The Vaginal Trilogue: Critical Conversations

The Poet: Julz Amare Poeta of the ‘Hisia Zangu Family’

The poem ‘The Vaginal Trilogue’ is a poem in three parts by Julz Amare Poeta ala The Black Widow (both pen names). Part one, entitled ‘The Vaginal Trilogue: The Ruling’ sets the stage of the defensive that can only come from a person who holds dear the women species. The first stanza goes:

“Herein is the verdict of the case of the Host Female Vs the “Society”.

In the matter of ascertaining ownership of the vagina,
As a tangible and intellectual property,
And award of right of use and proper acknowledgement!

The persona in the poem is of the opinion that ‘Host Female’ has been subjected to constant ridicule, mockery and taunts of the way she uses her God given organ that is the vagina by the ‘Society.’ This is apparent in the second stanza whereby the persona rails in hammers and tongs:  

“It was proven that there were attempts made by the “Society” at
Hostile possession of the vagina by a number of “sex advice” columns,
Which were geared at influencing the choice and number of tenant,”    

The dialogue is between the ‘Host Female’ and the ‘Society’ and there are accusations and counter-accusations of the “misappropriation of the vagina.” Society alleges that the vagina is being used in most inappropriate ways “as a tool of extortion of tenants.” In this case, tenants symbolize those who get the opportunity to interact with the organ in the coitus business. Further, the ‘Society’ cites cases whereby the ‘Host Female’ has used their female power of sexual appeal and image to secure jobs and promotions, climb the social ladder and trap men in marriages (Line 9, 10, 11, stanza 3).

The last stanza is an assurance. For the ‘Host Female’ has been suddenly hoisted on the pedestal of a plaintiff. May be to draw sympathy. To provoke tears of the crocodile. The constant misuse of sexual image that has been exploited by ladies to attain unwarranted advantages in different life spheres are wholesomely lumped as ‘criminal acts’ accusations (Line 20, stanza 6). This suggests that the court has the jurisdiction to punish in terms of eviction those who fail to recognize the sanctity of the vagina. And in dire consequences, a fine, pap!

 

The second part is called ‘The Vaginal Trilogue: Dear Yoni.’ This part is detached from its predecessor. Call it worlds apart as the East and the West. The persona laments that he knows nothing about this Yoni. However, the persona happily highlights the mysteries surrounding his object.

“Your thoughts are an alien to me,
Your actions all the more beguilling,
I have sought your depth,
In the basest of shallows,
Wanting only your nurturing warmth.”
At the expense of your knowledge.

I feel nothing is of importance to the second part of the trilogy because there is no connection to the first part. The enigma and the heroic concealment of Yoni’s nature and character does not relate to the well prepared defense in the first part. The second part, therefore, is better taken away to give the poem a uniform flow of thought and dialogue.

The third part and the last titled ‘The Vaginal Trilogue: The Vaginal Apocalypse’ finally shakes the foundations of the thesis that was presented in the first part. No words are minced. No lip-synching. The first stanza reads:

“The die has been cast,
And it has come to pass,
An apocalypse is afoot,
Upon friend and foe alike!”

Here the poet’s diction comes alive than ever. Several poetic devices have been interspersed in order to bring the full effect of an apocalypse. The final truth. Expose of the decade somehow. Alliteration dances with delight in the second stanza, line 2 as follows: “Nor in girlish giggling…” The first line of the third stanza has onomatopoeia of “sound like Hoo Hah.”

This last part is symbolically empowering womanhood. It is ranting against abuse of sexuality. Sexual misogyny and the objectification of women that we see especially in popular music videos. The persona does not want the ‘apocalypse’ that is a metaphoric term for womanhood to be ‘reduced to some inanimate object.” Something ‘To be poled, rammed or pounded (by) any and every phallic projection!” In other words, the apocalypse is like the famous poem by Gil Scott Heron ‘Revolution Will Not be Televised.’ The persona rightly cautions that ‘…this apocalypse is faithful and pure in tantric union.’

The complete declaration is wrapped in six-line stanza with short lines revealing the magnificence and literary value of words.  The persona quips, I bet with a promising tone:
“This apocalypse is vaginal,
The reason for which we are termed women,
A symbol of life and of love will come,
As an epiphany to women,
As a revelation to men
And a realization to society.”

The poem is a worthy read because the poet opens your eyes with the experimentation of a word deemed taboo in most African societies. Vagina! Did you just say that?

By Amol Awuor

 

To read the poems go to click the links below

The Vaginal Trilogue Part 1: The Ruling

The Vaginal Trilogy Part 2: Dear Yoni

The Vaginal Trilogue Part 3: The Vaginal Apocalypse

 

“Elephants Chained to Big Kennels” by Mehul Gohil: A Review

This is not your usual story. It’s demented and insane; it’s absurd and hangs on geographical pinpoints. It floats over the Kenyan territory, over Nairobi.

Mehul’s stories are always travelling, restless demented travails from ghettos to suburban, from bewitched urbane scented accents on Kenyatta Avenue and Koinange streets to the necessity of crudeness and jostling along Landhies road and downtown winding narrow streets, only to stop briefly and gaze at a bunch of yellow bananas at Wakulima Market. Rift Valley. The Signpost to Mumbai.

If art is a product of the environment, then Mehul’s art is obviously a product of his mind environment. Halfway through the story one feels like it’s not a story being read but an anime being watched.

Our attention is captured by two characters; Cephas and Erebus. These names sound like that of twin aliens released to map Nairobi streets with nothing else, but a pair of tickets to justify their meanders. The conversation is unrestrained by conventional mores and falls flatly on Nairobi’s oft celebrated civilized blabber that unfortunately gets tainted by tangs of tribal tongues.

The name ‘Cephas’ has its origin in biblical mythology. Theologians contend that Apostle Peter and Cephas is one and the same person reported in the Epistle to the Galatians. John 1:42 – “And Andrew led him (Simon) to Jesus. But Jesus looking upon him, said, ‘Thou art Simon, the son of John: thou shalt be called Cephas’ (which is interpreted Peter).” Simeon Kaipha =Simon Cephas = Simon Peter.  Kaipha” is the Aramaic equivalent for “rock”; whence the Latin “Petrus,” from “petra” = “rock”). We won’t go into the counterargument, that’s for another class.

‘Erabus’ seems to originate from ancient Greek mythology on ‘Erebus’ or ‘Erebos’ meaning a “deep darkness, shadow”. Erebus is a conception of a primordial deity that represents the personification of darkness. Greek literature also associates Erabus with the underworld.

I digressed into biblical textual criticism because the author cites John 1:5 as the inspiration for the story. For less biblical savvy folks, the verse says: The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome. Thus, a closer look confirms that the theme of the story is primarily driven by the characterization.

The language is fast, confusing, and enticing. Some descriptions will make you laugh until you shit on yourself. Let’s take a walk through the story.

How is downtown shaped? Asks Cephas

‘Like a grown lady lying on her back. From left to right, from here, we have her thighs which are the squat buildings on Haile Selassie. Except for the raised knees which are Co-operative House and Times Tower. The flat stomach of Moi Avenue and Tom Mboya Street after that. Then the rising breasts of Johnny Walker on Teleposta Towers. Finally, we go down to her head which is Tusker on Uhuru Flyover.’

With that description, the tour of Nairobi begins. Cephas and Erabus are guided by five biggest billboards in downtown. He begins with the one at Landhies Road (Blueband): a male billboard, it’s a he and a little later we are confronted by Aeron: the witch.

 … And he sees the witch called Aeron selling her books from the back of her blue matatu, and she’s wearing a bikini but it is legal and she knows the City Council bastards don’t want to touch her wrinkly skin or fondle her sagging breasts, and he catches a line of her bipolar monologue booming from the matatu stereo, ‘THERE IS LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS, BUT THE DARKNESS DOES NOT UNDERSTAND IT (my emphasis – John 1: 5).’

On the eastern edge of downtown, there’s a second mark on Cephas’s map. It’s a looming Airtel billboard and it’s a she. At the entrance of downtown proper we have our third mark; a Coca-Cola billboard. Again it’s a she. Westward from Coca-Cola is a ‘looming Johnny Walker Billboard on Teleposta Towers and it’s a he. The fifth mark is westward out of Nairobi: Tusker billboards over Uhuru Flyover. The gender of this billboard is not given but since I live in Nairobi, next time I’m in that area of the Metropolis, I’ll go and see for myself and assign a gender.

‘These billboards are his compass points. As long as they are there, he can’t get lost.’

The whole story is happens in the area between this five billboards. Nothing escapes the searing judgement of Cephas and Erebus. We see us, through their eyes. A few quotations will suffice.

Long rains and floods and muddy socks in the Omo foam

…..

Cephas jumps off the wall like the city spider that he is, landing asprawl, hands and feet hitting the ground simultaneously, smoky dust rising around his sneakers; without breaking his bones because he’s just a kid enjoying the rubberbandiness of his body..

….

“There are many here, at the open back of Aeron’s blue matatu where used hard and softcovers are stacked, and it seems books are popular and maybe this is a reading city. An ex-power skirt is flipping to a last page. There are thin men with big bones, the underfed and underpaid houseboys from deeper Eastlands, stopping here at Aeron’s and flipping the softcover pages for a minute before continuing their trek to the middle-class suburbs where they will scrub chicken tikka stains off plates and wash shit-farted underwears.”

…..

 “The matatu is gleaming with Omo-blue and polished silver chrome and it wants to get onto the pavement but a Toyota Flawless is in the way, so the beast attacks, sparks fly where their metal meets, the left headlight of the Toyota Flawless pops out and dangles just above road level, its windscreen shatters and glass pebbles bounce on the pavement. The blue matatu shoves the Toyota Flawless aside and comes toward Cephas.”  

…..

