Of COVID-19, Religion, and Conspiracy Theories

(By Farooq A. Kperogi) - Coronavirus and Exploding Conspiracy Theories of Religious Crackpots

Of COVID-19, Religion, and Conspiracy Theories

The novel coronavirus is not only devastating humankind, it is also disrupting the settled certainties and spiritual verities of religious fanatics for whom atavistic and superstitious frames of reference are the only ways to make sense of the world around them. 

I’ll start from fringe members of my own religious community. When the new coronavirus first emerged in China, a lunatic fringe of the Nigerian Muslim community celebrated it and said it was Allah’s punishment against China for mistreating its Muslim minority population.

They said the clearest indication that it was divine pestilence to avenge the persecution of Chinese Muslims could be seen in the fact that all Chinese people were compelled to cover their whole bodies in ways that were reminiscent of the sartorial choices Allah enjoined Muslims, especially Muslim women, to make, which China denies its Muslim minority.

I recall telling a religious crackpot who made this silly argument early this year that it wasn’t the first time that people had covered their bodies in response to a pandemic. The 1918 Spanish Flu, which killed nearly half a million Nigerians and more than 50 million people worldwide, caused people to wear face masks.

Misfortune as Father of Superstition

"I was lonely in the midst of people, thought so much that I took ill. It was a life that had no substance in it, completely vacuous in the present and in the future. I began to ask introspective questions, making attributions to spiritual diabolism. Misfortune is the the father of superstition. My woes must be spiritual, I concluded.
          The spiritual churches I visited varied and amplified my confusion. I was lost in the labyrinth of prophetic declarations. At one place, I was told that Ekwueme had spiritually sealed my destiny; at another, that there was an ancestral curse upon me. A third said my paternal uncle had shot down my star spiritually. Prayer after prayer. Fasting and seed-sowing, yet nothing changed in my life. A fellow prescribed yet another spiritual house. 'It's the final bus stop; stubborn shackles are loosened there by our father in the Lord.' My spiritual shackles appeared to have been forged with something stronger than iron since there was no breakthrough after a visit to that church. All I wanted was a change in my circumstances, a better job to enable me rent my own abode, and pursue higher education. So, I could not understand why God would not look into my petitions, ordinary as they were. I had now become extremely despondent; my mind had reached a critical state of despair. Finally, I was fed up, and gave up on spiritual solutions."

Immanuel James, 2014, 66-67

Under Bridge

Seun Kuti: God is the Tool of Oppressors

Straight Talk With Kadaria

Dave Allen on First Encounters with Religion

Dave Allen 

How Religion Undermines Nigeria's Development

(By Okenyi Kenechi) – I have never seen a dilapidated church. I have seen hundreds of dilapidated schools.

In my home town, the schools are rotting away while church buildings are growing bigger. No industries, just churches.

I once told someone that if the churches in Port Harcourt were to be transformed into industries, unemployment will vanish within one year and crime will be brought to a screeching halt. He agreed. 

Truth is, if a politician asks a certain village what they will prefer to be built for them, chances that they will chose a church will be higher.

Doubt me? Gitto in a bid to show appreciation to former president Goodluck Jonathan, asked him to chose one thing they will build for his village people and he chose a church. I don't know if there are world class hospitals in Otuoke or standard schools but he chose a church.

History of Ideas - Religion

The School of Life

The Meaning and End of Religion

"Any adequate interpretation of a Christina's faith . . . must make room for the fact that other
intelligent, devout, and moral men [and women], including perhaps his [or her] own friends, are Buddhists, Hindus, or Muslims. . . . One has not understood religion if one's interpretation is applicable to only one of its forms. On the other hand, neither has one understood religion if one's interpretation does justice only to some abstraction of religiousness in general but not to the fact that for most men [and women] of faith, loyalty and concern are not for any such abstraction but quite specifically and perhaps even exclusively for their own unique tradition--or even for one section within that. The Christian and the Muslim must be seen, certainly, in a world in which other men [and women] are Hindus, Buddhists, and Jews."

William Cantwell Smith

The Meaning and End of Religion, 1991, pp. 2, 3.

Don't Preach to me, Show me Compassion Instead

Pope Francis washes an prisoner's foot on Maundy Thursday in Rome

(Abiodun Kuforiji Nkwocha)--Did I even mention to you guys that I was once a banker? Ages ago.

If I attempt to take all my gist from that side, the stories will never end. I learnt something vital; whenever someone walked into my branch to cash a third party cheque with no ID and the prefix Pastor or Imam was written on that cheque, regardless of the amount, one of my bosses would not honour the cheque.

The Violence in the Sacred

Source: js.emory.edu

(Rene Girard)--“Religion in its broadest sense, then, must be another term for that obscurity that surrounds man’s efforts to defend himself by curative or preventive means against his own violence.... This obscurity coincides with the transcendental effectiveness of a violence that is holy, legal, and legitimate successfully opposed to a violence that is unjust, illegal, and illegitimate….

