Spaces without balance

The shift has occurred

I came across an article, a commentary on how organisations, establishments, and corporations are lacking in accommodation and inclusiveness. Sadly, given the direction of our public conversation, we are expected to promote and reinforce a particular perspective or risk ostracism.

Having experienced times of political correctness, which evolved into woke culture, and now the topical issues of identity and how diversity can imply exclusion, one might wonder what has changed in our discourse that no-platforming and cancelling have become more common, along with the need to punish those who dare to think differently and voice those thoughts.

The balance has tipped towards an unrelenting intolerance of broader perspectives and dialogue. For instance, my idea of safe spaces used to be forums with a range of viewpoints available for all participants to consider, regardless of their beliefs. However, what currently exists is a safe space not to feel uncomfortable or challenged; rather, it is a space to reinforce biases instead of questioning preconceived notions.

Can we think for ourselves?

The brave space to dissent and debate respectfully without being disagreeable has been lost to a different kind of safe space. It is safe for the timid or entitled, but unsafe for the brave.

Grievance, offence, upset, and outrage often dominate, at the expense of open-mindedness and tolerance of opposing viewpoints. As a result, we fail to step into another's shoes because we believe we are already wearing the most uncomfortable shoes imaginable.

How we arrived at this unidimensional situation involves curating inputs, confirming biases, a lack of curiosity, and perhaps a lazy mind as well. Meanwhile, certain purveyors of extreme perspectives stand to benefit from homogenising and intensifying positions that leave no room for compromise or consensus. We are unwittingly pawns on their vast chessboard of power, profit, and politics.

We must ask ourselves whether we are still thinking for ourselves or have become subsumed into the malign thought processes of others. In voicing these thoughts, we become megaphones for ideas we would have once rejected.

We are not the same

This debate is ongoing in Australia, where those involved have initially faced punishment but then found themselves reprieved through legal actions and protests. It is a debate we should be having across the Western world, as exemplified in this excerpt from the article.

“All right-minded organisations try to make their workforce more diverse. But are we going to accept people from different ethnic and political backgrounds only to the extent that they behave like middle-class white people? That is, those who dominate our culture largely as a result of their luck, and who have not got a family legacy of colonisation, war, trauma and holocaust?

Sometimes, encounters in brave spaces might lead to us changing our minds, or question our own assumptions.” [The Guardian: Opinion: The ABC and Creative Australia panicked in the face of controversy. These vital institutions must not be so timid. - Margaret Simons]

The Terrestrial Church of Cacophony

Out of sight, but an earful

I first learnt of the Celestial Church of Christ, an African initiated church in the 1970s when I spend short school breaks at my cousin’s in Sagamu.

The church was situated at the end of the road with a stream running by the church into a dense forest, they could have been unnoticeably ensconced there without disturbance.

Yet, it was impossible to ignore them, at almost half a mile away, their daily rumpus or dare I say worship was loud, agitated and quite a public nuisance.

Embrace silence

It came to a head one morning when the head of the house sent a cease and desist notice to the church to maintain a sense of considerate neighbourliness in their activities by lowering the volume of their orgies. God, we must appreciate is not hard of hearing.

Now, that was courageous, daring and bold, for anyone to challenge a religious establishment in that manner. It worked, they were quite amenable to the idea, probably under duress and with the knowledge that the aggrieved was a lawyer.

Mind the fine

Later, towards the end of the 1980s, I was a ward of some senior members of the Celestial Church of Christ, they were quite obliging to allow me attend the church of my choice rather than force me to align to their tenets, for that, I am exceedingly grateful.

However, the reason why we have this recollection of events past is because this morning I read in the newspaper that the pastor of a Celestial Church of Christ branch in Grays, Essex had been fined a total of £1,241.50 including costs for conducting unbearably loud services four times a week well into the early hours of the morning; 4:00AM that is. [Metro]

The neighbours had endured this public nuisance for months and one really wonders why any religious activity needs to be broadcast beyond the confines of the walls of the meeting place except for the need to use the sound to keep the members alert throughout the interminably long services.

