I have observed with strong feelings of embarrassment, the degree to
which people can be so enslaved by religion that they would go to great
lengths to defend their religious views.
People have been known to mutilate their bodies and engage in other
forms of unseemly behaviour in the name of religion. Some members of a
religious sect even go as far as committing such heinous crimes as
arson, murder and rape all in the name of religion! How debased can the
human mind be to commit such dastardly acts in the name of God! Such is
the power of religion to condition people’s minds. As I pondered events
surrounding Pope Benedict’s resignation and misleading rumors of his
subsequent conversion to Islam, I was awestruck at the magnitude of
influence wielded by religious personages and religion itself.
A classic illustration of what religion can do to people’s minds is a
story which recently made the rounds in Nigeria about a baby who was
born clutching a copy of the al-Qur’an from the womb! I first got wind
of this news on an online forum for university students where I expected
the story to be greeted with some skepticism, but to my dismay, the
supposed intellectuals fell for it hook line and sinker. With such
comments as “Allah is mighty!” my friends went all the way against every
principle of nature to prove that the “supernatural incident” was,
among other things, an evidence of the greatness of Allah and a warning
of impending judgement to the infidels.
I had earlier read a similar story about a commuter bus being caught
in an inferno with everything destroyed and all the passengers roasted
to death while a copy of the Holy Bible remained untouched by the fire.
It's amazing how quickly we employ such misguided stories as groundless
evidence to support our faith. Religion is indeed the opium of the
people! Now, I'm not disputing the fact that such incidents could have
happened by chance or careful manipulation, but it defies all sense of
justice and truth to attribute them to an act of God. Perhaps it would
have been a more plausible story if the Bible had saved the vehicle from
burning and the lives of the passengers from being wasted. Truth be
told; the Bible and the Quran in and of themselves are just like any
other book. You may not really get the raison d'être of any book simply
by reading the letters. To grasp the message, you must understand the
spirit of the author.
It is high time we stopped fooling ourselves and subjecting
ourselves to needless mental torture by means of propagandist ideas and
religious hype. With the heightened awareness of the supernatural world
that has characterized the past decade globally, one will have to be
either sincerely ignorant or deliberately dishonest to deny the
existence of God. But God and religion are not the same! Religion does
not make us relevant before God. True religion is a vital relationship
with God which causes His life to be reflected in us and through us as
we personify His attributes, the core of which is love. We need not
discard logic to substantiate our religion or faith. Faith and logic can
actually agree. Our life of faith must be a response to God’s power at
work in us, not to some fancy mental or emotional footwork by anyone,
regardless of who they are.
Philip Amiola is a teacher, writer and a campaigner of empowerment. He writes from Lagos, Nigeria.
by Philip Amiola
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