I have almost lost faith in religion. And not in its
manifest deficiency and incapacities in
solving the problems of the world but because it constitutes itself into a very
disturbing distraction from the real issues of human existence – the height of
human reverence for the supernatural on this planet is definitely beyond the
rites and passage of bowed heads and clasped hands at pre-determined time intervals.
Again, the arrogance of human wisdom as it relates to religion is fatally
addressed by new knowledge revealed on a daily basis from different corners of
the known world. Mankind is at best at pre-kindergarten stage in understanding
the world but we are too proud to admit that weakness. We have built empires
and world powers on empty wisdom, on minute ounces of knowledge and on pockets
of guesses latched into a chain of universal trial and error. Governments have
engaged in bizarre behaviours, often justified and hailed by their rather unverified
knowledge of the truth about our existence on earth. By all means, individuals
are the seeming perpetual tools of this ignorant trade, individuals remain
pawns in a most misunderstood maze of manoeuvres we term life, and at the end it
is all just confusion. Let’s get into the issues.
Religion is essentially centered on belief in the
supernatural, that, which extends beyond the physical to the metaphysical and
to which mankind has no complete understanding. We are however, in our best
efforts, again in a visceral and vicious cycle of bottomless reasoning in this endeavor.
Often times, influenced by family or environment, we develop religious beliefs
and convictions based on no external sources for truth beyond internal
feelings, highly subjective to each individual in the human enterprise. There
are therefore, countless potential Ibrahims in Christianity and another round
of countless potential Johns living across the Gulf Countries of Arabia but who
were born in ‘strange’ land. We would never be adherents to certain faiths had
we not been earlier exposed to them and many times this is often a function of
geography. The man that is born in Yobe State, Nigeria will more likely than
the woman born in Switzerland be a Muslim than any other religion. The choice
of Yobe as place of birth is however beyond that man. He did not choose to be
born in Yobe. He is a product of some conjugal activity by two individuals, who
themselves had no inkling as to how they were born where they were and so the
chain goes on and on – albeit unexplained. If all of mankind can therefore not
explain their biological origins which in turn, and most likely determines
their religious leanings, why is religion such a big issue in the world today?
Religion and religious wars have killed more people in the world than hunger.
At the heart of all wars is a fundamental driving principle usually hinged on
personal faiths which are unexplained, not fully understood but which are
strong driving factors for social re-generation (or degeneration) for groups in
the world. Religion has affected emotions, provoked hate, caused injury, ethnic
disdain and heart breaks and will continue to do so until we again re-appraise
our expectations for religion, its role in social development (if any) and its environment
specific management. While not totally ruling out the many advantages that we
have enjoyed on account of the evolution of religion in the world today,
contemporary events call for a re-assessment of what we have come to accept as
religion.
Wealth creation is a sister absurdity in my
opinion. It is a myth, nothing more. I borrow from the laws of
thermodynamics– the 2nd Law states that energy can neither be created
nor destroyed – likewise money cannot be
created or destroyed , its ownership
only changes hands. We only pinch money from one point to another in a
continuum. We collect and retain and in retaining pass ownership to others who
also pass ownership of the same money out. In the real operational sense of the
phrase ‘rich people’, you talk only about people who have passed ownership of
money at some earlier point. No rich man really ever has his money. His money
travels round the world and the difference between him and another man is how
much of his money he can call back for discretionary use, his money left him the
moment that it got to a bank or some other interest. It literally, is mixed up
with other people’s money and is forever lost. When he wants his money, it is
not the same money that he thinks he owns that he gets, money, usually a
fraction is called from another source and passed to him, and again he passes
the ownership of that money to somebody else just as he did. When we make
money, it is either for the bankers to use or for others to spend. It is NEVER
our own.
Having that basic
understanding of exactly what money ownership or ‘riches’ is, should therefore
prompt the question: where does all the money end up? And my immediate answer
is nowhere. It is never really owned. It is homeless for lack of a better
description and is in an unending flux. Nobody owns money. At best we just have
a money management system which individuals subscribe to and which serves some
purpose which may or may not be determined by the individual. This realization has
totally re-addressed my appraisals of financial prosperity at an individual
level and I live, having re-adjusted my expectations to the hard fact that I
can never really own money. Better put, I cannot ‘have’ money in this lifetime.
Today, we place the pursuit of money
almost above any other. It is prime and comes disguised in cloaks of career,
entrepreneurship, leadership, government, etc We have all signed up for a race
we will never win in the long run and contentment has been murdered by the
greed foisted on us by society. We have been made addicted to ‘success’ often
denominated by money and are unfortunately irredeemably lost on this count. We
must understand that money is a masquerade, a façade, a trick of life that we
must never fall for as shown, graphically in the stunning image of Earth from
Saturn below:
About a week ago, NASA released images from the Cassini, an unmanned spacecraft that took
pictures of earth from distant Saturn which is about 1 billion miles away. Those
images, if true, question the very crux upon which humans live and
relate with themselves on earth. Earth is almost insignificant in the entire
picture. We are, in actual fact just a dot in space. All the Towers of London
and New York, The Taj Mahal, Hotels of Vegas and Malls of Dubai, The White
House, Russia, China, Togo and Oshogbo are all but a speck. Obama, Putin, Obasanjo,
Jonathan, PDP, the Republican Party, Communist Manifesto become invisible in
the face of inter planetary revelation. They are not known, they are not seen
and they cannot be heard. They might never be. The Pope with all his catholic
power and might, Saudi Arabia with all the holiness of Meccah are contained in
what is cosmic dust, a speck of dust in a constellation of heavenly bodies
where earth plays as a minor. We pursue inter-faith domination and in the
process discard sense and reason; endorsing practices that make us kill
ourselves. We set earth, our earth on a suicide mission by our actions whereas
all of these acts are not even known or recorded beyond this physical earth.
Why do we do all the things we do in the name of religion when it ends up
nowhere? The space camera of the Casinni records nothing extraordinary about us
and we just might have been overlooked.
We do not even qualify as
pencil in the hands of a creative God who made the beautiful universe. In our
smallness, we build castles in the air and live recklessly. If we lived on
Saturn or a bigger planet, Heaven only, knows the kinds of wars we would have
waged on account of religion. We would have fought battles that would have spun
the cosmos beyond control but God in his infinite wisdom chose to put us, PDP
and Boko Haram alike in that tiny part of the universe, and despite that, we
have still not let him rest.
When you talk to the next
person and think you have all it takes to be bowed to, remember the image from
the Cassini of Earth from Saturn and see how the entire earth is quietly
humble, sitting almost unnoticed in a world where the big worlds are the big
worlds and earth remains just a dot in the picture. It is safe to have faith, but religion loses its relevance ultimately. So the ultimate question is
this, if earth is but a dot, what are you in the picture? The answer? I have no
interest in it.
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