Just unacceptable

More pertinently, what this suggests is a lack of understanding that what is tolerable and allowed in the hyper-religious Nigerian society borne of Lord Lugard’s suggestion that we have a vague dread of the supernatural, is hardly acceptable in many Western societies.

People are not as religiously imbued and those who have any sort of religious affiliation tend to go about their devotion with consideration and moderation, too high a bar of expectation required of an almost fanatical claque.

If this sanction does not serve as a deterrent, the council has suggested that the church might have to lose its sound equipment. Knowing that I have lived in a part of Essex where there was at least 6 non-establishment churches within 500 yards of our apartment, I was fully persuaded to veto an application to site another church nearby just because the existing ones had already exercised our tolerance to the point of intolerable.

For all the celestial aims of the church, there are terrestrial norms expected of any gathering for any purpose they might be persuaded to pursue. This one like many that have yet to be called to order around the UK has become a congregation of the Terrestrial Church of Cacophony.

Nigeria: A new horde of atheist super-zeroes

A new horde

It is amusing when you exercise a prerogative on Twitter and a certain lot believe that they have the inalienable right to override that prerogative having arrogated to themselves the entitlement to be engaged at all costs.

With time, it has become obvious that the opening line already shows the slippery slope to conflict, their feigned quest for understanding is never what it seems, they are perched ready to debunk, deride, excoriate and ridicule – they are the new atheist horde from Nigeria.

They believe that they are the bastions of logic, driven by scientific reasoning they have become completely unreasonable towards the reasons why others might believe quite differently from their apostate godless existence, they are right and you are wrong.

Seeking prey

If you have the smarts to refuse to engage them, they feign hurt, they demand a hearing, they flail and ache with shrill whimpers of an abused dog that you have had the temerity to deny them, but they must be denied.

For, they are the carrion seeking godless hyenas desperately seeking who to feast on, their forlorn existence given purpose by negating the beliefs of others. They are ready to deem you arrogant, condescending and disrespectful, but if you mount the rostrum they construct all in the ploy to wrong-foot you, they claim a form of superiority that appears to validate their existence.

Ostracised from their communities, they adopt multiple identities shape-shifting on the Twitter landscape hoping to find the luck of the draw, they are frustrated to distraction if you refuse to take their bait, if their persistence is rebuffed it is taken as rude.

Brusque, brash and brutish

They have no finery in language, no broad interest in the good things of life like fine wine or banter for all discussion must lead in one direction only, the purpose for which they exist, a life without God fulfilled by hacking down the gods of others.

Black holes that gravitate to endless disputing, argumentative to disagreeableness, they drive you to exhaustion, but as you review everyone else you engage of the thousands you communicate with on Twitter, these are radically different, odious and repugnant, they must be withstood at all costs and the best way to achieve that is to treat them like strangers – ignore them; if you must humour them, tease them but never fancy them.

They seek to unsettle your equilibrium and make you a drifting cloud bereft of water for rain, obscuring the sunlight needed for warmth, life and growth, you follow at your peril into the abyss of bottomless rancour.

The Taliban in new garb

My opening gambit was, “So take your ball back home, no one wants to play in the rain.” I should have brought a trailer of tissues for the sniffles that followed for I had not appealed to their sensibilities because their extroverted inferiority complex worn in every intonation to show some superior knowledge is too burdensome for them to engage without conflict.

If for once they can divorce themselves from the extremism that is quite similar to the Taliban but without the religion, you might take them for nice chaps, but even the social graces they might have once possessed has been lost with their kind of indoctrination, they must ram their guano down your throat and woe betide you if you attempt to gasp for oxygen.

