HEAVEN CAN WAIT

I believe in heaven. And I bet you do.
Heaven is located somewhere across the bridge of life. It is a place devoid of the iniquities of this life. In heaven, tranquility abounds. It is a treasure trove where God keeps the best of everything.
All our pursuits in life can be divided into two: the pursuit of heaven and the pursuit of happiness.  
Heaven is the only place where happiness is guaranteed. But for some reason, we are determined to pursue happiness here on earth when it has been proven that such is an impossible goal.
We dream of heaven when we face the travails of life on earth. We remember heaven when we lose someone we love. We embrace heaven when we face our own mortality.
Though the vision of heaven varies depending on our religious and cultural upbringing, the central ideas are the same. Heaven is a good place for good people who have a good report card from their stay on earth. We are expected to make sacrifices here on earth in order to get to heaven.
I recently lost a distant cousin. He died a heart-breaking death at a young age. He was such a nice guy that tributes came from far and wide. Everyone agreed he had gone to the bosom of the Lord to rest. One grief-sicken mourner wrote on Facebook, “Stay thee with the Lord, Tony, until we meet again – though not so soon.” 
Yeah, even an assurance of a place in the bosom of the Lord will not make us leave, so soon, this world that we know.
I’m not a pastor. I do not play one in Nollywood. But I can use one simple example in the Christian religion to illustrate what I mean when I say that for us all, heaven can wait.
The Bible is ambiguous about who goes to heaven. It says that it is not those who cry my Lord, my Lord that will make it to heaven; but those who do what God wants. What does God want? Apart from the obedience to the commandments, what does God want?
Well, His son, Jesus Christ, in the only prayer He taught says, He wants us to forgive others. “Forgive us our trespasses,” he says, “as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
I consider that a very dangerous prayer. By saying it, you are agreeing to be forgiven of your trespasses only when you forgive those who trespass against you.
So if you do not forgive those who trespass against you, there is no forgiveness for you.
You would think that with that, Christians would have forgiving hearts. But churches are full of men and women who carry decade old grudges yet, are hoping for forgiveness.
As if to buttress that point, the Christ stated that if you were at the door of the church with your thanksgiving offering and remember that you have not forgiven your brother or sister, you should drop your offering by the door. Christ asked that you should go and forgive your fellow human before you come to offer your thanks. If not your offerings will be a waste.
Pretty serious stuff, if you ask me.
We know all this. But we just cannot help it. Deep inside us, heaven can wait.
The call to be human is one heck of a call. We answer the call without a clear understanding of where we came from and where we are headed.
What am I saying? We are going to heaven.
To be exact, we hope to go to heaven. After all, heaven is not just God’s abode. It is a place where comfort is assured after the troubles of this life.
Because of that, a great many ideals of this life are designed to get us to heaven. Laws about goodness and evil are designed to take us to the place where good people go as a reward.  
We do not know when we shall be called to heaven. Whenever it happens, there is no way of knowing for sure that we shall be worthy of heaven. Only by His grace, the holy book says.
I, therefore, presume that the first question you will be asked in heaven is, did you ever live as if heaven can wait?
The only reason we do not commit every day of our lives to the pursuit of heaven is because of the other competing goal – the pursuit of happiness.
“We are all prompted by the same motives,” Samuel Johnson, the English writer noted. “All deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire and seduced by pleasure.”
After looking at man and his environment, Thomas Jefferson, concluded that man has these inalienable rights- the right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Together, the pursuit of these rights has overshadowed the pursuit of heaven.
Our attitude seems to be; let us enjoy ourselves now. Let us take care of this business of life first. Let us secure our life, liberty and happiness.
We pretend that heaven can wait, even when we know that it cannot.
Merry Christmas.

By Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo OF Sahara Reporters

SUPERSTITIONS AND THE SORRY STATE OF TERTIARY EDUCATION IN NIGERIA

Only last month, Western scientists successfully landed a robot on a comet. This feat was accomplished after 25 years of careful planning. The robot traveled 6.4 billion kilometers and took 10 years to reach the comet, which itself was moving at a speed of 56,000 km/hr (or 18km/s).

This is coming at a time when Nigerians are exporting religion and superstitions to the rest of the world; when our so called "men of God" assert that the cures for diseases are to be found in prayer houses rather than laboratories; when our universities have become the birthing places of pastors and imams; when we have become accustomed to pastors making extraordinary claims such as driving cars on empty tanks and resurrecting the dead; when the medieval belief in witchcraft and the practice of witch-hunting are ever so pervasive; when jihadists are engaged in a campaign of terror to spread sharia. I can go on and on.

A university is a place of enquiry and enlightenment but every year, impressionable young minds arrive on our university campuses hoping to be nurtured in the art and science of enquiry, the tool by which all progressive societies have advanced themselves; but instead, a great percentage of their university time is taken up by religious activities such as prayer meetings, night vigils, evangelism and so on, the result of which is that our universities have effectively become places for nurturing religious beliefs, superstitions and other fantastical ideas.
 Every year, our universities graduate people who teach and/or think that prayers can cure diseases, move the economy forward, fix our bad roads, choose good leaders etc. Rather than spend money on laboratories and research, our governments, persuaded by the belief in the efficacy of prayers, choose to build mosques and churches, and sponsor pilgrimages to Mecca and Jerusalem. The cure for malaria is in the laboratory, not mosques or churches. Some of our best minds abandon their original degrees and become peddlers of false hope, enriching themselves in the process.

If they lived up to their purpose, by now, one would expect our universities would have churned out generations of youth who are skeptics and critical thinkers. Sadly, that is not the case. Instead, we have science graduates who believe that cars can run on empty tanks (recall Pastor Adeboye and his famed journey from Ore to Lagos on an empty tank); that prayers routinely cure patients of diseases such as cancer, stroke, diabetes, Ebola, HIV/AIDS; that prayers can even resurrect the dead; that university examinations can be passed by anointing books, pencils, pens and other study materials with holy water, olive oil or handkerchiefs. These pastors (and imams) have corrupted our way of thinking.
 Does anyone still doubt, then, that superstitions and religion are the reins that hold back the progress of Nigeria, and the rest of Africa? No society with such deeply entrenched beliefs can expect to find cures for HIV, Malaria, Ebola, or to land robots on comets. It is this type of societies that habitually rely on foreign aid. Such societies do not innovate - at best, they borrow or pay for technology.
 I think that universities should be somewhere that people go, to not only acquire job skills but to also acquire the facility for critical and analytical thinking, and skepticism. By the time people have graduated from university, they should have shed off a considerable burden of ignorance and superstitions.

If we were to ever land robots on comets, then we must start with a change of mindset and attitudes. Superstitions will never get us anywhere productive. The current methods of instruction in our universities are no longer fit for purpose. Frankly, I have more faith in the social media as an instrument of change than in them. And make no mistakes, it will take a while until this damage is reversed because even university lecturers hold these preposterous beliefs and have no qualms in openly declaring them.
 Elections are right round the corner but I have heard very little said on education. The recurrent strikes are an issue, but they are only superficial. The rot is much deeper. It is in our minds and attitudes! 

By Dr. Ijabla Raymond