“The cloud right opposite him now is called ‘Ocampo Four Given Life Sentences’. Southward there is ‘Police Raid So What? Publishers, Find Illegal Fiction’. The entire sky is now carpeted with newspapers and headlines. The clouds drift peacefully. ‘Agwambo: I Will Expand Cities in Ukambani’ is reflecting off Lonhro House.”

Forgive the futuristic, though tribally annoying proclamations such as Ocampo 4 Given Life Sentences. The lewd and overt sexual descriptions abound. Of course politics is not spared as well. Here is a serving of the multi-coloured and logos sprayed wildstyle on matatus.

“Kuma Ya Aeron, Politica Landscape, Ratner’s Star, Ngugi wa What? Beer Hunger Wine Hyena, Agwambo Mapambano, Jah in Fallujah, Hague Is Vague”

There are underlying allusions of the influence on consumerism on the sensibility of Nairobians, particularly with regard to the iPhone. There are undertones of Dambudzo Macherera everywhere. From the sentence constructions, the dark humour, the winding narration, and the ability to turn otherwise normal and boring sights into eventful escapades! Mehul is arguably a Dambudzo student, only a little saner. He picks from his Master and seems to shower respect on an author that deserves Africa’s standing ovation, unconventionally.

That’s a 110-year-old Eselshoek. Mugabe was drinking it in his toilet,’ says Aeron.

Erabus wants to lean away from the book but he can’t because there is a moving mass of Nairobi bodies blocking his retreat. Cephas spies the power suits and even more powerful skirts army approaching and he sees a title typed on the soft cover, A Sunrise on a Murderous Day in Kampala.

‘By Dambooze Marechera. Yeah, baby, his last book never published. This only manuscript stolen from Mugabe’s toilet. And these are his fingerprints,’ Aeron says as she shows the finger stains to everyone.

‘He held it in his lap as he shat. This is how Marechera wanted his books read. While performing raw human arts like shitting. Fine alcohol ready at hand. Bob was always an avid reader.’

I have no doubt a story such as this will suffer from classic misinterpretations such as Dambudzo’s works. Attacking Marechera’s writing, one critic; Julia Okonkwo, chastised that he had “grafted a decadent avant-garde European attitude [nihilism] and style to experiences that emanate from Africa.” He declared that “the continent cannot afford the luxury of such distorted and self-destructive sophistication from her writers.” In Ngugi’s ‘Decolonising the Mind’ (I986) a representative passage comes to mind: “By acquiring the thought-processes and values of the foreign tongue, [the African] becomes alienated from the values of his mother-tongue or from the language of the masses.”

The story requires a certain level of openness. You assign a ‘writer duty’ to it; you get plenty of piss on your face. This is not Kenyan fiction. It is not African fiction. This is fiction. Can Mehul’s work suffer from the same criticism? ‘Ngugi wa What’ in the story suggests that the prevailing mirror for examining post-colonial writers is known to the writer.

Helon Habila notes that:

“Marechera’s enormous contribution to African literature is often underrated for so many reasons, one being the sheer impenetrability of his prose style. He is nothing like any African writer before him. Up until the time he appeared, the leading writers, like Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Ayi Kwei Armah, had written in an accessible, social realist mode, and most of the writers that came immediately after them adopted the same style, not only because of the earlier writers’ influence, but also because of the effectiveness of this very accessible style in presenting the anti-colonial, nationalist themes that had become the predominant concern of early post-colonial African fiction. But Marechera, heavily influenced by the European modernists, departed emphatically from the tradition, choosing the rather self-reflective, technically ostentatious stream-of- consciousness mode.”

Mehul leans towards Dambudzo’s prose style, without necessarily aping.

One major weakness with the story is that without the excessive use of geographical placements, there is little that remains. One could as well replace Cephas and Erebus with other characters but the story will remain just a different interpretation of the city, but when you do away with the billboards, streets et al … nothing remains. My guess is that the obsession with cartographic representations was an attempt to make the story relevant, to give it some meaning. Without the geography and allusions to different stereotypes in Nairobi, the story dies. To anyone without any visual knowledge of Nairobi streets, the story is just a cluster of buildings, billboards, strange events, and a paralyzing dose of humour.

We are therefore forced to view the story as a Nairobi story instead. It cannot be mapped on any other city. However, this does not mean that it is a story written for Kenyans. In Dambudzo’s words, reminiscent of his iconoclastic bend:

“If you are a writer for a specific nation or a specific race, then fuck you.”

Walk with Cephas and Erabus through the city and acquire new meanings from events and locations you pass each day but never take a second to appreciate, to evaluate, to judge.

***

Mehul Gohil is a writer born and living in Nairobi, Kenya. He won the 2010 ‘Kenya I Live In’ short story competition organized by Kwani Trust. His stories have been published in Kwani? 6. He is a Don DeLillo and Michael Jackson fanatic.

“Elephants Chained to Big Kennels” is a Caine Prize anthology story published in Kwani? 2012. Grab a copy.

By Richard Oduor

Amol Awuor: The Great Gatsby by Francis Scott Fitzgerald Review

This is the first masterpiece that I have read that is unputdownable. It is so fast paced; it glides in a flash second before your very eyes like a work of magic that before you realize, you are done. And you have got nothing from it. Published almost a century ago, 1925 to be specific, the book is considered one of the greatest works of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

It is about a man called Jay Gatsby told in the voice of one Nick Carraway who happens to be his neighbor. Gatsby is a man of pomp and color in terms of hosting endless parties that attract people from different states in America. But the fun ends there. A dimension of emptiness and loneliness sets in that is characteristic of the partygoers. The narrator almost contemptuously remarks:
“I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby’s house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited — they went there.”

During the party, Nick Carraway with another partygoer called Jordan Baker while taking a walk inside the several rooms of Gatsby’s majestic mansion chance upon a drunk in the library. He forks:

“Who brought you?” he demanded. “Or did you just come? I was brought. Most people were brought.”

He continues:
“I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to

sit in a library.”

Jay Gatsby, however, is a man who is never happy and always looks distant. He is a man obsessed with impressing Daisy Buchanan, a married woman of impeccable glitter and glamour. Daisy Buchanan was his former lover about a half a decade ago and Gatsby has never gotten over their former intense affair.

The sun finally sets on Gatsby when he dies and only his father, Nick Carraway and the man who was at the library attends his hurried funeral. Not even Daisy Buchanan or his best friend wants to get associated with him. The former soldier eventually goes with a hollow dream of the past that never materializes and only ends up distressed in the end.

The author through his narrator quips in a reflective and sentimental note:
“It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

This book will leave you flustered and asking questions that have no immediate answers. For those who have had trouble with their past love life – the fascination with the first love – you will quake in a haunting distress of the pointlessness of it.

The author, a celebrated novelist and short story writer of the Lost Generation will sweep you off your feet like a girl in love with his lines in the book. Sample a few:

             “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

            “When the JAZZ HISTORY OF THE WORLD was over, girls were putting their heads on men’s shoulders in a puppyish, convivial way, girls were swooning backward playfully into men’s arms, even into groups, knowing that someone would arrest their falls — but no one swooned backward on Gatsby, and no French bob touched Gatsby’s shoulder, and no singing quartets were formed with Gatsby’s head for one link.”

            “I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others — poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner — young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”

            “Human sympathy has its limits, and we were content to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind. Thirty — the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat’s shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.”

 

About the Author

Amol Awuor is a young Poet, Short Story Writer, Critic and Freelance Analyst of various issues affecting the global society. He can be reached at brunologix.89@gmail.com

He also runs a blog http://sikuzijazo.blogspot.com

Olubumni Familioni: On Storytelling and Such Other Matters …

Olubunmi Familioni

For me, writing a story means much more than “storytelling”. It transcends the banality of the “artistic activity” of telling the story (and how it is told). It is more than just a literary exercise; a weaving together of plots and narratives to make a tale, or the creation of characters and crafting of colloquies, or even merely entertainment. No. Writing, most of the time, for me, is cathartic; as I believe it is for many writers; hence the solitariness of the exercise—this is why sometimes it seems as if I am writing solely for, or to, myself; almost like rendering a soliloquy on stage, where you, the readers, represent the audience.

In the theatre, the thespian just recites his soliloquy, almost oblivious of the presence of listeners; thus, they (the listeners) have the liberty to interpret these stage-whispered thoughts whichever way they choose—because the actor will not offer an exposition of his soliloquy! Hamlet didn’t.

The actor is not a scholar or a scientist, neither is the Writer; they are artists. Artists are only supposed to create. They are not required to ‘maul’ these creations into academic pieces themselves. Because they are mostly solitary people their primary obsession is their Art (hence the hermitishness that is often perceived and misinterpreted as aloofness.)

Having established that this writing thing is a solitary affair you can now understand why most of the time the writer is only talking to himself, even though he may be addressing a general social issue. Since he is merely talking to himself, if he has “sold millions of books”, that is just as many ‘eavesdroppers’ gathered at his ‘window’ listening in on his private musings, his soliloquies. He will not come out of the ‘room’, mount a podium, pick a chalk and begin to academicize his thoughts—that is for the eavesdroppers to take up; the cynics, the critics, the scholars, the literati, and other sundry souls for whom intellectual exertion and literary scholarship is not beyond their ken. As I have observed, most scholarly expositions of works of literature by the author mar the ethereal beauty of the literary creation, and do more damage than the most acerbic critic would. This is why a writer would hardly ‘explain’ his own stories, or attempt to. I share the belief of the Aesthetic Movement of 1880 in England that literature has value in itself, even without a moral purpose, and definitely without the academic posturing of our ‘pedagogue-critics’.

To put this thing to rest, I must quote my favourite columnist, the highly revered “Snooper”, Tatalo Alamu, of The Nation: “the writer takes up residence in a hyper-real world of creative hallucination” where, I should add, only him has access to (hence the numerous (mis)interpretations by ‘eavesdroppers’), and where ANYTHING can be created, from men to monsters, without apologies, or explanations.

