And they see the fruit of the Holy Spirit in Donald Trump

It just beggars belief

That I find myself writing this just after the blog I posted yesterday just points to how scary the situation is. A conversation I had yesterday revealed to me the how the Pentecostal and Evangelical strains of the Christian denominations have bought into what is essential the cult of Donald Trump.

Blog - How God laughs at the thought of being a voter

As apparently God’s chosen one and I have heard that from many religious people I hold in quite high regard, he can do no wrong, he protects the church, espouses deeply conservative values packing the US Supreme Court with conservative judges, responds to a radical Zionist agenda especially with the moving of the US Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv.

A man apart wronged by all

Donald Trump is the wronged man assailed from all ends and denied legitimacy through the term of his presidency, the whole idea of Joe Biden traipsing the corridors of power as the President-elect is not only anathema, Donald Trump not conceding even though none of what he has suggested was electoral fraud has been proven where it matters, in court.

It was conspiracy theory upon conspiracy theory reinforcing a pack of improbable suppositions that they have become an article of faith, a standard to which they have nailed their flags and which they will not be persuaded.

Every example for a saint

To add insult to injury, someone suggested we have been blind not to notice the fruit of the Holy Spirit in Donald Trump. You have got to be kidding me. Yes, he is apparently the embodiment and personification of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, in expression, in character, and in example, a good Christian man. [Wikipedia: The Fruit of the Holy Spirit]

I need to put a call to my spiritual, mental, physical, and paranormal optician for a new eye test, for whoever is seeing this is indeed seeing things. Yet, I must curb my scepticism, because Donald Trump might well be a different man, why he does not show it, escapes me.

Thought Picnic: Victuals that feed the few

Inspired by this opinion piece by in Kay Musonda in ModernGhana titled, African Pentecostalism Has Given Birth To A New Breed Of Mentally Lazy Christians Who See God As A Rewarder Of Mediocrity, I contrived this ditty, emphasis on contrived.

Victuals that feed no one.

In the pursuit of the spiritual,
We have lost the individual,
As priests have taken the scriptural,
Made it into a begging ritual,
There is, therefore, no rigour of the intellectual,
For temples now inhabit the spectacle of the visual,
Therein we hone the instinctual,
From what was of the perpetual,
The clergy gains from the conceptual,
The laity left lazily ineffectual.

The psychology of the wash

A bath or a shower

When I owned my own place, it is strange that the decision to buy my apartment could have hinged on the bathroom having a bathtub instead of the installed shower unit.

There were times during the negotiation process where that was a niggling thought at the back of my mind, the place became a stronghold, a refuge, a kind of security from the things that ravaged my life and worth many years later. I spent ten and a half wonderful years there before I sold up.

The shower was a special place, the feeling of water cascading down my body, the temperature of the water set to just about bearable, but very comfortable, the floor of the bathroom heated such that the cold of winter was barely noticeable.

The wash for something

Indeed, there was something about the wash; I could adjust the showerhead to deliver the spray as a soft rain through to a pulsing massaging hosing down.

The quest for cleanliness also offered a cubicle of meditation, but there were times when I spent much longer in the shower as if I could get rid of a dirty thought or a feeling of a grimy existence not cleansable with the shower gels scented for seaward ambience and greenish blue hues.

We all have a predilection for some sort of wash, especially we of African descent, whilst those of other cultures might have concoctions to drink and possibly ointments or powders to rub on our skins to provide protection, fortify us for the formidable or empower us from some nondescript daring-do, we have the wash.

The ritual of the soap

I have prayed over waters and bathed in the strangest places, using soaps that would not pass the science of reasonableness to be applied to the skin.

Yet, the soaps, black or any other colour purported to grant powers for the favour from all mankind or defence from the dark arts are well sought for by the many who publicly appear rational but privately can be found in grottos ministered to by shamanic priests, fetishists or witch doctors.

The wash is not limited to these events, Christianity talks of the wash too, the washing away of sins as much as it pertains to baptism as a sign of faith, the Mohammedans perform the wash of ablutions before their prayers as a sign of purification before approaching their deity in submission and supplication.

Ritual purification is a function of many belief systems as Hindus will wash in the River Ganges, and the River Jordan has significance to both Judaism and Christianity.

The wash is deeper than the skin

For the holiday, the wash is in a swimming pool or at sea, we have an affinity for water caressing our bodies with or without particular reason – we cannot deny that regardless of who we are, the wash is critical for our presentation and thereby it determines how we are accepted.

We find that the whole context of clean and being clean is defined by the wash, the health of the body, the mind and the spirit might we be affected by the wash too even though the water only really touches the body, but the effect is much deeper than what we see or feel.

Nigeria: Atrocious Abuse in the Church Remains a Problem

Cruel and unjust punishments

With the way we espouse religion to a fundamentalist and extremist extent, it is important to highlight elements of our association with Christianity as practiced that must be condemned in totality.

First, the case of witchcraft exorcisms where two teenagers possibly stigmatised and victimised by their community were placed in the hands of psychotic, sociopathic and sadistic church leaders who bound them and starved them for 3 days leading to the death of one.

I am at pains to find the manual of exorcism these people used to go about this bizarre activity that just demonstrates cruelty unspeakable, all in the name of God.

False teachings and devilish acts

Whilst there might be passages in the Scripture that address witchcraft, the exorcism act which is called deliverance should not constitute harmful and cruel punishments with torture techniques that one will not find in a gulag, all in the name of God.

