joseph1013:
Godswill Vesta Ubong

IN DEFENSE OF THE RIGHT TO DISRESPECT GOD: A response to a response.

Pardon the length of this response. So, yesterday, Victor Ibegbulem made a post about a fictitious communication with God, in it, literally telling him, in coarse language, to go have carnal knowledge of himself. And, while I skipped the post yesterday, seeing it for what it was: a trouble-seeking post, meant to rile the emotions of the deeply religious, my good friend, Akaninyene Bernard Ubom, wrote a response to the post, basically calling for Victor, and by extension all atheists, to respect the beliefs of religious people. The following was my response:
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Hi Akaninyene,

While I agree with you that people should be treated with respect, and civility should be espoused in our interactions with each other, I find it disingenuous and a tad bit hypocritical for Christians to talk about disrespect while still reading the Bible—a book known to disrespect everything that isn't an israelite and isn't a male. I believe it was Romans 1:28-32 that said. "And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what should not be done. They are filled with every kind of unrighteousness, wickedness, covetousness, malice. They are rife with envy, murder, strife, deceit, hostility. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, contrivers of all sorts of evil, disobedient to parents, senseless, covenant-breakers, heartless, ruthless. Although they fully know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things DESERVE TO DIE, they not only do them but also approve of those who practice them."

This is an actual line from the Bible. And people would get dressed on Sunday and go sit and listen to someone preach about verses like this (amongst numerous others). I don't even want to start with the Koran. Yet, somehow, you do not see the need to throw the Bible away in deference for the espousement of the same respect you accuse the atheist as not having. I really don't care about the new age apologetics and refinement applied to the character of God. If the aphorism "God is the the same yesterday, today and forever" is to be believed, why should a God who's ordered the killings of heretics and unbelievers, who's sanctioned the enslavement of foreigners, who "hardens the heart of the unbeliever", who doesn't think women are worth as much as men be shown any form of respect? Perhaps you should ponder on this question.

You might look to God and see a being who's the author and finisher of your faith, but to most atheists, God is an idea, a character not more real than Santa or a pink unicorn, and one does reserve the right to say "Bleep you" for all his xenophobic, misogynistic, homophobic, slave-ownership compelling, child-killing inducing and bigotry-calcifying vituperations and rhetoric.

If a Christian truly values respect, They would start by dropping the Bible they hold so dear.

Warm regards.
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Granted, the response was hurriedly written, I have, since then, had time to reflect on the idea of respect with regards to religious beliefs.

Let's be honest with ourselves. When religious people talk about respecting the doctrines and beliefs of religion, they really usually mean their own. Like Charles pointed out, everytime you slaughter a cow or eat beef you disrespect the religious beliefs of the Hindus. Every bug, rodent or annoying reptile, you kill is an affront to the doctrines of the Jains. Everytime you drink coffee, you disrespect the religious beliefs of Mormons. Even the very idea of evangelism and conversion is a disrespect to those whose religions forbid them from leaving. In some religions, apostasy is punishable by death. You know this. Yet you have no qualms taking your good news of salvation to them.

There's a difference between respecting one's beliefs and respecting one's rights to hold a belief. Let's stop conflating the two, please. While the latter should be actively campaigned for, the former should be tossed in the bog of obsolescence. It's okay to believe the rings of Saturn are frozen gossamer, being spun, continuously by a giant spider sitting in space just beyond its moons. I won't have you arrested for it. I won't have your house burnt for it. I won't take you to court for it. That's what what respecting your rights to believe looks like. I, however, don't have to believe it. Or stop myself from laughing everytime you mention it, or thinking you need psychological evaluation. I don't have to stop myself from making cartoons about your beliefs, or ridiculing it. Do you get the difference? While we must all respect the rights of our neighbors to hold whatever beliefs they hold, the beliefs themselves, and this cannot be overstated, have no rights. They should not be sheltered from scrutiny.

