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My Religion Is Better Than Yours By Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo

There is no consensus on how we got to this 4.5 billion-year-old piece of real estate called the earth. The best estimate says that modern man showed up some 200,000 years ago. The only consensus is that the first series of questions that crossed the mind of the first group of men and women who saw themselves on earth were: who am I? Where am I? How did I get here? Who made me? Where am I going from here? These questions are the original questions.

There is no consensus on how we got to this 4.5 billion-year-old piece of real estate called the earth. The best estimate says that modern man showed up some 200,000 years ago. The only consensus is that the first series of questions that crossed the mind of the first group of men and women who saw themselves on earth were: who am I? Where am I? How did I get here? Who made me? Where am I going from here? These questions are the original questions.

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The search for answers to these original questions started from the very point they were first asked. They have continued until this day. Every now and then, century after century, we come up with new answers different from the ones before. These answers are tweaked and tweaked, promoted and advertized, until they become a force of nature called religion.

To understand how helpless we are in the face of this force, imagine a baby brought home from the hospital by its parents. When the baby opens its eyes, it sees the parents. The parents feed and care for the baby. In no time the baby looks up to the parents, especially the mother. The baby holds the parents in awe for all they do for it including, putting a roof over its head. To babies parents are gods. The words of the parents are the religion of childhood.

With time the baby begins to see the world outside of its parents’ house. It begins to see other houses and other parents and begins to question its original thoughts about its parents. Even when the child finds out that its parents are not all that it made them to be, out of habit and out of fear that there are no replacement parents out there that will accept it as a natural born, the child sticks to its parents. That is why most children of unfit parents, jailed parents and absentia parents find it hard to denounce their parents.

All cultures throughout history have come up with their answers to those original questions. It doesn’t matter how primitive a culture is. They come up with a story and over time the story develops. Expanding on the story, each culture tries to provide a guide on how to live this life in accordance with their story. The guide takes care of questions around life and death amongst other things. That is when the story becomes a religion.

And each religion sticks with its story, even when events raise questions about the credibility of the story or outright prove the story wrong. Most practitioners of every religion would rather follow it until they died. They rather find out the truth when they die than abandon the religion of their birth. And die they do, the believers and their religion alike.

The history of the world over centuries is littered with dead religions, dead gods and dead worshipers. In some ways, we are all children of a retired god. Key events in the world always retire religions and their gods. Traumatic world events always prove the old religions inadequate. The coming of the Europeans, for instance, essentially laid to eternal rest a lot of the African gods. Other events and movements like the Enlightenment reform religion. Reformation extends the life of a religion. An irreformable religion is one that is bound to implode.

The tragedy of Africa is that it reached the information age without first passing through the industrial age. In matters temporal, Africa got to the modern age without passing through the Enlightenment. That is why some people believe that a child was born holding a mini-Koran in its hand, or that a child came out of the womb holding a cross in its hand. Why mini-Koran? Why a cross? Why something we already know? Why does this kind of phenomenon only happen in societies that wallow in superstition? If it is a message from God, as some believe, why won’t God use the opportunity to send a definitive manual of life?

The Enlightenment instituted the culture of demanding empirical proof before believing. If a woman comes into the church and gives birth to a dead horse, you don’t clean up the floor and bury the horse. You send the horse to the lab and the woman to the hospital- mental and/or medical.  

Every religion that comes begets a new one. Two hundred years from now the people that will occupy this world will look at our era and our religions that we fight for and die for and call our age the Extreme Dark Ages. In another two hundred thousand years, nobody will remember what god we fought for, killed for, or died for. Just like we have no idea what god the people who were on this earth 100,000 years ago fought for, killed for or died for.

It is hard to imagine it now, but after the Third World War and after a nuclear war, a new world will emerge with new religions. The old religions left standing will go through reformation. And subtly and gradually, new religions will replace the old. Because it takes hundreds of years for this kind of transformation to be visible, it is hard for those living in that age to notice the change as it happens. We won’t wake up one day and notice that our religion is dead.

It is hard to live without the concept of God because it is hard to live without an answer to the original questions, even if it is not definitive. That is why many will stick with their religion as if it is their parents. Virtually all religions place God beyond reach- at times above the sky. Do you know why? If God is within reach, God will suffer the fate of all parents – be critiqued and be seen to have fallen short.

The trouble with religion is that for every religion to survive and gain members and fend off competitions, it has to proclaim itself to be better than the others. That my religion is better than yours is like saying that my moon is better than yours. That my God is better than yours is to say that my sun is better than yours.

To be willing to fight for your God- which is to say, kill and die for your God, is like to climb on top of each other to pull the moon until it stands still on your side of the sky. It may sound stupid but it has been done before and continues to be done.

Those who worshipped the Greek gods used to believe that they had the final answer. Those who worshipped Oduduwa used to think that their story of the creation was the ultimate. The highest level of human stupidity is the belief that our religion is the final answer to these original questions- who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going? Who made me? The arrogance of that assumption has no equal in human folly.

Religions come and go but the earth remains the same. Until we know the definitive truth about the very beginning; and until we answer the original questions without a doubt, religion will remain attractive. But religion will continue to promise us that we find the answers only when we die. Science is the only one trying to find answers to these questions while we are still alive. And science is the only one trying to get to the very beginning and empirically show it to us for the very first time. It may take science one million years to get there. But I am rooting for science not religion.

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