Religion, then, is far from ‘useless.’ It humanizes violence; it protects man from his own violence by taking it out of his hands, transforming it into a transcendent and ever-present danger to be kept in check by the appropriate rites appropriately observed and by a modest and prudent demeanor….

[Religious] prohibitions serve a basic function. They maintain a sort of sanctuary at the heart of the community, an area where that minimum of nonviolence essential to the survival of the children and the community’s cultural heritage—essential, in short, to everything that sustains man’s humanity—is jealously preserved. If prohibitions capable of performing this function actually exist, one can hardly attribute them to the beneficence of Nature (that good angel of complacent humanism, the last relic of those optimistic theologies engendered by the deterioration of historical Christianity).

Miracle, by Tope Folarin

Source: missoulian.com

(Tope Folarin)--OUR HEADS MOVE simultaneously, and we smile at the tall, svelte man who strides purposefully down the aisle to the pulpit. Once there, he raises both of his hands then lowers them slightly. He raises his chin and says let us pray.

“Dear Father, we come to you today, on the occasion of this revival, and we ask that you bless us abundantly, we who have made it to America, because we know we are here for a reason. We ask for your blessings because we are not here alone. Each of us represents dozens, sometimes hundreds of people back home. So many lives depend on us Lord, and the burden on our shoulders is great. Jesus, bless this service, and bless us. We ask that we will not be the same people at the end of the service as we were at the beginning. All this we ask of you, our dear savior, Amen.”

Religion: A Repository of Society's Values

"A society’s religion is its repository of values and ways of interpreting not only their individual and social lives, but also their universal relationship with nature."

Religious Intolerance: As It was in the Beginning...

"While the [sixteenth century European] explorers traveled, their homelands often came ablaze
with the fires of persecution and war. Communities were split apart by ferocious quarrels over theology, first between Catholics and Protestants and later among the scores and even hundreds of different religious groups that began to appear in once-unified Christendom. Amid the storms of ecclesiastical conflict and political struggle that gripped the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is not surprising that concerned believers on all sides grew ever less certain that they alone held God's final truth in their hands. The deadly, destructive wars of religion, which persisted for more than a hundred years in some lands, led people to believe that the truth about religion cannot possibly be found in sects that were prepared to torture and execute opponents, confident their work was God's will."

Daniel L. Pals, Eight Theories of Religion

Born-Again Hooliganism

They’ll murder heritage in its timeless crib,

Decree our heroes, heroines out of memory

Obliterate the narratives of clans, names

That bind to roots, reach to heavens, our

Links to ancestral presences. The Born-Agains

Are on rampage, born against all that spells

Life and mystery, legend and innovation.

Imprecations rend the air, song is taboo,

The stride of sun-toned limbs racing wind a sin,

Flesh is vile, wine, the gift of earth, execrated.

These tyrants have usurped the will of God.

How did we fail to learn, that guns and boots

Are not essential to a coup d ‘état?

Shall Ala die? Ahiajoku be anathematised? Does

Oya defile her streams, Ifa obstruct the paths

Of learning and councils of the wise? Praise the Lord

And launch the bulldozer – they’ve razed

The statues of mbari to the ground, these

Christian Talibans. Their brothers in Offa

Murder Moremi in her shrine, shrieking Allah akbar.

Rivals else, behold their bonded zeal that sanctifies
Alien rape of our quiescent Muses, extolling theirs.

                          Wole Soyinka, "Elegy for the Nation" (For Chinua Achebe at 70)

Religion Without God, by T. M. Luhrmann

THIS Christmas our family will go to church. The service is held in a beautiful old church in the charming town of Walpole, N.H., just over the border from Vermont. The Lord’s Prayer hangs on the wall behind the sanctuary. A lectern rises above the nave to let the pastor look down on his flock. The pews and the side stalls have the stern, pure lineaments suited to the Colonial congregation that once came to church to face God.

Except that this church is Unitarian. Unitarianism emerged in early modern Europe from those who rejected a Trinitarian theology in preference for the doctrine that God was one. By the 19th century, however, the Unitarian church had become a place for intellectuals who were skeptical of belief claims but who wanted to hang on to faith in some manner. Charles Darwin, for example, turned to Unitarians as he struggled with his growing doubt. My mother is the daughter of a Baptist pastor and the black sheep, theologically speaking, of her family. She wants to go to church, but she is not quite sure whether she wants God. The modern Unitarian Universalist Association’s statement of principles does not mention God at all.

Religious "Mumugiousity" by Charly Boy

For starters, don't pick up the dictionary to lookup ‘Mumugiousity’, I coined it myself but you go soon grab weytin I wan yarn.