Like those who have received their religion prone to error with obtuse interpretation and practice, so have these too, we seem to be predisposed to practice what was not intended of those who schooled us in the new knowledge and beliefs we have received – it is unfortunate – even where reason should prevail, we find ways to suspend intellect for the purpose of obstinacy at where we immovably stand.

I could be persuaded

Surely, there are reasonable atheists out there, ones who having railed about the divisiveness religion brings who do not go on to create another dimension of divisiveness their consciousness exudes in – I seek common ground in most things – where I see conflict looming, it is unnecessary to be unduly confrontational for kicks.

I am tolerant of others who are ready to be tolerant of me, the human race is too diverse in culture, beliefs, views and persuasion for anybody to think where they have arrived is the final destination of human knowledge be you adherent, agnostic or atheist – if we seek co-existence where we meet and when you go away fellowship with those of your persuasion, there is harmony and where we agree to disagree, it will never become disagreeable.

I might be persuaded differently of the opinions I have expressed here, but to date, these views have been reinforced, if this is a pattern, extremism finds a home in the character of anyone regardless of what they do or do not believe and that is a very dangerous thing.

[Comments are closed to this blog.]

Homosexuality in Nigeria - Condemning bigots who seek death

Suffering a different sexuality

It is no more a surprise that people whose sexuality does not align with the majority can get persecuted in some societies; however, African societies tend to prosecute them.

Add religious intolerance and tyrannical moralising to the mix and you have the result of people being condemned to death for being different.

Now, there are certain punishments which might serve as deterrents to others when it comes to crimes, but how would capital punishment serve as a deterrent to a situation that is inherently accepted as genetic?

Homosexuality a norm

Medical science no more considers homosexuality a mental disease, an aberration or treatable condition, it is a norm for the people who exhibit those tendencies and the same people have been, are and will continue to be worthy and contributing members of our societies whether we accept them or not.

Nigeria comes to the fore on this matter again as 18 men were remanded in custody for transvestism and homosexual practices (for those who seek great revulsion – sodomy) in a state that practices Sharia Law – Bauchi State.

When I was in Paris in June, I observed the Gay Pride march where a group against capital punishment highlighted a number of nations that imposed the death penalty on homosexuals (See Slideshow) - Sign their petition if your are concerned.

Stoning a taboo

Nigeria prominently featured in that list and it got me worried and quite concerned that all death sentences imposed through Sharia Law have yet to be carried out in Nigeria, but the possibility of execution is getting closer than is comfortable to countenance.

What better way to excite a lynching mob since the stoning of these people would most likely be done by the public who would be provided the stones to commit a public murder than to present them with a homosexual?

This is a human rights issue has been hijacked by irrational religionists and painted with the epithet of a taboo – but whose taboo is it anyway? And what right has anyone to make their taboo a crime on others who do not subscribe to that taboo?

Bigots deserve no tolerance

However, beyond the news of these arrests comes the comments (scroll down the linked page to see selected comments) that accompany the news, people who want to appear objective and rational spew out the most savage and primitive notions predicated on nothing but religious adherence and the willingness to sacrifice fellow human beings on the altar of fanaticism and irrational thought, with the hope that it makes them better human beings or committed religionists in line for great heavenly reward. I think not.

These selfsame people are the cancer that eats into our societies and deprives our humanity of talented, reasonable, tolerant and albeit different people to perpetuate an illusion of ridding our societies of corruption and moral laxities.

In my view, if anyone so advocates the death penalty for people being who they naturally are and are found committing supposedly victimless crimes amongst consenting partners then the accuser does not deserve justice for wanting to unnecessarily punish the innocent to validate their bigoted and prejudiced views, they should be first in line for the stoning - be they bishops, disciples, imams, politicians, fanatics or people who just refuse to use their God-given right to think and rationalise.

Our societies can tolerate and accept homosexuals but we must not tolerate or accommodate bigots and religious fanaticism that fork lifts Scripture for their own selfish ends seeking evil rather than mercy, speaking death rather than saving life.