The advantage of higher cognitive
capacity man enjoys over other animals has made him a creator. He creates
whatever he desires in order to fulfil a particular need. The universe is such
a mystery and man understands very little about it, hence the need to create a
supernatural. When Albert Einstein turned 50 he granted an interview in which
he was asked point blank, do you believe in God? “I am not an atheist” he began,
“The problem is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a
little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The
child knows someone must have written those books. He does not know how. He
does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly
suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but does not know
what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent
human being towards God. We see the universe marvellously arranged and obeying
certain laws but dimly understand these laws.”
The primitive men of the ancient
religions created gods for themselves in order to fulfil one of the philosophical
desires of human; finding his source and purpose. This led to a lot of creation
myth varying from each god, a series of accounts less convincing than evolution
and the big bang theory. There has always been a gaffe in religious accounts of
creation and astronomy. The most common ones from Abrahamic religions being the
sun standing still (as if it was rotating in the first place), existence of day
and night before the sun, the earth being held by pillars and the creation of
plants before the sun (which is technically impossible).
It is acceptable for an illiterate
to think the sun is rotating around the earth, hence the occurrence of night
and day. So are we to say an omnipotent god is as smart as a primitive middle
easterner? Man created gods for all forms of element that do not seem so
understandable to him. In the African traditional religion he created Ogun for
iron with the same mind set the Greek created Zeus for thunder and lightning.
The average man is averse towards what he don’t understand e.g. homosexuals - hence
his god feels the same way. So he creates a law against them in the religious books
he made for his gods. Let us agree for a minute that humans could rebel against
god and give chance for perversion, what case can we make for homosexual
monkeys, ducks who engage in necrophilia and the masturbating penguins?
Most religion was created at a time
when they live by the sword or survival of the fittest was the order of the day,
hence the woman was termed ‘weak’. They couldn’t understand that a menstruating
woman is just shedding linings of the uterus, so they thought it was impure and
their god thought the same as usual. The famous story of the journey to promise
land by the Israelites was just another occurrence of tribal invasion of
foreign lands by primitive men, an occurrence which was the order of the day
prior to civilization. The so called promise land happens not be special after
all, a divine force would have directed the Israelites towards Saudi Arabia or
Qatar; a land filled with lots of crude oil.
A lot of gods has come and gone,
lots of religions have gone extinct, lots are still around and people worship
god in their own different ways with the notion that their god is the one true
god(s). Have we ever wondered that if there is one true and all powerful god,
why allow the proliferation of thousands of counterfeit religions. Gods are
created by men, that is why all that religion encompasses is all that man can
think about, and we never heard of pandas in the bible because there are none
in the middle east - and the creator of the Abrahamic religions were oblivious
of its existence. The greater proliferation of a particular religion(s) or
larger presence of a particular faith on earth has nothing to do with the divine;
rather it shows a history of violence against humanity and the relevance of its
tenets in the subduing of masses and control of economic resources – with its
most useful ingredient being afterlife.
Most theists find it difficult to
swallow that we do not fully understand how we -the living beings got here, or
how some elements of nature came into existence. We find it common attributing
our ignorance to a god entity, rather than saying we do not know. Had it been
that any religion is divine and not man made, its texts would have actually been
a blueprint to many scientific discoveries that we have today, but sadly it’s
not the case. No matter how hard theists try to reconcile faith and logic; they
are two parallel lines, they cannot meet. While churches are being turned to
pubs and apartments in Europe, we tend to rake together politicians’ loots,
widows mites, and the average man’s sweat to build worship edifices when our
hospitals and schools are in bad shapes. We should soft pedal on religion; it
is causing more harm than good in the African society. Don’t you think so?
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