———————-

POSTSCRIPT: This is not to say I do not enjoy thoroughly the keen dissection of my stories which my sharp-minded friends take the pain to carry out—when men like these draw their scalpels who am I to restrain their hands.

Olubunmi Familioni

Olubumni was born in Ibadan and raised in the heart of Lagos. Now he lives in Ibadan but his heart still resides in Lagos. His writings boast of an intense injection of dark humour, unconventional characterization, and are best viewed through the mirror of absurdist literature. On the flip side, Olubumni is a Mathematics Lecturer sweating under the curse of Advanced Numerical Analysis

For new works (Pieces of Rags Series) check out http://www.naijastories.com/author/bunmifamiloni/

The Clash between Darwinism and Creationism: 1859 to present

In this posting, I’ll talk about the American response to Darwinism and the continuing clash between Darwinism and Creationism in North American schools; 1859-1900 and later developments. Such an examination will show how the same arguments have been adopted by scholars, theologians, and churches the world over.

Fundamentalist religious groups have never accepted the uneasy relationship that exists between religious institutions and the theories of evolution and natural selection in the Western world. In America, those who believe in the Judeo-Christian accounts of the creation of the world as outlined in the book of Genesis have for centuries acted as political pressure groups to eliminate the teaching of Darwinism in schools by imposing their beliefs on public education (Strickberger 2005).

Because Charles Darwin published “The Origin of the Species” in 1859 when America was on the eve of the civil war, serious opposition to the work began in the 1870s in the post war period. Initial rumblings began to emanate that science was becoming a threat to religion. However, due to the presence of an imminent threat of biblical criticism, the Protestants failed to perceive the details of Charles Darwin’s study hence causing delay in their response. In 1873, during the international meeting of the Evangelical Alliance, the question of evolution was finally voiced. Charles Hodge; a Presbyterian theologian from Princeton took the challenge and allayed fears of the impact of evolution and natural selection by saying that these were not new concepts, the only new concept was Darwin’s own version of the two concepts.

By proposing a design that nature was controlled by chance, he concluded that Darwinism was atheism. After this initial declaration by Hodge, Borden P Browne who was a professor of philosophy in Boston University characteristically interpreted Darwinism as being expressive of; “Life without meaning; death without meaning; and the universe without meaning. A race tortured to no purpose, and no hope but annihilation. The dead only blesses; living standing like beasts at bay, and shrieking half in defiance and half in fright” (Pyne 1996, p.12)

For Americans, the Origin of Species and the Descent of Man only intensified the allegation that science continued to attack faith. By disregarding the underlying belief that humanity was a semi divine creation and that the universe was expressly designed for the benefit of mankind, the evolution theory and the schemes of natural selection posited that just like all the other animals, man too was involved in the struggle of existence. Theologians and religious institutions were expressly against the fact that the natural selection debased man to the level of other animals by denying human beings the unique qualities of the mind, intelligence and the soul.

Darwinism created doubts on three fundamental components that had maintained belief in religion for centuries. It shattered the belief in the presence of any design and purpose, the belief that there existed a Creator or a Designer of the universe, and lastly in the belief on the presence of the human soul. The shaking of the later belief consequently created pertinent questions on the existence of life after death-a belief that had been held belief in religion for centuries.

Not even the educated public could afford to be less attuned to the ramifications of the evolutionary theory and natural selection that had created confusion and controversy among philosophers, theologians and scientists. Some were driven to suicidal thoughts. A case in point is the wife of Historian Henry Adams; Marion Hooper Adams who after the loss of her father was engulfed in depression leading to her committing suicide due to depression and doubts on the existence of immortality after death (Pyne1996. p. 13). Her death was attributed to the controversy of the evolution theory as her husband; Henry Adams had uncannily predicted her religious crisis. Marion could not succeed in reconciling her beliefs in religion and the scientific evidences of natural selection.

The 19^th century also saw the rise of American geology but its development was affected by serious controversies that were both theological and scientific. Just towards the end of the 18^th century clashes over the origins of the earth had began to be felt in the intellectual circles. Catastrophists perceived Creationism as outlined in the book of Genesis as the only logical explanation to the perfection of nature. The “uniformitarians” were against this explanation as literally presented in the Bible. Instead they postulated that the formation of the earth resulted from uniform and continuous courses working over long periods of time. These debates were transported to the periods after the beginning of Darwinism in the 19^th century (Mandelker 1984).

When the ramifications of the Darwinian Theory eventually reached the majority of Americans, their reactions reached dimensions of hysteria. Everybody sensed that with his study, Darwin had deliberately and effectively destroyed the fundamentals of religion. Earlier on through the works of Paley and other historians of his kind, the world had been made to believe that though miraculous and mysterious natural processes, God had directly created new species. From the geological records, these geologists and naturalists had almost completely convinced humanity that the earth as it existed was the product of a grand cosmic design implying that nature was reflective of the Divine Mind and Purpose (Pyne1996).

However, as the years trudged on to the lure of positivist science, new converts were being acquired to be practitioners of this novel empiricism. In essence, a new divide of belief was created. People had to either choose the orthodox view of creationism if it suited their understanding of existence or alternatively chose the novel scientific positivism as expressed in Darwinism. The overlap between these two facets characterized the notable hostility of Darwinism in America.

While creationism was held foundationally on the presence of a purpose of nature that satisfied the belief that the world and humanity moved towards a predetermined end, the theories of evolution and natural selection described the movement of nature to be marked with random and purposeless variations. Even though Darwin himself was persuaded that nature was governed by natural law as opposed to miracle, catastrophe, or the caprice of a Creator, he maintained that through these chance variations and adaptations in nature evolution proceeded along a probable evolutionary chain. In his journey to study the species in South America (1831-1836) on the Beagle, he had observed and recorded several mismatches between species and the environments they inhabited. This led to the postulation that as opposed to the creationist theory, to exist in the changing environments organisms had to espouse a wide range of adaptive mechanisms to ensure their survival.

The liberal Protestants in America were especially more loathsome of Darwinism, as Darwin insisted on delineating the evolutionary process which implied that nature and the existence of humanity was laid waste in the brutal struggle for existence. They could not fathom that the postulations of the superfecundity and plenitude of nature, miscegenation, mutation, ugliness and randomness were the basis upon which natural laws operated. The mere fact that natural selection as Darwin had explained led to the extinctions of some species created a religious and philosophical ferment of great magnitude.

Ten years after the publication of the “Origin of Species,” and the rise of the anti-Darwinism movement which is attributed to Protestantism, Herbert Spencer developed a philosophy of science with the intention of allaying the controversies between religion and science that Darwinism had created. In his publication, the “System of Synthetic Philosophy”, Spencer expounded on the theories of evolution which had specifically been limited to biology, linguistics, fossil life, education, political history, architecture, psychological phenomena, child rearing, and rights of women, manners, morals, fine arts and in any other discipline in which the theory of evolution could be applied. Even though Charles Darwin publicly praised Spencer as “the great expounder of the principle of Evolution”, the two works not only differed in methodology but were also derived from different schools of thought (Pyne 1996; Numbers & Stenhouse 2001).

The “System of Synthetic Philosophy” was especially instrumental in accommodating Darwinism in religion because he attempted to explain that religious coherence as it existed in those ages was buttressed by the authority of truth derived from science. His intention can be said to have been the creation of a new form of science that incorporated both the scientific truths and religious beliefs into a form of natural religion that would replace the orthodox Christianity. If such an intention is understood to be one driven by arrogance, then it best describes the evangelical zeal he set in the interpretation of the evolutionary theory and its subsequent incorporation into the perfectibility of human life in his book, the “System of Synthetic Philosophy”. However, even though his work was instrumental it never vanquished the hostilities between science and religion.

As the ramifications of Darwinism continued to create an upheaval in religious circles, the Old Protestantism order which had its basis on the interrelationship of science, faith, the Bible, civilization and morality began to crumble. In 1869, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. offered a prediction of the catastrophe that was impending. He predicted that the collapse of the interrelationship would not be dramatic. He also intoned that the many vested interests of churches were rooted in evangelical idolatry and bibliolatry. For these reasons churches could not be expected to accept the implications of the novel views and explanations of the existence of man and the universe as the Bible could not challenge the scientific standards (Marsden 2006). The truth of the matter was that the creation evidence as detailed in the Hebrew books could not just be taken at face value as factual evidence of the creation of the world by a Supernatural deity.

By the 1970s so many evangelicals believed in the seriousness of the threat of Darwinism to religion but they did not share the analytic conclusions that Holmes had so aptly predicted. W.A Stearns attributed the current threats to Christianity as being no more than a continuation of the assaults that Christianity has been enduring (Mardsen 2006, 17). Other leaders reiterated that just as the skepticism, deism and atheism had been defeated in the Enlightenment, Christianity will be victorious again. While positing that never since Christianity has been strong as it was then, Stearns added that they will work together under the Evangelical Alliance to lift all people to achieve victory with the afflictions of modern rationalism, skepticism, the Papacy or any other false system.

These were the opinions that characterized fundamentalism. As an organized movement, it had two major forms. One front operated within the denominations where seminarians and ministers purged modernists and liberals with the sole intention of saving the orthodoxy. This form of fundamentalism cantered mainly in North America. The second form of fundamentalism was more of a popular crusade that was directed not only towards modernist and liberal heresies but also against Darwinism and the deteriorating moral trends in the society. While former mainly involved seminarians and conservative ministers, the latter was advanced by less scholarly or less academic preachers. These two forms of fundamentalism were joined into a form of loose coalition as they were working against a common enemy: Darwinism.