As I approach this topic I want to be careful so readers don't get the whole essence of this write up, twisted. E no dey hard some people. Religion is a touchy subject for a lot of people and in my household it is generally not considered "polite conversation."

For some, an attack on religion is an attack on their god or gods. I only wish to put down certain points or aspects of organized religion I’m not comfortable with, I am not questioning anyone's belief in a personal god. 

In Nigeria, religion has helped us to remain sane or else we all for donkolowith the way our environment is stifling us. Religion can give people a sense of community and make people feel welcomed.  But life is never that simple sha. Kai! Oh lord.

In Nigeria especially, religion has turned a lot of my people into MUMU's.  Instead of learning to discern truth on their own and formulate their own mindset, they're told how to think. These are the people engaged in ‘Mumugiousity’. For them Religion has turned them into group soul's, sheep, cows and goat with their Shepherd as their pastors, who have erased their trust in their own intellect and gradually convinced them to put their trust in them(pastors) as the only true men of god, convincing them that without them they would be lost. Hummmm! They fall for this like very poor people would fall for a bag of rice. Odikwarisky…

That Ain't Right: Teachable Moment for the Nigerian Christian

I am getting old. I don't know how I could have forgotten this story, given its relevance to the Nigerian tragedy (a tragedy which shall prevail until we make some progress in rewiring the atrocious psychology of the Nigerian).

My brother from another mother, Bayo Aregbesola, a Director in Canada’s Federal civil service, reminds me of something that happened during our days at the University of British Columbia in the 1990s. Those were our wild oats graduate student days. We crawled the nightclubs of Vancouver to get our beering right between intra and interracial dating.

Film and the Christianization of Nigeria

Let’s start this column with a quiz question. Which film center produced more commercial movies in 2005: Hollywood (USA), Bollywood (India), or Nollywood (Nigeria)? If you guessed Hollywood, guess again. America produced only 611 commercial films in 2005. Ok, Bollywood then. Nope. Although India outshone the USA, producing 964 films, they produced less than half the output of Nollywood, which released over 2000 films. (Hollywood comes out on top when the criteria is gross sales income.)

Admittedly, the Nigerian film industry operates on different principles from those of America and India. Most films are low-budget, often costing less than $30,000 to make. They are shot in ten days or less by hand-held video cameras, and distributed directly to DVD without ever seeing the light (or is it the “dark”?) of a movie theater. Most films made in Nigeria sell for about $3 and rent for 50 cents.

NollyCulture

Is There Life After Death?

Is There Life Beyond This One? (Part 1) by Rudolf Okonkwo

After taking off on March 2, 2004, over ten years ago, and travelling 6 billion kilometers, last month a European spacecraft called Rosetta orbited the nucleus of comet 67P otherwise called Churyumor Gerasimenko.

It was the first man-made object to essentially catch a comet, often referred to as the solar system’s most mysterious object. On November 11, 2014, a probe called Philae will self-eject from Rosetta and land on the comet. Philae will drill into the nucleus of the comet and perform tests, beaming the results to Rosetta for onward transmission to earth. In December 2015, the Rosetta, flying along with the comet will come close to the sun at a distance of 111 million miles. 

The data this Rosetta exploration will reveal will help us understand a little bit more about the history of the solar system. Scientists working on the Rosetta may even prove the theory that it was a comet that brought water and, consequently, life, on earth. They hope to answer nagging questions like: Are there other forms of life out there? If there are other forms of life could that change our beliefs and our perceptions of ourselves in this universe? If there are other forms of life in this vast and expanding universe, could that help us understand what form of life we will transform into after death?

"When God Is Not Enough," by Rudolf Okonkwo

In the middle of Lagos- Benin expressway, before the Ore junction, sits a rusty disabled car with a partially burnt-out engine. It has been there for weeks, abandoned by the owner and by the state. There is no light where the car rests, yet thieves have managed to visit at night and extract anything of value in the car. Meanwhile, at their home in FESTAC, a patriarch and his family are preparing to travel to Onitsha. They have packed their luggage and taken them into their Honda Pilot jeep. They pray for God to grant them safe trip. The parents speak in tongues and the children sing choruses. Their neighbors and friends come out and wish them journey mercies. As they drive, they play gospel music and sing more songs and praises. Near the site where the rusty car rests, the patriarch of the family swings the car to avoid a pothole. By the time he regains control of the car, he is face to face with the disabled car. The last thing that comes out of his mouth before the car slams into the abandoned car is, God.

Over two hundred years ago, the French used to attribute everything to God. They revered their leaders as people chosen by God. They worshiped their clergies as men anointed by the Almighty, even as evidence mounted that these men and women of privilege were ruining the lives of the poor French citizens. In a sporadic uprising, the French society yanked off the yoke of ignorance and subservience and kicked out the so-called men and women handpicked by God.