someone wrote--
note-this is someone's perspective and not neccesary mine,receive sense as you read
The insertion of the “virus” of Christianity and Islam into our independent populations was simply to soften up the populations and make them more pliable for colonial interests. Both religions incidentally place an inordinate amount of emphasis on subjection, humility and meekness. This was in stark contrast to our native spirituality, which encouraged introspection, meditation, expression, personal growth and independence. In whose interest was it for our native beliefs and spirituality to be exterminated and replaced with ideologies of enforced submission from the Middle

East? How did most of us end up with the religions we adhere to? What religion does the average woman from Enugu adhere to, and what religion does the average man from Katsina adhere to? Why is that? The unpalatable truth that most Nigerians do not want to hear about their religion is that the religions we adhere to are first and foremost a reflection of our upbringing, which is why the lady from Enugu will likely be Catholic while the bloke from Katsina will almost certainly be Sunni Muslim. There is really nothing special or mystical about one of the most basic processes of human socialization. The way and extent to which we take our beliefs seriously more often than not, is a reflection of our personal experiences and ideology. To put it in plain English, you have the religion you have because your parents gave it to you, and you practice it the way you do because you are mirroring your own personality in it. It’s really that simple. ‘God’ has very little to do with the pastor asking you to hand 10% of your monthly earnings to him or the Imam telling you who to vote for in an election. They are both human beings like you with an agenda – every human being has an agenda, even you. The idea that “God loves everyone equally, but those from my religion just a bit more equally”, is the source of a lot of what we perceive as “corruption” in everyday Nigerian life. There are few safer hiding places for scoundrels than the church or mosque. There are people who have built their entire careers on religious favouritism and demagoguery, having done not a single day’s honest work in their lives. They have risen to the very top of Nigerian politics several times and they are still there. Their constituents do not question them, because to question them apparently would be to question God himself, and how dare anyone do that. So we have people who studied Christian Theology or Islamic Studies being smuggled into key positions ahead of distinctly more qualified people by dint of belonging to a religious group with a power base in that organisation. Some very mischievous people then take it a notch further and mix religious fanaticism with the ready tinderbox of our fake ethnic identities, so that certain regions and ethnicities with millions of people become aligned to certain religions. Thus, we start to have a “Muslim North”, “Christian Southeast”, “Christian Niger Delta” and a conflicted Southwest (which incidentally has a clandestine culture war going on as perceived liberal Christian values and conservative Islamic values vie for supremacy). And we all know how that ends. One huge brawl basically. These religions are not ours. They were imposed and forced on our ancestors often at gunpoint. The people who imposed them on us do not practice them the way we do. Certainly the average Algerian Muslim would look at his counterpart from Katsina and wonder why he cannot read and write. He would be shocked to find out that the society in Katsina finds it more important to give children Koranic education than the secular education that gives them a fighting chance at having a meaningful life. A British Christian would be mortified to learn that certain types of physical and sexual abuse, which are not sanctioned or implied anywhere in the Bible are now commonplace in Nigerian churches, which seem to have evolved their own peculiar brand of the Christian faith. To anyone with a holistic understanding of history, it is not that shocking because the circumstances under which the religion was introduced to the population determine how they practice it. If the religion was flogged into you and reinforced with trauma, you will practise it with a demented zeal and violence, and you will flog it into your children as well. They will in turn flog it into their children and...here we are ­ a nation of overzealous, traumatised fanatics! So while Islam to a Kuwaiti Arab is merely a religious projection of his own indigenous culture, to a colonized Hausa man, it is a perfect and unattainable target, which he must spend his life trying to prove himself worthy of, and his kids dare not practise it with less zeal than him lest he flog them with the rage the Arabs flogged his ancestors with. Certain types of knowledge are passed down genetically after all. To European Christians, Christianity is little more than their cultural heritage, but to a colonized Yoruba man, it is something that was literally flogged into his ancestors, and he must practice it accordingly. Our experiences of the way the same religions are practiced in Africa and outside are vastly different!

When I was a student in England, I attended church services a few times and they were intimate, quiet, somewhat pleasant sessions where we had long chats about internal spirituality and global events. Prayer was viewed as something personal and private between yourself and God. In Nigeria, the few church services I have attended have been raucous, high profile, power­dressing, supercharged affairs where an inordinate amount of emphasis is placed on giving money and SCREEMING OWT TOO DEE LAWD ALMIGHTEE! So a Nigerian Christian will claim to practice the same religion as an old lady from Pontefract, but this is not the case in practice at all! The implication of rejecting ancestral knowledge to chase foreign chimeras is that there will always be a spiritual emptiness in the soul of the “believer” that they will try to fill with primitive accumulation. Nothing they have will ever be enough and they won’t know why. Nature abhors a vacuum. When you cannot have enough of anything and you are constantly looking for more, what will it lead to inevitably? The other implication is that in the absence of a genuine, non­hypocritical peace which colonial religions cannot give, the only way to live with oneself and justify what one deep down does not believe in, is to become a fanatic and a bigot. Nigeria is utterly flooded with bigots for this singular reason. You don’t need me to tell you why this is dangerous. To put it very bluntly, our insistence on clinging to the definition of the colonial religions that were flogged into us is one of the three biggest causes and helpers of corruption in Nigeria. So you want to “fight corruption”? Start from putting down that Bible and Quaran and taking up a social or economic cause instead.
note-this is someone perspective and not neccesary mine,receive sense as you read
cc;:hahn,plaetton,Loj,seun

Thats your own veiw...

hordhunharyor:
Thats your own veiw...

oya read wetin i post abeg