Every religion comes with its baggage of absurdities. Christianity's absurdities are now less action-oriented—remaining only in the realms of verbosity/lexicon, thanks to ceaseless reformation from within and endless ridicule, criticism and debates from without. Every battle won on human rights have been at the expense of one religion or the other. Christians are able to brag about their religion today thanks to the criticisms and ridicule it has had to endure.

In closing, we must learn to differentiate between disrespecting one's beliefs and disrespecting one's rights to believe and make conscientious efforts to eschew the latter.

This can't be reiterated enough.

joseph1013:
The Muslim Whose Presence Defiled Christ.
Prof. Pius Adesanmi
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Modees Usman, one of my protégés, was supposed to come and see me at the Ake Arts and Book Festival last month in Abeokuta. The gentleman is a patriotic Customs officer and, in my estimation, one of the brightest hopes for the sort of pan-Nigeria I envision ceaselessly in my public reflections. A devout Muslim, his sensibilities and advocacy for Nigeria reach across all our fault lines and bitter divisions. He is a picture perfect portrait of my ideal Nigerian. Suffice it to say, he did not make it to Abeokuta for our meeting. However, he sent a carton of non-alcoholic wine to me through another wonderful pan-Nigerian patriot, Remy Binte Oge.
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My protégé couldn’t make it to Abeokuta because he had to travel to Calabar to attend the wedding of his childhood friend. He was in fact the designated best man at the occasion. I sent word to him that his attempt to bribe me with a carton of wine would not work: he would still have to pay a fine for failing to somehow find a way to visit me during my last trip to Nigeria.
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I had no idea that a little drama was playing out in Calabar…
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Modees, obviously, is a Muslim. His best friend who was getting married is a Christian. A Muslim was going to be best man in a Christian marriage! The Christian groom and his Muslim best friend thought nothing of this until wedding day and the officiating Pastor somehow caught wind of the faith of the best man and refused to proceed with the ceremony. It was bad enough for Modees, a Muslim, to have come to defile the body of Christ in his church! To approach the pulpit as the best man in the wedding was adding insult to injury! All entreaties to the Pastor failed. No Muslims allowed here!
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The story of this foolish fundamentalist Christian Pastor in Calabar is the story of Nigeria. It is indeed the story of Africa. It is the story of the failure of critical intelligence. It could very easily have happened the other way round. It could have been Modees getting married and his Christian friend being bundled out of the ceremony for defiling a Mosque. The trouble with Nigeria, the tragedy of Africa, is that in a world of mutual connectivity and global influences and interactions, we have not figured out a way of making whatever we accept from the outside, whatever is forced on us from the outside, sit on the solid foundation of our own worldviews and humanity.
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We forget that Christianity and Islam did not invade Africa purely as faith. They couldn’t have for they are much more than faith. They are also cultures for they took on the cultures of either their places of origin or their sources of global dissemination. Europeans and Arabs injected a great deal of their cultures and values, of who they are, into the versions of the creeds that they introduced to Africa. Because he lacks critical intelligence in his embrace of these two religions, the African thinks that the African in him must die as a pre-condition for his being a true Muslim or a true Christian.
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This is the source of a strain of pathological fundamentalism that is strange even to the 'owners' of those religions in Europe and the Arab world. This explains why the modern Nigerian Christian – the sort who jots his Pastor’s sermon on an iPad – condemns the New Yam Festival in his village as a pagan practice while enthusiastically invading the Ikeja Mall to buy Halloween costumes for his children. That is why people demonstrate peacefully in Saudi Arabia whenever Europe draws cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed but Nigerians kill fellow Nigerians on account of ideological conflicts between Europe and the Middle East.
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That is why Modees was thrown out of a Christian wedding in Calabar.
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Modees was thrown out because Muslim and Christian faithful in Nigeria have killed the spirit of accommodation, humanism, and tolerance which informed the religions of their forefathers. They do not know that African Traditional Religions, like every other faith, also come complete with values that should inform their approach to the foreign religions they now practice.
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Nobody is saying that you should discard your Christianity or Islam and go back to worship Ogun or Amadioha. But, at least, reduce your ignorance of what they thought of the other; reduce your ignorance of how the faith of your forefathers handled difference. Let me invite one of Africa’s foremost thinkers, Professor Ali Mazrui, to instruct you. Let me quote in detail from Professor Mazrui’s book, Resurgent Islam and the Politics of Identity:
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“Of the three cultural legacies of Africa (Indigenous, Islamic and Christian) perhaps the most religiously tolerant is the indigenous tradition. It is even arguable that Africa did not have religious wars before Islam and Christianity arrived. Precisely because these two latter faiths were universalist in aspiration (seeking to convert the whole of humankind), they were inherently competitive. In Africa, Christianity and Islam have often been in competition for the soul of the continent…Indigenous African religions on the other hand are basically communal rather than universalist…By not being universalist in that sense, the African traditions have not been in competition with each other for the souls of other people. The Yoruba do not seek to convert the Ibo (sic) to Yoruba religion or vice versa. By not being proselytizing religions, African creeds have not fought with each other. Over the centuries, Africans have waged many kinds of wars with each other but hardly ever religious ones before the universalist creeds arrived.”
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There you have it. The Ogun worshipper did not seek to convert or kill the Sango worshipper. The devotee of Obatala did not try to break the ikenga of the devotee of Amadioha. Tolerance was the foundation of the faith of your forefathers. How does adopting this foundational spirit of tolerance and injecting it into the Islam and Christianity you practice in Nigeria today make you any less a Muslim or a Christian? How exactly does the presence of Modees as best man in the wedding of his Christian friend diminish your Christianity?
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In Zaria, you are even dividing and killing each other within the same faith along Shiite and Sunni lines imported from the Arab world – with the Army pouring petrol into the fire and committing possible crimes against humanity by mowing down civilians in a residence after clashes initial clashes on a road, all sides trading accusations.
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Yet, the Pastor who threw out a Muslim from his Church will not hesitate to break the law by organizing a Christian event to block major roads in Calabar and make life difficult for his fellow Christians locked in a hellish traffic jam. Every Friday, Sambo Dasuki, Nigeria’s greatest thief at the moment, still does very public photo-ops from the prayer mats of the Mosque he attends.
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Fundamentalist professions of Islam and Christianity have not stopped you from making Nigeria a cesspool of hate, theft, and corruption.
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Tolerance was the foundation of the religion of your forefathers. You are welcome to continue to spit on these ancient religions and condemn them as pagan or idolatry. That is your wahala. But, know this: any Christianity or Islam which requires you to forego the tolerance inherent in the religions of your ancestors is leading you straight to hell for you will steal, hate, and kill in the name of such a Christianity or Islam.

