Pastor Dan, a brother, friend, acquaintance, teacher and student visited this morning and madam told him I was in the other room, my place of reasoning. The place of deep thinking. It was there I was trying to put my thoughts together on a quit notice given to Bishop Mathew Kukah by Muslim Forum to leave Sokoto state or tender an apology.
Pastor Dan wanted a ruborst engagement with yours truly on religious matters, but I said to him, please do not let me segue into what I cannot finish today. Allow me to write on an important matter of national urgency.
As you may have judged from my article of January 1st, entitled; Break Yourself From The Shackles Of Religion. One of the factors that inspired that article manifested between the Muslim Forum and Bishop Mathew Kukah, the Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Sokoto. Wherein, the Bishop was asked to leave Sokoto because of his Christmas message on national issues.
As a matter of fact, the imbroglio provoked lots of debate on social media. While some believe that Kuka deserve the quit notice, others held that, what would the Muslim Forum say to the Sultan of Sokoto and Sheikh Gumi for saying the same thing as Kuka? Is it that, there is a different law for people that belong to a certain religion and ethnicity from others? Some people asked.
You must agree with me that religion played a dominant role in all of this. live means to learn, and life is an ongoing lesson. When, however, you have grown up conditioned to believe what is right and wrong according to a religious dogma, and you’ve been taught that to doubt the religion you were born into means to go to hell, naturally you become afraid of seeking knowledge. You stop searching to find truth, and hence to educate yourself and grow as a human being.
Knowledge and wisdom are incompatible with dogmatic religious ideologies. Indeed, religion is confining people’s minds in the darkness of ignorance, and those who are in search of the light of truth are being condemned by religion.
This way, religion keeps people blinded by all sorts of beliefs that are not based on any factual or experiential evidence, which does wonders to stunt their intelligence.
Oftentimes, I shake my head in dismay when I hear Christians saying they will not eat sallah meat given to them by their Muslim brothers and Muslim saying they will not eat Christmas meat given to them by their Christian brothers. And I ask, how did humanity get to this crossroad?
In search for answer, I discovered that, religion keeps man in a state of perpetual condemnation and lack of assurance of acceptance with God perpetually. You never know when you have measured up because you are relying on your good works and behaviour for salvation.
When such continue, you will see a society collectively masturbates to the pornographies of inglorious leadership. Such society is the product you get when a butcher pretends to be a surgeon.
It’s important to note that, creation of a nation is not the task of religion, politicians, militricians and other vaudeville performers. A nation is created by a sense of common destiny and a shared values. And if there is a common constitution, then we have gotten ourselves a boon.
A nation is created by poets, writers, singers, the psalmist, public philosophers, the linguist, the chefs, hymn writers and philologist. In fact, a nation is written into being like a song composition into the very corpus of the people.
Comrade Godwin Anyebe is a Journalist and a Human Rights Activist