At the end of the 19^th century it seemed that religious leaders had started becoming in terms with the evolutionary theories, but still approximately half of the population in the United States still denied the scientific truths postulated by the Darwin theories. This proportion which rejects Darwinism in its entirety believes that human beings are a product of a Supernatural creation that happened at some time in the history of the universe.

With regard to the uniqueness of the political and constitutional history of the United States, and the long history of a religious culture the creationism movement became more popular hence characterizing the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. It should be understood that the majority of the European settlers who came to North America during the 17^th and the 18^th centuries were settlers who were fleeing from religious prosecution from their mother countries (Dixon 2009).

Many of these settlers were non conformist Protestants who had adopted the belief in a personal relationship with God and the study of the Bible. They were Puritans, Quakers, Congregationalists, Baptists and Methodists. Since the settlers constituted a majority of the United States population at that time, these distinct religious groupings became the characteristics of the religious culture in the United States of America. Thus, due to the multiplicity of churches, there arose a need to separate the church from the state so as to prevent any favouritism of the any of the church groupings by the state. This spirit was aptly expressed when the First Amendment explicitly prevented the Congress from ever establishing any form of national religion. Despite this constitutional provision, other states still maintained contact with established churches but these were to soon die off leading to the full separation of the church and the state (Dixon 2009).

To exercise the same spirit of the separation of the church and the state, statutes were enacted to prevent other established religions from imposing their own version of Christianity on others. This led to the abolition of religious instruction in public schools. The passing of religious beliefs onto the younger generation was left to be done at home or in the Sunday school. This provision that completely eliminated religion in schools was what ushered in the clash between Creationism and Darwinism as the 20^th century drew to a close.

The first instance of the clash with regard to the education occurred in 1925, when Dayton; a small town in Tennessee banned the teaching of Darwin’s evolution theories in public schools within their locality (Dixon 2009). The end of the sensational debates led to the elimination of the evolution theories from the science curriculum of most schools throughout the United States and for the duration between 1925 to the 1960s, the clash between Darwinism and Creationism subsided as they had both been eliminated from instruction curricula of public schools.

The elimination of such important scientific principles in the education curricula did not present any serious threats to the scientific development of the United States until the surprise success of Sputnik mission; a Russian space program which was launched in 1957. For fear that America was lagging behind in scientific development, a national panic arose that the scientific standards in American schools were low. The abolition of Darwinism in schools could no longer be tolerated. Acting against the wishes of many American parents who viewed Darwinism as the causative agent for the social ills in the society, the courts re-introduced the learning of the evolutionary theories in American public schools.

The 1960s to the 1970s led to the rise of the theories of the Intelligent Design. However, the religious fundamentalists especially those in North America were also determined to establish a way by which they could also be enshrined in the curricula. These developments led to the concepts of Intelligent Design and Scientific Creationism. There were those who advocated for the teaching of both evolution science, the creation science in addition to another alternative such as catastrophism so as to create a balance between the violently conflicting theories of Creationism and Darwinism.

Through the idea of an Intelligent Design, postulated by a biochemist Michael Behe and a lawyer Phillip Johnson, a new way through which the concept of God could be taken back to the classrooms. However, the teaching of the Intelligent Design in American classrooms did not see the day as judges ruled that it had been religiously motivated and therefore a breach of the First Amendment in 2005(Dixon 2009; Numbers 2006).

The clash between Darwinism and Creationism in America was watched with amused detachment or in some instances notions of superiority by the British as they could not understand that there still existed some culturally backward communities in America that prevented children from garnering knowledge on the theories of Darwinism. Given that their era of controversy had long ended, they could not understand that unlike in Britain, the United States had far different historical differences among its population. The presence of interdenominational rivalry that existed in the United States did not exist in England during the time of the evolutionary controversy. The supremacy of the Church of England and the existence of a Parliament with a long tradition helped settle down the controversies that raged after the publication of the “Origin of the Species” and the “Descent of Man”. Moreover the Fundamentalist Christian movement that took off in the United States in the World War I period did not take off in Britain (Dixon 2009).

In his analysis of the developments of the clash between Darwinism and Creationism or rather the Intelligent Design, Yeats observes that just like any other American he does not understand why naturalism should exercise monopoly in North American classrooms. He reiterates that individuals who espouse Darwinism are using the courts to sustain the principles of evolution and natural selection in public schools. He could not understand why an issue about the origin of existence could only be explained by Darwinism when there were a multitude of other options that could be taught in the public schools. However, given the motivations behind the intelligent design, a bad case was presented to the judicial system and from that bad case emanated a bad decision. By trying to use scientific data to prove that the theory of Intelligent Design was at par with Darwinism hence losing the case before a court under modern jurisprudence with judges who underwent secular training.

Therefore, while religious fundamentalists may attempt to negotiate for a dualistic approach in the education system, they have to understand that the attorneys as well as the system of training existing in North America is steeped in Naturalistic philosophy. Thus, unless the religious fundamentalists propagate the understanding that Darwinism is a religious tenet as in secular naturalism and that the education system as well as the public school’s science educators is nothing but the missionaries of the religion, any attempt to introduce any other theoretical understanding of the origin of man and the universe will be viewed as being religiously motivated. However, some argue that much as Darwinism can escape the reference of being classified as a religion, what matters is the element of faith. So long as students are taught to have faith in Darwinism as being the conclusive explanation of the origin of man, then it is religion and it should not be taught in public schools in North America.

In North America, the continuing conflicts between supporters of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection on one hand and the supporters of the creationist theories on the other are just the 21^st century’s skirmishes that have characterized the struggles between science and religion. Creationism as a theory and its pseudo-scientific offspring; the theory of Intelligent Design are products of the historical, cultural and religious characteristics of the population in North America.

So long as these underlying characteristics of the population persist, there is limited evidence that a time may come in the near future where the supremacy of Darwinism in the public school system will be challenged with creationist theories like the Intelligent design or any other theory, so long as such a theory is deemed to have originated from religious motivation. Currently, with the observable lack of interest in the theories of Creationism by current President of the United States of America; President Barack Obama coupled to the support of Darwinism in schools by the Supreme Court as well as the overriding interpretation of the First Amendment, it is no surprise that religiously motivated anti-Darwinism in North America will continue to be kept out of American classrooms.

There is very little, when one judges the history of these developments, to suggest that Darwinism will not continue to be part of the science syllabus in countries with secular systems of governance. Creationism, held afloat by nothing but belief, will also be taught in many countries but it will never strangle Darwinism as far as understanding natural biological phenomena is concerned. There are mountains of evidence to that end, mountains that cannot simply be washed away.

COMMENTS AND OPINIONS ARE HIGHLY WELCOMED.

Richard M. Oduor/Richie Maccs, Nairobi

Mr. Oduor is a writer, poet and critic. He did Biomedical Science and Technology (Bsc. Hons) and in line to pursue a Masters in Strategic Management. He is a founding Partner of a young company; Expert Research & Management Consultants and Founding Member at the Center for Intervention Against Alcohol (CIAADA). His prose and poetry have appeared in print and online journals and anthologies and the first poetry collection is due for publication. He has freelanced and copywrited for various local and international private research entities.

 

References

 

Darwinism, Religion and the Idea of God

Charles Darwin: The Greatest of all naturalists

When the “Origin of Species” appeared on November 24, 1859, a new intellectual impulse was generated and just as a novel generative idea defines a philosophical epoch, an intellectual movement that would define and engulf a whole generation began. While it can be generally posited that Darwinism in itself was but a terminus of the linkages in intellectual development in that century, it is much more preferable if we posit that Darwin inaugurated the reflex of the universal spirit of natural science.

While the “Descent of Man” included the species Homo sapiens as a natural consequence of the evolution theory, thus explaining its existence as nothing but a natural development from lower animal life forms; which was a rather natural progression of Darwin’s doctrines of the origins of species, the turbulence that the sole assertion would create was beyond his comprehension at the release of these works. Far beyond the bounds of natural philosophy, scientific theorism, religious and ethical depths, the reactions ranged from acknowledgement and admiration, from aversion and repugnance while a select minority maintained a sober and unprejudiced judgement.

To some, Darwinism represented the flambeau that would light mankind to perceive and discover new paths of truth and attain moral and spiritual perfection. On the side, Darwinism was also viewed as an unproven hypothesis that threatened to radically transform the noblest and grandest achievements of the past centuries and thrust them into a heap of ashes. Alternatively, Darwinism was also representative of the highest level of scientific, moral and religious height that humanity had ever ascended (Schmid 2008). Thus, under these overriding circumstances it was virtually impossible for guardians of religion and moral interest as well as those respectable individuals with sacred acquisitions that man had ever been endowed with, to assume the roles of idle spectators.

It would have been better if these groups of people delayed their onslaught on Darwinism until they had attained a significant level of evidence to judge or at least waited until the controversies subsided to levels that could warrant an unprejudiced analysis. However since, Darwinism was seen as being hostile to Christianity as well as the theistic view of the universe, these agents voiced their controversy. On the other hand, extreme materialists and the sublime monists, who are nonetheless hostile to Christianity, decided to use Darwinism as a reference point for shattering all belief of the existence of a Creator and Master of the world (Schmid 2008).

Cumulatively, taken as threats to God and religion, individuals with ethical and religious acquisitions could not afford to accept a reserved position on the matter. In essence, silence would have been understood to be an inglorious retreat. Therefore, it is important to understand the position that religion took with regard to the Darwinian theories.

Charles Darwin, Darwinism and Religion: 1859-1900

To pose a highly reliable discourse on the interactions of Darwinism and religion, it is only prudent that we take a look at the scientific problem in itself before digressing to the views of Darwinism as propagated by religion. At basic, this attempt desires that we first and foremost discuss the purely scientific theories that Darwin postulated. Generally, these theories attempt to give an answer to the question: “How did the different species of organic beings on the earth originate”(Schmid 2008).

