscience and thus is boundless in wickedness and concupiscence. Voltaire has earlier stated man’s need for this “idea god” when he mused that “if God did not exist, man would invent him”. Man did invent this god irrespective of God’s existence in an apparent display of his boundless capacity to improvise. This idea god has been manipulated in religion and politics. He is the god of some senators, gays and lesbians. He is the god of some pastors and priests who use him to make money and gain influence. He is the god of politicians who use him to win elections. Recently, this idea god has been converted to a hammer to drive home impossible cases in the senate house because he is the god of religions. The power of this idea god is constantly protected by a network of taboos, sacrileges and blasphemies. Men have been discouraged to talk about this god and just believe him. Discussions and questions about God will make one an atheist or a blasphemer instantly. Then who talks about God? It is left for Men who have been trained in the subversion of truths and the consistent recycling of falsities. What makes one man’s knowledge about God better than anyone else’s? Without eschewing the possibilities of divine inspirations and revelations, one man is as good as the next man in the divine affairs. The truth about God is simple, the complexities are manufactured. The truth about God is in our hearts, it is called conscience. The conscience tells one that marrying his granddaughter is incestuous and that a grandfather marrying a 13 year old girl is wrong. Surely, we do not need God to tell us that through religion. Hence the outcry against the implications and the #ChildNotBride campaign on the social media. Our unquestioning assent may be mistaken for an Abrahamic faith but more correctly, it is a manifestation of palpable fear of being given a dose of spiritual Ritalin. There have never been much problem with “yes-sayin”, the problem starts when we say no and ask questions. There must be questions asked about why we believe what we believe and thus every religious belief must pass the litmus test of conscience. For instance, the denomination that holds the belief that anybody that does not share their beliefs is already damned needs a serious rain check. The Supreme Being God is eternal and when viewed through this spectrum of God’s eternality, the folly of that belief is immediately brought to light. The agents of idea gods who dissuade us from thinking about God and asking questions when they appear do not give us enough respect. They may be as right as we are or as wrong as we are. Claiming that your opinion about God is the universal truth and should not be debated is akin to a privatization of Divinity. Thus lets draw an analogy, if a pastor forms a political party, FRESH as an instance and claims to have received a divine mandate from God to rule Nigeria and catapult us into utopia and another pastor claims to have received a similar mandate from God to move us all into paradise, who do we believe?

The conversion of God into an idea that can be twisted to suit the trends is only possible when men refuse to ask questions that will bring them towards a closer understanding of who God is. It leaves us well exposed to the conmen who are no better to tell us what to believe. Knowledge is improved through debates and an accommodation of new truths no matter how strange they seem. Because once a society demonstrates an intolerance of dissention, it sets itself up for inertia and degeneration. It is a well known fact that the earth may still be taken as being flat if not for the dissention of Copernicus, Galileo and Magellan towards religious authorities of the day, people would still be rowing to the extremes looking for edges and expecting to fall off into oblivion. Critical developments have been made as a result of questioning. The early nomadic societies, Michael J. Gelb argued were defined by the question: how do we get to water? They later turned pastoral when they started asking “how do we get the water to come to us”.  In the absence of the right questions and novel ideas, a throwback on the dark ages seems inevitable. A society characterized by strange beliefs, corruption and an impenetrable mindlessness. Escaping the mental prisons of religion is a prerequisite towards the wider societal development.  Believing things because religion said so is no longer acceptable in the 21^st century. We can recall that there was a time in the history of African societies when human sacrifices were prescribed by almost all religions.  The catholic theologian St. Thomas Aquinas asserted that faith and reason are not mutually exclusive but are actually self-reinforcing concepts. Any belief or dogma which does not appeal to human conscience and basic understanding must be discarded. I shudder to think what will happen when one of the traditionalists that believes in the sacrifice of twins and human sacrifices were to find himself in the house of Assembly. What if some of the senators are twins? Does it make it right if he argues that he sacrificed a 13 year old girl because his religion accepts it? And most crucially, will we still be silent because it is a religious issue and thus “sensitive”?

The time of using God’s name to score cheap political points and further our psychotic indiscretions should be confined to history along with the dinosaurs. When pastors resort to biblical mantras to collect tithes but not to live the virtuous life of Christian calling, then a rethink is in order. I have nothing against tithe, as a Christian, it is a biblical injunction. It is only reasonable that the Levites who do the work of God are made as comfortable as possible. But a line must be drawn between comfort and luxury and then luxury and opulence. Thus when a minister of God owns three private jets, a high cost posh school, a convoy of cars and claims to have a lucrative business, then a rechanneling of the tithes towards more pressing matters must be considered. Every religion approves of generosity, as a matter of fact, they encourage it in unison. But reasoning must be applied while deciding who really needs our generosity. There are homeless people sleeping under the Third Mainland Bridge, Lagos even as your pastor is building another school for the upper class. There are vagrants in the Upper Iweka and the Bridge heads of Onitsha even as your pastor’s son is throwing a posh wedding celebration. The sick who cannot raise money to pay the hospital bills are decaying in the streets in full view of the religious people even as the Church minister’s daughter is going abroad to further her studies due to incessant ASUU strike. The examples of Jesus Christ, Siddhartha, and Prophet Muhammad are disregarded as the religious ministers favour opulence.

The questions start from here. Let no one discourage you. It is only when truth is allowed to interface with falsehoods that knowledge is improved. When you are confronted by any religious ideas that are not supported by your conscience and common sense, raise your doubts and when the doubts are not cleared, disagree. If you trek to church at the mercy of the elements and could not see any reason to pay your tithes to ministers riding private jets, disagree and pay your tithes elsewhere. If you see the sick and the dying littering the roads, ask why these tithe-collecting ministers are doing nothing about it. If the answers are not satisfactory, disagree. Ask why anybody’s individual knowledge about God should be made a doctrine and if the answers gotten are not good enough, disagree. Ask why a fifty something year old man would choose to defile a 13year old girl, if the answers are unreasonably religious and borders towards mental unraveling, disagree. And lastly ask where God is, in your religion or in your heart?

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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.