Damn, I wish this kind of sense was more prevalent.

LordReed:


Damn, I wish this kind of sense was more prevalent.

The author of the seminal article died last year in a plane crash. The death of the brilliant young prof. was tragic, to say the least.

Life is a mystery -- death would leave old and wicked people such as Buhari alone and would snatch great intellectuals from us such as Pius Adesanmi, the likes of which are few and far between in Nigeria.

gensteejay:

The author of the seminal article died last year in a plane crash. The death of the brilliant young prof. was tragic, to say the least.

Life is a mystery -- death would leave old and wicked people such as Buhari alone and would snatch great intellectuals from us such as Pius Adesanmi, the likes of which are few and far between in Nigeria.

What a tragedy. It is almost as though we collectively lost a few brain cells, making us collectively less rational. My mind weeps.

All the Abrahamic religions peddle a false representation of history.

CAPSLOCKED:
The great flood... a topic of great debate and controvercy all over the world.
One of the biggest issues that I have with it are as follows:
The Bible says the God regretted he had made mankind:
Gen 6:5 The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. 6 The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. 7 So the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them. (NIV)
Why would God lament over a state of affairs that he himself chose to bring about? That implies that either:
a) He is not all knowing (man’s sin / wickedness caught him by surprize - he didn’t know beforehand they were going to make evil choices).
b) Man’s wickedness was part of his plan all along, and the fact that he “regretted” he created them shows that he is a schizophrene (he planned their wickedness but then regrets it afterwards - clear signs of a mental disorder).