Living in the midst of an endless variety of plants, animals and human beings, man has continually striven to understand the nature of all these by observation and design of laws that are in congruence to the natural world as it existed in a given century. With the facts of reproduction partially understood and after designing explanations for the existence of the species in immeasurable epochs of the history of the earth, we are finally faced with the task of developing a believable explanation of the origin of the first species, be it a plant, an organic being or an animal.

Since no man ever had the opportunity of witnessing the origination of other species as there are enough evidential proofs asserting that when Homo sapiens finally appeared, all other organisms were in existence. In the natural history of the progression of science, there reached a time when scientists desisted from attempting to solve the question as it was deemed unprofitable and utterly insolvable. Any attempt in solving it would require the use of unjustifiable hypotheses which in themselves could not provide an appropriate answer to the whole phenomena. Having faith in religion simply rendered these investigations useless because the question had aptly and fully resolved in religion.

In religion, all species had their origins from the creative act of God. This solution for the question of the origin in species sufficed for religion because as a believer, all things including the universe itself, was the work of God. Since religion is grounded on belief and as such cannot be taken as being indifferent or antagonistic to the scientific impulse behind investigations into the origin of the species, Darwinian evolution theories had a profound impact on religious belief. Traditionally, religion was grounded on the belief that both social and biological systems were designed by an intelligent supernatural deity.

Evolutionary theories denied that there existed a god who with a supreme purpose designed biological creatures. Since religion lies in human driven attempts to appeal to or control natural forces, which had long been incomprehensible to man but thought to be humanlike but supernatural, the concepts of God and soul arose. Both these concepts are supposedly eternal in nature and immaterial. Owing to the general insecurity of humanity and the instability of nature, religion provided the understanding that there had to be in existence a supernatural being who had the capacity to manage and control these components of the universe. It is such a propitiation that maintained deep beliefs in religions and cults. Through offerings and sacrifices, human beings sought to restore order, ameliorate guilt and provide benefits by appealing to the divine creator (Strickberger 2005).

Before Darwin, Galileo and Copernicus had challenged the notion of a powerful deity as the controlling force behind the whole universe. In their view, the idea of God only served as an explanation of the initial creation but not of the incessant manipulation of the solar system. However, their explanations could not cause such religious turbulence as Darwinism would cause. Darwinism posed that biological relationships; inclusive of the origin of man as well as that of all other species in the universe could only be explained through natural selection in the complete absence of a controlling or managing God.

At the onset of Darwinism a majority felt that the randomness and uncertainty of the evolutionary theories had almost completely replaced the existence of a deity with conscious, purposeful and human like characteristics. The postulation that evolution was a historical process and that species were not created spontaneously but rather formed via a succession of selective events in the past was a direct contradiction to the religious beliefs which maintained the understanding that there could not exist any form of biological design or otherwise without the existence of  Grand Designer.

With regard to evolution, interactions between different species and their environment results in the selection of successful traits that are further enhanced by selective events. Therefore, environmental adaptation has the capacity to continuously modify structures and organs over long periods of time, and complexities that had initially been unlikely singular spontaneous events progress to become evolutionary probable events. Even though the variability on which selection is dependent on may at times be random, adaptations are not because natural selection only chooses and perfects that which is adaptive (Strickberger 2005). With natural selection, the designs and purpose of a supernatural deity are not necessary.

Everybody who is acquainted with the hostility of the reviews, treatises and sermons just after the works, “The Origin of the Species” and the “Descent of Man” were released will understand that at the time Charles Darwin was perceived as a wicked infidel who had completely abandoned God as the Creator of the universe, a man who had completely undermined the authority of the Scriptures, a man who degraded human beings to the same levels as beasts and lastly as a man who had abandoned the universe under the control of chance. For centuries and centuries men had comfortably adopted the belief that God was the creator and that Nature as it existed was but an evidence of God’s purpose and design.

These men could not understand nor even tolerate that things could just grow without being products of the divine craftsman nor that the exquisite adaptations of organs to the environment was not a divine design but due to natural selection of variabilities that simply chanced to be favourable to the organism at a specific time. More serious was the disbelief that man, animals, vegetable or any form of inorganic nature had the same pithecoid ancestry.

Darwin’s Reaction to the Upheaval

These upheavals were strange to Darwin who could not simply understand what the fuss was all about. In fact, he regarded these hostilities with mild irritation and innocent surprise. In response Darwin wrote to Asa Gray in May 22, 1860 that, “With respect to the theological view of the question, this is always painful to me. I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically” (Banton 11). To a Dutch correspondent, Darwin wrote in 1873, that since it is the impossibility of conceiving the universe with the help of our conscious selves that drives man to believe in the existence of God, he concludes that it is safe to surmise that the whole subject of the existence is beyond the scope of the intellect of man, but man has to do his duty. All through these attacks Charles Darwin maintained that he had a belief in a God.

While answering an earnest student who sought to know his opinions on religion, Darwin reiterated that he considered the theory of Evolution to be in compatibility with the belief in a God. In the same note to the German student, Darwin added that it should always be understood that different individuals had different opinions on what is generally referred to as God. On the insistence of the student who was like many other not convinced with his answers, he wrote that Science had nothing, absolutely to do with Christ (in reference to attacks from Christianity)(p, 12). In the same year while writing to J. Fordyce, he exhibited the typical Victorian individualism by saying that, “What my own views may be is a question of no consequence to anyone but myself”.

Such was the passion of Darwin for natural history that he could not fully understand that he had shattered the simple faith of belief in a Creator; a belief that had been held by thousands and thousands over the centuries. Having grown old and not the best of health, and at the same time possessed by his own pursuits he could not spare time for irresolvable questions. To shatter accusations that he was an atheist, he said that even in the most extreme circumstances he had never been an atheist as to deny the existence of God. In fact what could appropriately describe his state of mind was being as agnostic.

To get a more in depth understanding on what drove Darwin’s views on religion, lets take a look at Christianity as and its influence on his growth and development an a very tender age. Religion, science and Charles Darwin interacted strongly during the early years of the naturalist’s life. Before, Darwin released his works, science and religion, especially Christianity had maintained a form of a harmonious relationship. During the early 19^th century and even before that, many naturalists of repute were clergymen who studied nature as an exposition and appreciation of the designs of the Creator. Students of the day depended on theological works by William Paley (1743-1806) that attributed the natural exquisite designs to the existence of the Grand Designer: God.

These naturalists also explained the perfect adaptation to the environment to the same grand designing. Based on these early exhibitions of intellectual development, it was therefore not a surprise that Dr Robert Waring Darwin(1766-1848) contemplated the clergy as being the most appropriate career for his son even though the young Charles Darwin had found medicine while at the University of Edinburgh to be distinctly uncongenial (Dupree 1986). During Charles years on the Beagle, he shared a cabin with Captain Robert Fitzroy; an intensely Orthodox man. Together they wrote an article defending the British missionaries in New Zealand and Tahiti (Dupree 1986).

Thus, Darwin as a person and Darwinism as a set of scientific theories both originated from the Christian culture. In fact the scientific community of that time profoundly depended on Christianity as a direct economic support and as a rationale for the social usefulness of science. It is also important to remind ourselves that when Charles Darwin went to Cambridge it was for the idea of being ordained as he had deeply studied and admired Paley. On board the Beagle, Darwin quoted the Bible as an authority on morality, a belief that was laughed by many officers on board the Beagle. In fact some German phrenologists once described him as possessing a “bump of reverence developed enough for ten priests” (Banton 13). On the basis of these facts it is impossible to accept the belief that his views expressed in the Origin of the Species had any intention of assaulting religion.

In the next posting I will talk about the American response to Darwinism and 1859-1900, and later developments in the 21^st century, especially with regard to the war between Darwinism and Creationism in American Schools because these perspectives define strands of thought the world over.

COMMENTS AND OPINIONS ARE HIGHLY WELCOMED.

Richard M. Oduor/Richie Maccs, Nairobi

Mr. Oduor is a writer, poet and critic. He did Biomedical Science and Technology (Bsc. Hons) and in line to pursue a Masters in Strategic Management. He is a founding Partner of a young company; Expert Research & Management Consultants and Founding Member at the Center for Intervention Against Alcohol (CIAADA). His prose and poetry have appeared in print and online journals and anthologies and the first poetry collection is due for publication. He has freelanced and copywrited for various local and international private research entities.

References

Banton, M. Darwinism and the Study of Society: a centenary symposium. Routledge Press: New York.

Dixon, T. (2009). America’s Difficulty with Darwin. History Today. February 2009. Volume: 59 Issue: 2, p. 22-28.

Dupree, A. H. (1986). Christianity and the Scientific Community in the Age of the Darwin. In, God and nature: historical essays on the encounter between Christianity and science; David C. Lindberg, Ronald L. Numbers. University of California Press.

Mandelker, I. L (1984). Religion, Society, and Utopia in Nineteenth-century America.  University of Massachusetts Press, 90

Marsden, G. M. (2002). Fundamentalism and American culture. Oxford University Press US, 10-22

Numbers L. (2006). The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, Expanded Edition. Harvard University Press.

Numbers, R. I., & Stenhouse, J. (2001). Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race,  Religion, and Gender. Cambridge University Press.

Pyne, K. (2006). “The American Response to Darwinism”. In, Art and the Higher Life: Painting and Evolutionary Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century America. University of Texas Press.

Schmid, R. (2008). The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy Religion and Morality. BiblioBazaar, LLC.

Strickberger, M. W. (2005).  Evolution. 3rd Edition. Jones & Bartlett Publishers, p.  63-71

Yeats, J. L. (Dec 22, 2005). First-Person: Call Darwinism What It Is-A Religion.   http://www.bpnews.net/bpnews.asp?id=22351

http://www.historytoday.com/MainArticle.aspx?m=33170&amid=30264952.

