People need to understand one thing. No matter how much you pray or how loudly you play the religious music, you will only get what you deserve. While football unites us, religion and God divides us.
O religion and the name of God
Few days ago, when I stayed up all night being sick, all I wanted to do the next day to sleep. The idea was to sleep until 10 am. It was just 6 am then and I thought I had more than enough time in hand. My eyes were exhausted as I hadn't slept a wink the previous night and I was having a terrible headache along with severe body pain. It was gloomy outside and it was the perfect weather to cuddle up inside a blanket and go to sleep. I had just closed my eyes when I woke up to a loud sound. Turns out it was my neighbour and his family casting and binding an unknown enemy. Why he had to be so loud I do not know.
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I sat up in bed holding a pillow to my head, struggling to fall asleep while the noise stopped after a good thirty minutes. Finally relieved, I slithered under the sheet again to get some much deserved shut eye. Then began then noise parade. First, it was that of a bell of a white garment church on my street that was ringing during their morning ritual. It was then followed by a loud religious song. Religious songs praising God bombarded my ear drums as I struggled with a blazing head and lack of sleep. This went on for a good two hours and by then I was up from bed, had finished my morning tea and had decided to work. Yes, I could have gone back to sleep once the noise subsided, but I did not trust it enough for it to not return.
The things we humans do in the name of God and religion is so troublesome to everyone around. While I'm more of an agnostic than an atheist, I do not have anything against people who are religious and hold on to their beliefs. It is the unnecessary drama in the name of God that bothers me. I know that people like to pray to God in their own way. I do it in the form of a thank you every day but others seem to want their prayers to be literally heard by the God up above.
People need to understand one thing. No matter how much you pray or how loudly you play the religious music, you will only get what you deserve. While football unites us, religion and God divides us.
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We humans make religion a matter of status and pride. The louder the prayer and music, the stronger the faith; this seems to be the mantra. If there are specific houses of worship, why can't prayers to God be limited to that? All this noise disrupts daily life as you cannot sleep, work, read or study in peace. If God is watching, he is having a hearty laugh.
While hard work and self-belief have taken a back seat, religion continues to be the center of being for many people. Since it is a matter of every individual's faith, I do not question it. Have faith, it is a very good thing. But you do not have to show it off on a grand scale. I have nothing against God. Or against worship. But must you disturb everyone and everything around you while doing so
Of Nigerians and politics
There's nothing more obvious about Nigeria than that our political discourse is concerned primarily with how we feel about certain kinds of people. And the problem with this is that a policy in which you're primarily concerned with attitudes about people is a policy in which you're unconcerned with reasonable reasons and timeless principles.
Whoever has the best publicists and the means of stirring our emotions has the best chance of running our government; and if we complain that the special interests of men are responsible for corrupting our legislature, we're oftentimes quick to ignore that the special interests of ethnicity and religions are capable of corrupting our political executives. The Nigerian who does poorly doesn't have his behaviours called into question, but his ethnicity or his creed; and if we believe not that his creed is right, but rather that it's been unpopular, then we pass judgment not on the unpopular man, but on his judges for rightly making him unpopular.
And so a slew of all kinds of minorities are the center of our attention; as if there was nothing in the world but oppression, and nobody worth listening to but the underdog. The philosophy of the day concerns neither whether anyone has built anything good, nor whether they've said anything profound, nor whether they personally deserve what they've got, but whether they've experienced the distaste of society, and the insecurities of poverty. There is no rule of right but a transfer of power, and no God of goodness but an outlay of empathy; and as empathy requires discrimination, there is no empathy except to chosen people and chosen ethnicity. Nobody is in the right -- unless we feel he ought to be in the right. Nobody has a superior claim -- unless we feel he ought to have it.
We're a thoroughly corrupt people by the strictest definition of corruption, and the reason for our corruption is our unbridled passion for acceptance. If we tried to play a game by these rules someone would throw the pieces in the air and say we were cheating. When we try to run a government by these rules we pat one another on the back and say that we're holy.
Now this is the problem
Our "men of reason" are not our men of manly feeling and passion, and our men of manly feeling and passion are not our "men of reason."
We believe that having access to information is the same thing as having wisdom.
We frequently refuse to confirm our theories in historical precedents, and we laugh at holding timeless problems up to the written scrutiny of the ancients.
We confuse nice ideas with good ideas. We confound newer things with better things.
We judge men not by what they can do, but rather by what they permit.
We believe too easily in our teachers and professors; we refuse to really listen to the arguments of our enemies; and we think that scientists and statisticians can tell us more about ourselves than ourselves.
We live in an age of faith -- even if our faith is in the faithlessness of atheism.
We worship at the altar of our fallible and sexless wonks.
We live in social superstructures theorized in books that few of us have read and even fewer understand.
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