—— Leaving The Faith (facebook).

I am really curious how they will explain it. Let me make a guess. God gave us free will but he didn't anticipate we would get it totally wrong.

Religious claims go against everything we know in physics, biology and chemistry. So far these tools/methods have been a better explanation of the phenomenons in our natural world.
We now stand on the shoulders of giants and can see further than our elders with better, more accurate tools.

GoodBadandUgly:

We now stand on the shoulders of giants and can see further than our elders with better, more accurate tools.

MANY YOUTHS IN MY COUNTRY DISAGREE WITH YOU. THEY SAY "WHAT AN OLD MAN/WOMAN WILL SEE WHILE SITTING, A YOUNG MAN WILL NEVER SEE IT, NOT EVEN WHEN HE CLIMBS THE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN TOPS".

THEY BELIEVE THAT THEIR ILLITERATE ELDERS WHO HAVE NEVER LEFT THE CAVES IN THEIR VILLAGES WILL FOREVER KNOW ABOUT EVERYTHING ENTIRELY, MORE THAN THE EDUCATED, EXPERIENCED, ADVANCED YOUNG MAN THAT HAS TOURED AROUND THE WORLD.

SAYING THAT THE ELDERS, OR AN OLDER PERSON IS WISER THAN A YOUTH NO MATTER WHAT.......... IS A VERY SILLY ASSUMPTION WITH NO EVIDENCE THAT THE AGE OF A PERSON GUARANTEES WISDOM EVEN WITH THEIR TOTAL LACK OF EXPERIENCE OR KNOWLEDGE.
THIS IS TO SAY THAT NO MATTER WHAT WE DO AS YOUNG PEOPLE, NO MATTER WHAT WE STUDY, AND LEARN ABOUT OUR WORLD, WE WOULD ALWAYS BE BACKWARDS IN KNOWLEDGE BEHIND THESE OLD CLOWNS THAT KNOW NOTHING BUT PALM WINE, KOLANUTS, AND SEVEN WIVES.

THAT STATEMENT ALONE IS THE GRAVEST OF INSULT ANY YOUNG PERSON CAN GIVE HIS/HERSELF. ONCE YOU SAY SUCH A THING I IMMEDIATELY DRAW THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN US BECAUSE THAT'S A VERY CLEAR SIGN THAT YOU'RE MENTALLY RETĄRDED.

GoodBadandUgly:
Religious claims go against everything we know in physics, biology and chemistry. So far these tools/methods have been a better explanation of the phenomenons in our natural world.
We now stand on the shoulders of giants and can see further than our elders with better, more accurate tools.

Teach!

GoodBadandUgly:

We now stand on the shoulders of giants and can see further than our elders with better, more accurate tools.

Eventhough, i get your point here, we are in absolute awe of our elders for the experience they continously put to bare.

Our elders would often put emphasis onto their awesome guidance when they would say:-

The correct combination in the genius of the Young and the Elderly is that which allows for the world to be a better place.

That is to say, age is never a factor to the authenticity of an idea.

Age is never a factor to the authenticity of a practical solution.

However, except for rare instances of absolute brilliance, i.e Tutankhamun, the 8 year old boy that became Pharaoh of KM.T and reigned for about nine years, for most, age is a huge factor with regards to putting such ideas or practical solution into practise.

These are the reasons that history is highly important.

joseph1013:
DUMB ARGUMENT #4
I don't know how life began THEREFORE The god my mum believes in must exist.

"Nothing" never existed and 'Nothing ' will never exist.
So your mum's God is either imaginary or just another monster that shouldn't be associated with positivity

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czMIH4Im6Z4&t=48s