Raila Odinga: Speech at the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) National Delegates Conference

This is the speech of the current Prime Minister of Kenya after being endorsed by delegates to be the party’s flag bearer in Marth 4^th elections.

 

***

Once again, I am both humbled and overjoyed to be here with you today as the leader of our great political party, ODM. Chungwa!

 

Today,  we  remember  how  buoyed  with  hope  we  were  at  this  time  in  2007,  when  we  as  a party knew we were about to take over the leadership of this country.

 

All the blessings and good intentions of our ODM manifesto lay, as they do today, brimming over in our basket, ready to be delivered to the people.

 

But sadly it was not to be. We were denied our victory, and denied our opportunity to make a real difference to this country.

Now, however, we have another chance.

 

And I want to reassure everyone, here at Kasarani, in Kenya and around the world, that this election will be free, fair and peaceful. In fact, I want to ask that all presidential contenders come  together  in  a  strong  show  of  unity  and  resolve,  to  reassure  Kenyans  that  we  are  all unequivocally committed to a free, fair and peaceful election.

Ladies and gentlemen –

My purpose here today is to tell you a little about my far-reaching plans for the future of this beautiful country of ours.

 

Today, I want us, as a party, to make a social contract with everyone in this country – that we will deliver democracy, the rule of law, prosperity, unity, inclusiveness and equality.

 

In conjunction  with  our  coalition  partners,  we  will  fully  implement  the  Constitution  we fought so long and so hard to bring to fruition.

We will make devolution a reality, so that all of our country has the opportunity to develop equally.

 

Ladies and Gentlemen

In  2007,  I  said  we  must  invest  heavily  in  three  things:  One,  Infrastructure!  Two,

Infrastructure! Three, Infrastructure!

 

We  have  seen  the  result  in  expanded  road-building,  accelerated  growth  through  ICT,  and successful irrigation projects in arid and semi-arid lands.

 

While  we  continue  with  this  work,  I  now  pledge  that  we  shall  again  invest  heavily  in  three things: One, Jobs! Two, Jobs! Three, Jobs!

Every one of the ills we suffer has its roots in POVERTY. At the very root of this poverty is the lack of jobs.

 

Most  of  our  young  people  do  not  have  jobs.  Yet  our  youths  have  been  educated  to  expect something more from life.

 

They expect to be gainfully employed.

They expect to have the opportunity for personal development, to make a decent living and to contribute something valuable to their communities.

Lack of jobs, as we have seen, leads to only one thing: social insecurity.

 

Social  insecurity  is  characterised  by  corruption,  poor  policing,  muggings,  extortions, insecurity,  cattle-rustling,  land  clashes,  poor  health  and  education,  strikes,  deficient  local production and lack of food sufficiency.

 

Ladies and Gentlemen

Don’t get me wrong. I am proud to be a Kenyan. No one could be more proud than I am when I represent our country, as I have been privileged to do on so many occasions.

 

And  every  time  I  am  out  there  representing  Kenya,  I  am  always  trying  to  learn  from  the

experience  of  others,  always  seeking  the  best  ways  of  building  sustainable  economic development, always planning how we can provide an environment where local and foreign investors are eager to work with us.

 

I have spoken many times about the Asian Tigers, those countries once at par with, or behind,

Kenya,  and  now  way  ahead  of  us.  My  plan  is  that  Kenya  becomes  the  African  Simba,  the

Lion of Africa, and sets the standard for the continent.

 

To do this, we must take a very different approach to our national life.

 

We  have  already  taken  huge  strides  towards  making  it  much  easier  to  do  business  in  our

country.

 

We have removed much of the red tape and bureaucracy that has made us so uncompetitive in

the past.

 

Ladies and Gentlemen

As well as these major steps, we shall also concentrate in areas that make a more immediate difference to the life of each individual Kenyan.

Too often, we talk about annual percentage growth, GDP, rising or falling inflation, and other such exalted matters of finance.

Too rarely do we consider how little the ordinary Kenyan can feel of this.

 

We  must  begin  to  think  of  the  individual,  of  the  cost  of  living  TODAY,  of  having  enough food on the table TODAY, of being able to send the children to school THIS TERM, of being able to afford that URGENT hospital bill, of having a road nearby so that we can market the crop ripening in the field AT THIS MOMENT.

 

We cannot  always  wait  for  the  long-term  results  of  big  business,  so  we  must  back  up  these

plans with parallel projects to help people improve their lives NOW.

 

To this end, we have many ideas that are intended to revolutionise our national life.

 

Ladies and Gentlemen

Our  ODM  manifesto  is  a  carefully  thought-out,  comprehensive  programme  to  change  the direction of this nation.

 

In  preparing  for  job  creation,  for  example,  we  shall  reform  the  Kenya  Industrial  Estates  to

establish incubation centres in each county, so that people can acquire locally the skills they need to get jobs.

We shall focus education and training systems to be more responsive to industry’s needs.

We  shall  provide  funds  for  enterprise  development  among  marginalised  communities  and

disadvantaged groups, including those living with disabilities and the differently-abled.

 

In the Kenya we envisage, our youths will be our greatest asset.

We shall invest in business skills development among the youth and women, and then offer

grants – not loans – that will provide the start-up capital to establish viable livelihoods.

 

We shall give the youth the life-skills they need, so that they don’t fall into the trap of drugs

and alcohol and crime.

Women  are  at  the  core  of  Kenyan  life – yet  their  true  value as  builders  of  this  nation  has

never been acknowledged.

We  shall  sustain  the  march  towards  parity  and  equality  across  the  gender  divide  whose

foundation has been laid.

 

Ladies and Gentlemen

All these goals tie in with our Vision 2030, and we can only realise Vision 2030 if we have industrial peace.

Over  the  past  few  months,  we  have  seen  many  of  our  workers  lay  down  the  tools,

complaining  of  low  pay  and  poor  working  conditions – university  staff,  medical  staff,  civil servants, teachers.

 

Just as I have moved determinedly forward in creating an enabling business environment, so I

plan  to  ensure  that  all  working  Kenyans  receive  remuneration  commensurate  with  the contribution they are making to nation-building.

 

We  intend  to  invest  in  rural  and  cottage  industries  and  to  foster  transformation  through  a good-neighbour system, so that community efforts help each and every person to build his or her house, to plough his or her land, to reap in good time whatever has been sowed.

 

I believe that, through ensuring social inclusion, social security, and marketable skills, we are

investing  in  sustainable  economic  development – and  that  means  a  quicker  transition  to  a

fully waged society.

 

Ladies and Gentlemen

 

Our  country  has  been  ripped  apart  by  factionalism  and tribal  hatred.  This  lack  of  social

cohesion  is  high  on  our  list  of  things  to  be  addressed.  And  I  am  well  aware  that  poverty contributes the largest portion to that kind of insecurity.

Poverty contributes to the ineffectiveness of our police force.

We intend to fully revamp our criminal justice system.  We  shall improve police conditions,

providing  police  officers  with  proper  initial  training,  as  well  as  sustained  retraining  and  the opportunity to acquire wider policing skills.

 

We  shall  provide  officers  with  decent  housing,  equipment  and  pay  cheques  that  match  the onerous responsibilities of their work in guarding our nation.

 

Speaking  of  onerous  duties – our  police  officers  have  a  very  onerous  and  important  task coming up soon – that of guarding our elections.

Because of their work, these officers will not be able to vote on March 4^th.

 

In this sense, they are disenfranchised, and I am requesting the IEBC to put in place measures

to  allow  police  officers  to  vote  early,  so  that  they,  too,  have  their  say with  the  rest  of  the nation in electing the leaders of their choice.

 

All these measures we intend to take will give the police force a new culture and a new pride, guiding it towards a new identity as a pro-people agency of assistance and security.

 

Ladies and Gentlemen

Speaking of social cohesion brings me to the fundamental underpinnings of ODM as a social-democratic party that advocates the peaceful, evolutionary transformation of society through social inclusion.

 

Being  a  social-democratic  party  means promoting  a  social-market  economy  where  people have choices, not just at the ballot box but through being stakeholders in their own economic futures.

It means ensuring rights not just to education, but to QUALITY education.

 

It  means  ensuring  rights  to  accessible  healthcare  facilities – QUALITY  healthcare  that  is available to everyone through a universal health insurance scheme.

Our  social  inclusion  programmes  will  help  close  the  gap  between  the  haves  and  the  have-nots.

 

We have begun cash-transfer programmes. We shall extend this, so that anyone who cannot

make  a  living  through  no  fault  of  their  own is  not  forced  into  a  life  of  crime,  or  life  on  the streets.

 

This  transition  to  a  humanly  sustainable  way  of  living  will  loosen  the  grip  that  criminality,

homelessness, hunger, modern diseases, ethnic clashes and other ills have on our society.

 

 

And  when  people  are  treated  equally  and  there  is  equity  in  the  distribution  of  our  national

resources,  we  shall  finally  be  able  to  send  ethnicity  to  the  place  where  it  belongs – the museum of curiosities of human history.  NOW is the time.

Ladies and gentlemen –

Only national unity will make possible the great goals we have set for ourselves.

I  have  set  the  bar  for  co-operation  with  fellow  Kenyans  by  entering,  on  your  behalf,  into coalitions with some of my fellow leaders.

At  the  signing  on  Tuesday  this  week  of  the  largest  coalition  agreement  in  our  history,

Kenyans  saw  what  they  had  so  eagerly  been  waiting  for –  the  composition  of  a  new government that will usher in the change that our people have fought and sacrificed so much for over the decades.

 

Vice-President  Kalonzo  Musyoka,  the  Honourable  Moses  Wetangula  and  I – with  so  many

other  leaders  who  appeared  at  the  formation  of  the  Coalition  for  Reform  and  Democracy

(CORD) – have made a pledge of total commitment to a new future for our beloved country.

