The Danger in Worshipping the Wrong God

(Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo)--Eureka!

I’m going to found the Empirical Proof Foundation. Our job will be very simple. We will crisscross Africa and collect specimens from every phenomenon that needs further investigation so that we will help establish empirical proof.

Here is a good example: last week, Nigeria’s Sun newspaper published a fascinating story of a young woman who vomited a padlock and gave birth to a turtle right inside a church. The newspaper told the story of the woman, the prophet who made it happen and the congregation who joined in the celebration of the miracle.

For some inexplicable reasons, the newspaper did not show the pictures or the videos of the padlock and the turtle. Maybe the reporter was too lazy to get a picture from scores of church members who pulled out their cameras as soon as the miracle happened. Or maybe the congregation was so shocked by the audaciousness of the turtle that they forgot to pull out their phones to record the miracle for posterity.

Whatever the case may be, the job of my foundation begins after the reporter is gone. Our first task is to collect the padlock and the turtle. We will preserve the turtle in a rescue facility. Working with research universities across the world, our scientists will map out the turtle’s genome. We will feed it and observe it 24 hours of the day and record other transformations the turtle may still undergo. As for the padlock, we will follow its digital footprint to find its maker, the person that imported it into Nigeria and track its journey to the woman’s native doctor father who mysteriously placed it inside the woman’s body some ten years before.

With support from you, my foundation will be very busy. Each time a woman delivers a baby accompanied by a Bible or a Quran, we will be there to pick up and preserve the Bible or the Koran and the chaplet or the beads that came along. We will collect, with the woman’s permission, her placenta. Unlike people like Kim Kardashian who ate their placentas, we will just study the placenta that brought food to the Bible or the Quran and the chaplet and the beads. We believe there may be new knowledge and new ingredients we may be missing by simply dismissing these wonderful events of our time- events that God has made to happen only in Africa.  Also, we will check every verse of the Bible and the Quran and crosscheck with the ones the printers made just to make sure that God has not passed across a brand new message with these Holy books He placed inside the wombs of these women.

If we do our job well, we may be able to replicate these phenomena in the lab. For instance, based on our findings, we could add to the ordinary test-tube baby process certain ingredients that will make a pregnant mother to give birth to a baby accompanied by a diamond, $1000 dollar bills, or an unpublished Harry Porter novel manuscript. The possibilities are endless. But it starts when we stop dismissing these great blessings of our time and start studying them and exploring them for our greater good.

Africa missed the age of Enlightenment when empirical proof became a standard for discourse. And we have been paying for it for centuries in lives ruled by superstition. We also missed the industrial age. The payment for that can be seen in the primitivity of our lives. This information age that is upon us has placed in our hands the digital camera, YouTube and Facebook, we have no excuse not to use them.

Which brings me to my epiphany- the Empirical Proof Foundation. I encountered my epiphany listening to Brewster Kahle talk on National Public Radio (NPR)….