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Let Us Give God A Day Off By Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo

I hope you’ve heard of Sigmund Freud. If you haven’t, your children will soon tell you something about him.

I hope you’ve heard of Sigmund Freud. If you haven’t, your children will soon tell you something about him.

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Even if you know Sigmund Freud, chances are that you do not know how the Austrian neurologist changed the world. The impact of his psychoanalytic works has not reached the psyche of many of us Africans at home and abroad.
 
Most of the time, we stick to our own conscious interpretations of dreams, ignoring the meaning of our hysteria, and contented with our misunderstanding of everyday life. We back off from any attempt to link sexual desire to the primary motivation of human life.
 
For many of us, most of those ideas are too complicated to be bothered with. “We are satisfied with attributing our tumbles in life to foes who stifle our fate,” a wise man said. “Meanwhile, most of our tumbles in life are caused by friends, families, pastors and imams who attribute all tumbles to foes who stifle our fate.”
 
Have you ever given it a thought that that wicked old man in your village, causing havoc everywhere he goes, is not a child of the devil? In him, the devil is not working overtime. He is actually a child of God, just like you. He may just be acting out a repressed childhood experience.
 
This column is not about Freud. It is not about any of his theories that are the backbone of what is now known as Western culture.
 
This is about you.
 
When you go to church and the pastor says, “Lift up your heart.” You respond by saying, “We lift up our heart to our Lord.” It does not follow that you should leave your heart up there in the air. But that seems to be what many of us do.
 
When you go to the mosque and the imam talks about total submission to the will of Allah, it does not follow that you should cease to think for yourself. It does not mean that your job here on earth includes fighting for Allah and his prophet.
 
“The world we have made,” Albert Einstein said, “as a result of the thinking we have done thus far, creates problems we cannot solve at the same level of thinking at which we created them.”
 
Humanity needs a jolt to come out of the box we have locked ourselves in for generations. The rot has become so severe that a mere paradigm shift is not enough to rescue billions of us who walk around like robots.
 
We need to be deprogrammed. We need to be defragmented. There is no independent interpretation of life anymore. Even an understanding of who we are and what we are doing here has been adulterated by mantras and ideologies repeated for hundreds of years.
 
Mankind needs a pause.
 
In my piece, “Is God your Child”, I pondered:
 
“I believe something is really twisted in the mind of anyone who thinks that he has to fight to protect his God.
 
“For God’s sake, when did God stop being God? If a God cannot protect himself, he should retire.
 
“The world is full of retired Gods. Zeus, Oduduwa, Apollo, Amadioha, Juno, Fa, Mukuru, Wele etc once had lots of followers. They have since retired. Those who did not want to retire were quietly retired. Some were retired by force. So it is not an unheard phenomenon that Gods who can not defend themselves should retire.
 
“I reserve the right to give the Gods a middle finger. And I think you should, too. After all, the Gods have been giving us the middle finger since Creation. If not, how do you explain the craziness of this world?
 
“I will not worship a God that will need me to defend him whenever someone abuses him. If I need a simpleton, I will worship the earthworm.
 
“Why are we so screwed up? It is such a shame what we have allowed religion to turn us into.
 
“All you defenders of the Gods who are willing to murder other human beings, I say, shame on you! Is God your child? Is God your wife? Why must you keep a gun to defend your God?
 
“I bet you that the Gods are ashamed of anyone who is out there killing other humans in Gods’ name. If the Gods want to kill all nonbelievers, they do not need your guns or your machetes. The Gods can use Ebola, fire, earthquake, water, and cancer. The Gods have so many weapons they can use.
 
“Remember the plagues- smallpox, Spanish flu, typhus, Black Death etc. All together, they killed hundreds of millions of people.  Did the Gods need you to wipe off millions of people?”
 
You can be sure that many of the Gods we worship today will be retired 5,000 years from now. Of course, our limited imagination does not think beyond our lifetime.
 
We need to change our narratives. Our rituals are taking us nowhere fast. Our prayers are bringing us closer to the abyss. Something is screwed up with our reality.
 
I think one of the easiest ways to change the human perspective is to suspend religion.
 
Let us give God a break. Let us ask God to take a day off.
 
Billions of Chinese and Indians are not worshiping your God and your Allah and they have not been swallowed by the sea.
 
While God is on vacation, we will open our eyes and look around. No doubt, we are going to notice some things that have always been around us which we have always overlooked.
 
Let the places of worship stay closed for a year while we open up our hearts. Let the holy books be put away while we listen to our fellow humans. Let us use the holy day to reflect on our common humanity.
 
Let us utilize all the resources we commit to religion for advancing the condition of mankind.  Let us spend time thinking about the little people we do not notice because we spend a lot of our time focusing on the Almighty.
 
Let us disconnect heaven and reconnect with our next door neighbor.
 
Let us cease counting the days before the rapture and instead count the stars. Let us stop dreaming of bliss up in the sky and instead pick the roses beside our gardens.
 
While God is surfing the galaxies, let us pan our minds across the earth from East to West and from North to South.
 
With God looking away, let us see behaviors that are real and those that are false.
 
Let us find out what life is by redirecting our minds away from the perpetual strife to make death ultimately good. If death is ultimately a good thing, what is life?
 
With God taking time off, maybe, just maybe, we will remember the things we can do for ourselves- like fight for what we want and stop hoping that God will order it to fall from heaven. Maybe then, we will remember why we have a brain, a heart and a mind. Maybe. Just maybe.
 
When the Italian scientist, Galileo Galilei, stated that the sun was at the center of the universe and not the earth, the Catholic Church could not give God a day off. In February of 1615, the church tried Galileo by Inquisition as a suspect of heresy. The church forced Galileo to recant and kept him under house arrest for the rest of his life. Almost 400 years after, Pope John Paul II expressed regret over how the church handled the Galileo affair.
 
As Sigmund Freud said, it is the renunciation of instinct that builds civilization.
 
Folks, civilization is not built on an emotional embrace of irrationality, in whatever disguise.

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