 

In the days to come, other leaders, professionals and activists will join us. All of them realise this election is by far the most important in the history of our country.

This will be the biggest step Kenya has ever taken towards real unity.

 

The Grand Coalition was a forced marriage but we have still managed to achieve some things

of  significance – the  new  Constitution,  devolution,  and  the  entrenchment  of  integrity  as  an essential pre-requisite for leadership.

We  must  build  on  these  gains  as  a  united  nation,  all  of  us  willing  to  stand  side-by-side  in mutual support.

In  the  search  for  unity and  dignity  of  our  nation,  I  commit,  as  I  have  said  before,  I  will

petition  the  Security  Council  of  the  UN  to  have  the  cases  facing  our  people  before  the

International Criminal Court, referred back to Kenya.

We  have  a  reforming  Judiciary  that  enjoys  the confidence  of  the  people  and  can  handle  the

cases.

My  message  is  one  of  peace  and  unity,  just  as  our  national  anthem  prescribes.  We  must “dwell in unity, peace and liberty.”

 

Our  hearts  must  be  “strong  and  true”  and  service  must  “be  our  earnest  endeavour.”

 

The third verse of the national anthem contains exactly the message I want to impart to you today:

 

“Let  all  with  one  accord,  In  common  bond  united,  Build  this  our  nation  together.

 

“And the glory of Kenya, The fruit of our labour, Fill every heart with thanksgiving.”

 

Nothing can say it better.

 

I, Raila Amolo Odinga, am more than READY. Are you ready? Mko tayari?

 

[Response: Tuko tayari!] Then, let us get on with the job!

ODM! Chungwa! Maisha bora!

Wiper!  Ford-Kenya!  Narc! All the people of Kenya!

Thank you so much, and go well. We have exciting work ahead.

Is Life Meaningful? What is the Purpose of Life?

“Maybe you can afford to wait. Maybe for you there’s a tomorrow. Maybe for you there’s one thousand tomorrows, or three thousand, or ten, so much time you can bathe in it, roll around it, let it slide like coins through you fingers. So much time you can waste it. But for some of us there’s only today. And the truth is, you never really know.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“You could die at any moment. You might not even live to see the end of this paragraph. Not only that, you will definitely die at some moment in the future. If not being prepared for death entails knowing when and where it will happen, the odds are that you will not be prepared. Not only are you bound to die and leave this world; you are bound to leave it in such a precipitate fashion that the present significance of anything – your relationships, your plans for the future, your hobbies – will appear to have been totally illusory. While all such things, when projected across an indefinite future, seem to be acquisitions of a kind, death proves that they are nothing of the sort. When the stopper on this life is pulled by an unseen hand, there will have been, in the final reckoning, no acquisition of anything at all.

And as if this were not insult enough, most of us suffer the quiet discomposure, if not frank unhappiness, of our neuroses in the meantime. We love our family and friends, are terrified of losing them, and yet not in the least free merely to love them while our short lives coincide. We have after all, our selves to worry about. “ – Sam Harris, The End of Faith, p. 37

***

A few months ago, a friend passed me a link of South African miners who’d been mauled by the hiss of bullets. CNN was all over the place advertising the butchery of the black skin. I had a little more time on my hands, and decided to sample the opinions of the world’s intellectual young minds trying to grapple, trying to laugh off the stupidity of the African people. Any African who’d read the CNN comments on the post would obviously get annoyed. It was the miners, with their ‘barbaric and crude’ weapons who were to blame. As usual the police were only responding to a call of public order. I closed the page, dropped my anger in the dust bin. Here in Kenya, 40-plus policemen were felled by bandits in the now infamous Baragoi massacre. What then is the purpose of life?

Watch and listen to the volley of bullets from a firing squad, pulling victims to their knees, sagging with every blast and losing what we refer to as life to the ground. Accidents cut short ambitions of individuals and families. Diseases crush the hopes and push millions to darkness. We live in a world where the inevitability of death is spread before our eyes in huge bold letters. We lose our loved ones each day. Strangers, friends, and acquaintances all fall to the same pit and all the living can offer is a flood of tears, comfort to the living, and a fitting end off. Every single death reminds us of the briefness of life. Yet why should one spend his life thinking about death?

The world is an interesting place, where the blood of tyrants and their victims soak the sacred earth they both despise.  How we perceive death fully influences how we lead our lives. Death terrifies us of our insignificance in the world. Everything human beings engage in is a pure transparent attempt to keep the fear of death at bay. Even though we don’t think about our own deaths, we know that there is not doubt at all that we’ll die. To prolong our lives we engage in activities aimed at keeping the fear of death at bay. Human advancements are merely an attempt to experience a better, longer, and more fulfilling life.

The fear of death and what happens thereafter is the reason for the existence and practicing of faith-based religions. Organized religions have bound the world’s inhabitants in a dogmatic prison with the promise of eternal heaven for the faithful adherents and hell for the disobedient. For fear of eternal damnation, billions have bowed to these religious truths that are accompanied with a set of rituals to dramatize the messages. To the uncritical mass, these bodies of knowledge offer a single answer: a single truth that is ‘self evident’ and protected from questioning. The strands of religious beliefs and assorted rewards after we pass the gate are countless and cannot possibly be tackled at length in this post.

Religions provide man with a simple and unquestionable explanation on the origin of man and the universe and his relation to the Creator, as well as the purpose of man in this life.

Genesis 1: 28: Be fruitful and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

Ecclesiastes: 12:13: The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.

Quran 51:56: I have created the jinn and humankind only for worship.

Bhagavad Gita: The real goal of life is to know God.

Knowing God and keeping God’s commands as prescribed in the different and sometimes contextually clashing Holy books is presented as the source of meaning and purpose of life. Each religion has a set of dogmas whether literally procedural or anecdotes of spiritual directions that adherents must follow to realize find the meaning and realize their purpose of living. In all the religions, with the exception of Buddhism, there is a reward for those who truly and wholesomely adhere to these religious prescriptions.

Religions are culturally attuned and hence differ in popularity from one region to the other. That they have been a major source of human misery is a fact that does not need much discussion. Religious conflicts dot the world’s history and blood of innocents have been spilled in the name of religion for millenniums. Those who have attempted to closely examine religious beliefs and present these falsities to the world have been branded pagans, heretics, unbelievers, etc and unilaterally conscripted to the worst forms of punishment in the afterlife. For me religions are no more than simple attempts to explain the origin of man and the universe, and by extension find meaning and purpose in life. They are cultural cobbles with roots in myths.

While millions fight to maintain the supremacy of these religious reasons as definitive of the meaning and purpose of life, only a minute number of the world’s population live according to the tenets they daily howl about; but its man’s nature to lie to himself in order to conform to overriding doctrines. Further, these prescriptions are a rough road to walk so millions hopelessly falter hopeful that an act of repentance will absolve them and shot them straight to the heavenly realm.  I write these not to criticize religious people, but to convince them to view themselves as beads stringed together with other human beings, in a journey to … Is life a train to nowhere? Maybe our lives are just a passing fancy in the whirlpool of existence.

For the great majority, the meaning and purpose of life is not something that ever crosses their mind. They just live. A child is born, a few years into life they are registered into kindergartens where they begin their lifelong indoctrination. Education is the key to life – that’s the call! From kindergarten to college one is exposed to a set of pre-determined subjects… and so we accumulate knowledge that is suited for various professions that form the economic superstructure. In short, the purpose of life is to earn a living, to eat-live-and-die. Everything we do in life, in all professions including sports and entertainment is to survive. Survival is the primal and basic purpose of existence. Unfortunately, we all die in the end and pass the baton to the next generation through our progenies.

Human beings have advanced to a stage where we don’t necessarily have to kill our neighbours to obtain nutrition and survive. Our ‘hunting’ is much safer than was a millennium ago. We simply sit in offices and engage in a few economic activities and wait for the reward at the end of the day or month. We have evolved to an extent to an extent where morality and ethics have become key to defining the meaning and purpose of our lives. The desire to be moral and ethical beings is the main reason for the rise of spirituality the world over.

While the seeds of materialism are still being sowed and the excesses of consumerism continue to devour the very ground we walk on, the very air we breathe; millions of the world’s inhabitants are seeking an inner self – seeking an inner path to enable them to discover the essence of their being. Spirituality builds the deepest values and helps us to develop the meanings by which we should live. There are many spiritual practices such as prayer, meditation, and contemplation and both allow each individual to develop their inner life.  Spirituality destroys the false boundaries between religions, ethnicities, races, tribes, and people.

Through spiritual experiences we are able to discover the link between us and all that exists. As Fuller notes;

Spirituality exists wherever we struggle with the issues of how our lives fit into the greater scheme of things. This is true when our questions never give way to specific answers or give rise to specific practices such as prayer or meditation. We encounter spiritual issues every time we wonder where the universe comes from, why we are here, or what happens when we die. We also become spiritual when we become moved by values such as beauty, love, or creativity that seem to reveal a meaning or power beyond our visible world. An idea or practice is “spiritual” when it reveals our personal desire to establish a felt-relationship with the deepest meanings or powers governing life.

One can be spiritual without the heavy burden of religiosity because spirituality emphasizes humanistic ideas on moral character. The meaning and purpose of life can be found in spiritual experiences because spiritual beings attempt to build qualities such as love, compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, contentment, responsibility, harmony, and a concern for others. The pursuit of these virtues undoubtedly create a higher state of awareness as individuals seek to perfect their owns beings, seek wisdom, and be in communion with al that exists. It is also interesting that while religion and science remains in a tug of war, many scientists continue to consider science and spirituality to be complementary, not contradictory as long as supernatural explanations are not used to describe reality; hence the rekindling of scientific interest in holistic conceptions of reality. In this regard, Buddhism presents the most advanced conception as far as a spiritual life is concerned.

