DEAR NIGERIAN TWITTER ATHEISTS
Dear Nigerian Twitter Atheists,
I sympathise with you all. Perhaps you’d say I’m just patronising you, but that’s your choice, I’m telling the truth nonetheless. Religion in Nigeria, if I were to say it in a way many of us understand, “needs deliverance”. It tends to be anti-intellectual, sectarian, and fundamentalist. I’d say this is partly caused by our sad state of governance and general ignorance, but that doesn’t change the reality anyway. However, if you think responding with slogans amounting to nothing other than “religion is detrimental”, “religion is evil”, “the west developed when it abandoned religion, so should we”, “science is more ‘rational’ than religion”, and so forth, you are simply the other side of the same anti-intellectualist, sectarian, and fundamentalist coin.
As any good scholar of religion knows, “religion” is a complex beast. The closest I’ve found to a working definition of religion comes from the root word of religion itself, “religare” – To bind. You could say a religion is a “worldview”, with its stories (myths, in the original sense, origin stories telling truths about the communities’ origins and goals rather than pitiless accounts of academic history), rituals, and language, which binds a community together. I can find no other definition not similar to this one that captures the sheer scope of what we’re dealing with when we say “religion”. As you can see, in this definition, we are all “religious” in some sense. From the Secular Atheist who idolizes the enlightenment (and contrary to most of their statements, their telling of the enlightenment is as much myth as the book of Revelation), to the Zen master who worships no gods, to the “polytheists” and “monotheists” (Although, that distinction is very flawed in my opinion), to the devout capitalist and communist (The Cold war can be thought of as a war of religions, I’d call them “Mammon” religions). For those already thinking “I’m not religious, I worship no gods”, there are religions without gods, not all Buddhists worship gods, or God (If you can’t tell the difference, you haven’t even entered the debate with the “monotheists”, as for “gods”, my friend I assure you that the statement “gods don’t exist” is up for debate, especially since “god” has many definitions). So I suggest you read wider than whatever Papa Adeboye published or said yesterday, actually look up academic journals on religious studies, theology, philosophy, and so on, and start reading, if you want to move beyond fighting theists about basic things, like how wide religion is beyond an inoculation against “going to hell”. Nuance is key here, when you want to know the best understandings of a topic, you do not go for a lay man’s explanation only.
This leads me to a specific example where many of you follow the same line as the “fundamentalist” religious adherents, particularly in relation to Christianity, though it affects the way you deal with other religions as well. I’m referring to the way you handle sacred texts. It is very hard when one actually gets into scholarship about them, their history, and use, if you’re brought up in the environment where a particular “literalist” view of the text is enforced. When some of you do leave, you have this instinctive reaction to sacred texts, usually disdain and thinly concealed hate. Even though you reject the text, or rather, the text as you understand it, you accept that such “literalist” accounts are the essence of the religion, or strain of religion, you left. When confronted with the history of interpretation, its “non-linear” approach in many cases (I’m speaking of Christianity here specifically, but this also applies to the hermeneutics of many other religious traditions), it is rejected as being unfaithful to the text by the same people who reject it. This, contrary to what you may say, is simply dishonest. Like I said before, there is a whole field of hermeneutics dedicated to this. For the “anti-christians” specifically, this “Biblicism” of yours isn’t a good look, just because you left that tradition doesn’t make you an “expert” on that tradition. There are atheists who understand this, it is not a problem restricted to religions or those who claim to reject them. What would it take to see the big picture?
Finally, this touches on the way we engage with political debates. I am by no means a Political Scientist, Physics is my course of study, however I do know that Secular government =/= atheist government. The separation of church (or any religious institution) and state is based on a Christian concept from none other than the esteemed North African theologian St. Augustine. The point of this is not to push religions out of the public sphere (which is impossible and has failed woefully), but to put the religious (and the proclaimed non-religious) in public co-operation towards the common good of the society (Classical theism calls this “abstract” good the essence of God, but then again, you claim not to believe in transcendent good anyway). If I said that atheism was a spiritual disease, you’d call me crazy, what do you think happens when some of you call the religious “sick”, or imply so? If you want to have a shouting match about how what other people believe is a sickness (and it is sometimes called for), you better be convincing and truthful, because we all have ample ammunition for any declared debate “war”.
That is all. I doubt I convinced any of you that read this. There may be replies, but I doubt I’d change my mind on the basic thrust of this: Stop being ignorant critics of “religion”.
Sincerely,
A stumbling seeker of truth.