He is for it and I am on the other side.
To one of the points he raised, I responded as follows;
The major problem with you; and indoctrinated folks like you in debates, is the swiftness to pretend that history does not matter because, it shows that the religion that was indoctrinated into you; was a vehicle of cultural, political and epistemic imperialism, to which you are still a victim.
And for you to denigrate history and attempt an atrocious whitewashing of it; so that people would forget, where this rain started to beat us; is really in bad taste.
History is so important even in the academy that you cannot submit an academic dissertation that does not have a literature review, in any serious university.
But for someone like you to denigrate the consultation of history; means that history is not kind to the position you peddle.
And in this instance; you sound like all that is wrong with Nigerian education; which has denigrated history to our chagrin and discomfiture.
I thank God that we still have Achebe to forever remind us, that those who do not know where the rain started to beat them, would never know where it stops.
I understand your predicament. It is not an easy one. Trying to balance intellectual honesty, with a siamese attachment to dogma is really a tough act.
And that you would never succeed in that act, could be seen in the ease; with which you try to embezzle historical facts as cliches.
I deploy historical analysis in all my debates since it situates things and contextualizes them. It is a discipline, which every academic should cultivate and encourage. Denigrating it is a symptom of an unvarnished attachment to dogma.
Having said that;
The first contact of all conquered people’s of the global south with Christianity, was a cultural annihilation for most of those cultures. None of them survived that contact.
It was not the beauty or the logic of christian theology that convinced anyone to accept Christianity, or even Islam at those contacts. It was the advertisement and celebration of raw violence; and unspeakable brutality that frightened people into accepting those faiths.
Bartolome de Las Casas; a Dominican; Bertrand Russell and Eduardo Galeano and many other writers across the ages, documented those festivals of brutality in their writings.
It was not the symphony of theological treatises. It was the arrant savagery and brutality they consulted in annihilating our epistemic and cultural pedestals; which left people with a psychosocial vacuum screaming to be filled; which they eventually replaced with the idols of their own pantheons.
European Christianity had many centuries of experience, in brutal imposition of epistemologies on others. That is what Christian proselytizing was. The war against heretics, which saw the Carthars and Hugenuots decimated and scattered across Europe was a case in point. The Inquisition, which made a bonfire out of anyone, who disagreed with the Christian church, was another case in point. And this was handled by the Propaganda Fidei. The witch-hunts of medieval times, was another case in point. The war against science, which saw Galileo imprisoned; and Giordano Bruno barbecued at stake, was another case in point. The war against modernity, which lasted until the 1950s; when the Christian church saw democracy as evil and was strictly against it, was a case in point.
All in all, the Christian church has been on the wrong side of history for most of it voyage across human time and civilization.
It was the Papal Bull of the Christian church, that inaugurated the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade. The Anglican church had slaving ships plying West Africa and the West Indies. You may have been captured and sold into slavery were you to have existed in those times. The same fate may have befallen me too.
So, having been well schooled in the art of ripping cultures, peoples and limbs apart, these hordes of buccaneers from Europe under Christian banners, left their European homelands in search of Gold, and Glory. And they took their God with them.
It was not preaching that converted the first people. It was the whole climate of fear, consequent on the evisceration of their sociopolitical and cultural matrixes; at the instance of colonialism; which compelled many of them to drop their gods, and walk over to the Whiteman’s faith, if they were to save their savaged psyche, or salvage any semblance of meaning for their lives.
The anthropology that inspired their theology was one that saw people of colour as having no souls and therefore unfit for their heaven.
But that was not for long. They kept fine tuning those theologies according to the direction in which the wind of change was blowing. And that is what has been happening till date.
You go into rural Africa and see the devastation wrought by American Evangelists in places like Kenya and Uganda; where they have been exporting their virulent form of bigotry under Christian banners; and the aggression with which they go about it. It would remind you of the origins of their missionary work and the denigrating anthropology of the African and his reality, which scaffolds that epistemic enterprise of neo-colonial provenance.
Go to rural Nigeria and see the gusto and the aggression with which Christian preachers burn down the groves and shrines of Traditional worshippers; and the arrogant paternalism with which they commit ecocide or ecological suicide, by cutting down trees that have been standing for thousands of years, because they were been worshipped by the people. You would then realize that most of what passes on for proselytizing is a huge dosage of emotional blackmail and psycho-terror.
Have you ever wondered why Europe that brought you Christianity banned people from preaching in their public transports or in residential areas or going from door to door to harass people in the name of proselytizing?
Taking the noise pollution aside; and the asinine theologies many of them preach across many African countries; coupled with the emotional blackmail directed at an impoverished people; what has your proselytizing got to offer these poor ignorant people apart from deepening their inferiority complex and compelling their psychological surrender; which prepares them to be fleeced eternally by their pastors?
After the first brutal pacification of the natives; and imposing the balms of religion on them to prevent them from resisting their oppression; they gave them catechism to enable the natives brainwash their children and descendants themselves; so as to forestall resistance for ever.
The children so brainwashed grew up to love their masters more than themselves. And to want to defend the imported gods even to the furthest portals of shedding blood on behalf of their new gods.
Is that not the point you and many people like you are now at?
They stole our land; but their religion commanded us to forgive and love our enemies. But when we owed them; they forgot their religion’s exhortation of the jubilee forgiveness of debts.
They forgot their religion when they were selling our people as slaves.
They forgot their religion when they were raping our people and buggering them in the plantations. They forgot their Christ when they were selling tickets to the lynching of our people in their churches. They have even forgotten their christ now that Africans are dying in the mediterranean, trying to escape the hell, they and their African collaborators have made of the continent.
But we are still peddling that God that chaperoned and supervised our enslavement and rape.
I wonder how anyone could define Stockholm syndrome without seeing you holding court in defence of the masters of your enslavement and their God that underwrote that.
Ike gwuru.
Well, that just threw a bucket of cold water on me. Thank you for giving me so much to think about
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