Our little lives are occupied by little fibs and trials. Each day wakes up preprogrammed for us. The sun will rise and set, as nature’s laws will. Science has made great strides in helping us understand the world, but the reality is that there are needs that a mere understanding of our world, scientific or otherwise, will never fulfill. There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life. But we will find that it requires no faith in untestable propositions like Jesus was born of a virgin or that the Quran or the Bible is the literal word of God, to find this dimension. Its an old argument but when we do good, we feel good.  Be virtuous.

Know thyself.

Richard Oduor a.k.a Richie Maccs

Nairobi, Kenya

The Secret Black Hole of Religion

“How can you tell me Christianity is the one and true religion, when it is one of the religions with a dark past? Do not think I do not know what I’m talking about. I have done my homework by reading and studying much about what I’m talking about. If you doubt me, you can do your own research to confirm what I know already (well…that’s if you have the patience to read books. I know most people don’t read that is why they perish for lack of knowledge). The Christian religion is the most fragmented and divisive in the world. Christianity, compared to other religions in the world, has the bloodiest history in the history of mankind. It has destroyed so many lives and invaded so many lands in the name of Jesus. The name of the first slave ship that brought Africans from the Motherland to the Americas was called “Jesus.”

You tell me Christianity is the truest religion there is but let’s break things down here. How can you tell me the Christian faith is true when it has so many denominations, and these denominations can’t even agree with each other? This is just crazy. Under the Christian umbrella, you have the Catholic church, the Protestant church, the Anglican church, the Baptist church, the Methodist church, the Lutheran church, the Mormon church, the Eastern Orthodoxy church, the Nestorian church, the Coptic Catholic church, the Apostolic church, the Presbyterian church, the Paulist church, the Episcopalian church, the Anabaptist church, and so on. Gosh…I can go on and on. It’s just crazy. Now, according to the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, there exist roughly 43,000 Christian denominations worldwide in 2012. That is up from 500 in 1800 and 39,000 in 2008 and this number is expected to grow to 55,000 by 2025. Hmmn…this means Christianity will continue only continue to divide more and more.

Currently, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary estimates that a new Christian denomination is formed every 10.5 hours, or 2.3 denominations a day. God is not a God of division and confusion, but of unity and oneness. For a religion, which claims a divine origin, to have so many denominations or “duplicates” of itself does “not” stand on a solid rock. Something is definitely wrong wrong such religion. Just think about it. How can a religion which is true so many denominations like this? Trust me, the truth does not have duplicates to it. The truth is always one and original. Anything that is true cannot have carbon copies of it. The fact that the Christian faith has so many denominations like this means it CANNOT be a true religion. It is a false religion. Even Islam has divisions of its own too. There is Sunni Islam, Shia Islam, Sufi Islam, Ahmadiyya Islam, Ibadi Islam, Qurani Islam, Yazdani Islam, and so on. Islam is not as divided as Christianity, but division, nonetheless, is division. Division is division, and there is nothing good about it. In Heaven, there is no such thing as division. What replaces division in Heaven is unity. It is only on Earth that such nonsense division exists.

Okay, back to Christianity now. Next, how can you tell me the Christian faith is true when its holy book, the Bible, has so many versions to it? I mean, how can a holy book, which is claimed to originate from God, have so many versions? Does that make sense? There are so many Biblical versions and they are all different and conflict with one another. When it comes to different Bibles, there is the King James Bible, Amplified Bible, Good News Bible, Coverdale Bible, Mormon Bible, International Standard Version Bible, Lamsa Bible, and the list goes on and on. Once again, this is just crazy. According to my research, which can be confirmed, there are hundreds of different translations of the Bible. Now, this is super crazy. Hundreds of translations of one holy book? Wow…it doesn’t make sense at all. All the Christian denominations have a particular Bible that they read. Catholics have their own Bible. Protestants have their own Bible. Mormons have their own Bible. It’s just crazy.

Other weird things about Christianity is the number of Christian churches worldwide, which to me, seems like money-making, private enterprises. What I mean is that the Catholic church – which is the first and oldest church – is the global headquarters of all churches, while other church denominations are like “subsidiaries” scattered across the planet to generate greater profit. Think about it. If a business/company wants to compete globally, reach out to the global target audience (customers), and market its product to generate greater profit, what do you think that company, which does not have foreign offices must do? Of course, it needs to open up foreign based offices, factories, and businesses to do that. This is what companies like Apple does in China. Apple and Nike products are made in China, rather than America.

What the church did many centuries ago is what big corporations are doing today. Apple success can be attributed to the church. When it comes to “expanding business interests” and winning souls or winning “customers,” the church is number one. Okay, the church, from the very beginning (just in case you didn’t know) is a business. I’ve done my research on this. Based on my research, I discovered there are more than 3.7 million Christian congregational churches (businesses/branches) in the world. WOW. We are talking about 3.7 million churches in the world. That’s huge. One has to wonder if these churches are “really” in the business of “winning souls for Christ,” or “accumulating more cash.” When you dig deep into the dark history of Christianity, you’ll figure out the answer in a flash. I mean people really need to start thinking outside the box.

The world is changing and most of the lies our religious and political leaders have been feeding us with are coming to light. Thinking outside the box will not kill you. Thinking outside the box is rational, logical, and sensible. If the Creator never wanted you to think, you wouldn’t have a mind to think and calculate things. The fact that the Creator gave you a mind to think with, means you are allowed to think for yourself and not let corrupt authority control your thinking for you. If you must know, “all” religions, not just Christianity alone, have dark histories to them. All religions are divisive. All religions wage wars and shed blood to grow and expand themselves, which is quite logical, considering the fact that no thinking human would embrace anything new outside of his or her conscious circumference. But does it really make sense to impose religion by force, which is what most of the Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – has done for millennia? These three religions have caused so much wars, death, and destruction on Earth beyond measure. The destruction caused by these religions continue up to this day. It has not stopped, and may never stop, until people wake the hell up. Hundreds of millions of lives have been wasted because of these three religions.

If it is true that these religions are from God, would God really want to spread religions by force? Is it necessary? Wouldn’t God want people to accept a religion naturally, rather than forcefully? What happened to free will? How can God give man free will and at the same time act like a dictator by literally “forcing” a religion down our throats? I hope I’m making sense here. You cannot give people a choice and deny them that choice by imposing your “own” choice on them. It does mean any sense at all. God does not operate that way. Why aren’t people thinking? Like I said, there is nothing wrong with thinking outside the box. Religion does not permit free thinking. This is a FACT. But must a person live his or her entire life not thinking outside of the box for once? Most educated people cannot fight or free themselves from the mental chains of religion. It has a strong hold on them. As far as I’m concerned, any doctrine, or philosophy, or religion which prohibits free thinking cannot be from a pious God. It must be from the devil. Belief systems, centered around ignorant and blind obedience without questioning authority, is based on mental slavery.

Yes. That is what religion is all about. It was created by a few elite people to mentally enslave the minds of people. Physical slavery is bad, but mental slavery is much worse. When someone has control of your mind, you become a property, a slave of that person. The only way to free your mind from religion is to learn to think outside of the box. The best religion is not religion itself, but love. Loving one another like yourself is the best way to live. There is no contradiction about it. Love does not contradict itself. Love is what it is. God is not concerned about religion because God never gave religion to man. Instead, man gave religion to man. Evil men created it to control the sheep (the masses). After death, God will not be concerned about what religion someone practiced. A clean mind, clean heart, and clean hands is what God will look at. Religion is irrelevant to God because it is man made. Wake up, humanity. Free your mind. You are created to live free, not in chains. Wake up, people.

By Adebisi Atitebi

Adebisi Atitebi., based in the United States, is a writer, poet, philosopher, and historian. A ardent truth seeker, Adebisi studies and writes about global politics, esotericism, conspiracy theories, history, and religion.

What is the way forward for Africa? Join the Online Discussion

Motherland Africa

We live in a world of continuous changes. Changes create fears and insecurity as well as challenges and possibilities. What continues to differentiate successful countries from others is that in the latter, their leaders failed to anticipate changes and respond to them effectively. There is no doubt that the problems that currently confront Africa are complex and deep-rooted in Africa’s history. However, it can be stated that Africa is poor, underdeveloped, and home to many problems because leaders have failed to respond to changes and challenges and exploit opportunities effectively. Africa continues to suffer from inappropriate policies, bad governance, incompetent, corrupt, and ineffective leaders.

Africa has failed because it lacks the requisite capabilities and the political will to effectively respond to its leadership and governance challenges. Because of poor leadership and governance, Africa is unable to optimally exploit the major developments in science and technology, novel types of production, organizational principles, invention of new goods and services, or adapt innovative forms of social development. There is a need to develop a new way of doing things.

The current problems we face are not new. In fact, these problems are the cumulative consequences of our inability or unwillingness to respond to changes in our midst. Africa is becoming progressively isolated because of being a weak participant in the global marketplace. Africa’s weak position increasingly makes it a victim or casualty of the global changes and challenges. In essence, Africa is a recipient of other people’s ideas and ways of doing things, goods and services.

The persistent negative images of Africa, as a continent in deep trouble, and Africans as people who are unable to solve their own problems is unhealthy and potentially damaging. If Africa cannot challenge these images, then these images will continue to mislead the world and cause many Young Africans to continue doubting their own capabilities and self esteem, and thus undermine their role as levers for change and agents that can provide a better alternative future for Africa. The net result is that Africa must build its requisite capabilities now and respond to its marginalization from world activities. Africa must accelerate its participation in trade and politics, science and technology. Africa must be heard to be seen.

There is no continent that is going to bail out Africa. Africans must, out of necessity solve their own problems. To do this, there is need for a re-thinking of our position followed by imaginative discourses and bold answers. We need competency, honesty, vision, and commitment to fully liberate our minds.

—- Richard Oduor –Nairobi, Kenya.

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