The idea that a somewhat spiritual affliction can be fought with physical means is foolish, if not idiotic, but we are held in trawl of these fantastic and spectacular acts that leave us in dread of the supernatural from a bad perspective rather than be in awe of the miraculous, if that is what is to be expected.

Wrong treatment for a problem

Then again, in another development, a mentally-ill man was taken to a church for prayers and possible help, which that pastor suggested could be offered, all in the name of God.

Being left in the care of the pastor, by circumstance, happenstance or carelessness, the man having been prayed for and then taken for psychiatric help was left in the care of a stranger and eventually went missing.

Whilst, there is nothing to suggest the pastor is responsible for the disappearance of the man, we live in a society superstitious enough for some to assume and suggest the man has been used for macabre ritual purposes.

Shamanism taking the fore

In fact, it is strange that the parents of the man who sought the help of a man of God for their son with faith in Christian practices now begin to believe that the disappearance of their son is linked to ritualistic purposes.

Though the pastor has been released from custody, he is at best careless considering the person put in his care was vulnerable and should have been under constant supervision, for that alone, there is a case to answer though how to follow that through is not clear.

However, the greater issue here is our lack of understanding of mental health issues which we deem spiritual and usually associate with spiritism, witchcraft, and other black arts.

Understanding mental health issues

Whilst one cannot entirely contemn this long-held belief system, we need to approach mental health from a more logical, systematic and constructive perspective, employing professional psychologists and psychiatrists to analyse, diagnose and suggest ameliorating therapies.

Besides, it is important to know what the mental disability is, which could be anything from autism, through anti-social behaviours to bipolar disorders, and many other conditions that we just lump together as madness.

Some of these conditions could be environmental or even chemical imbalances that we take to churches where people are barely trained to understand what they are tackling that they resort to shamanistic rituals pretending to alleviate suffering which they are not in fact doing.

Reread, revisit, review, repudiate

In all, if we are to rely on the miraculous for problem resolution, it is only right that we go back and study the gospels and the Acts of the Apostles to appreciate and understand what they did to help people in circumstances where modern medical practice would almost equate the kinds of miracles that were wrought then.

If any of the acts involve cruelty, punishments, force or any exertion beyond voice of command, we should begin to suspect that the purveyors of such solutions have no such power to help than to violate, brutalise and abuse the vulnerable – there is no licence given in the Scriptures for abuse nor should we condone such from any who portend to have spiritual authority over us.

Let us be smart about abuse in churches and condemn such in totality, there are many horrible things done, all in the name of God.

Thought Picnic: How Do They Launder Demons?

You cannot make this up

Pat Robertson the American Televangelist says the darndest things that makes people think he had been quaffing psychedelic drugs in place of breathing air for oxygen.

It is then not surprising that he then attracts even the most unspeakably bizarre questions to his 700 Club show, his responses are sometimes impossible to watch creating a cringe-worthy sense of unease and queasiness that leaves you all so queer.

Recently, he had to answer a question about second-hand clothes being possibly inhabited by demons, of course, the idea was not originally his, but by the time he provided anecdotal evidence and the additional commentary, he as good as said clothes can be the residual habitation of demons and something to the effect that demons can reside in inanimate objects.

Get me a Demons for Dummies manual

Now, I am no expert in demonology or the exegesis of exorcism, nor would I suggest that I fully appreciate the manifestations or fantasy of the paranormal that excites the Pentecostal folk to the point that they handle spiritual matters with unusually physical vigour that a typical WWF fixture will not have as much movement or entertainment value.

However, the problem arises when agnosticism takes the place of disbelief; the seed of the questionable has been sown in a mind that conjures much vivid imagination and imagery.

As I was checking out of my hotel yesterday, I usually leave some of my stuff at the hotel over the weekend which means one has to pack wisely.

Demon reproduction

I use the laundry services of the hotel and so imagine my surprise when it looked like I had another suit in the wardrobe that had returned with my clothes some 3 days before.

Yes, a small-sized Burton’s suit had mistakenly been carted back to me and had dissipated its life amongst my clothes for days unbeknownst to me because my laundry is usually returned to my room when I am out. I just assumed everything was fine.

Back to Pat Robertson’s drug-addled theory of demonology and demon estate management you begin to wonder whose demons are cavorting with other demons and whether those I tolerate have been copulating with those of the stranger’s suit – I can’t go on, but you get the drift.

Some people need to be taken off television with immediate effect, I can’t remember if I said my prayers – over the clothes.

The Churches of Strange - A short story

There they stood

“What is all this?” He said in amazement almost bordering in stunned amusement to his mother as he made to leave her room. It was one of those bizarre events that would almost read as too good to be true, it had to be the figment of an imagination in overdrive looking for the incredulous to offer as fact.

Somehow, there seems to have been a disconnect between mother and child, for all the tradition and culture she knew that she hoped to instil the greatest fear and dread in her son, one can only say she had cried wolf one too many times already.

The church of the bizarre

The boy had his problems, many could not be attributed to the usual adolescent issues, they were much more troublesome and she had resorted to remedies in African-initiated churches to deal with possibly mental, maybe psychological and generally termed spiritual problems.

The raison d'etre of these churches were of an almost macabre ritualistic creed that bore very few similarities to the established church which Africans generally never felt tackled the vague dread of the supernatural and superstition that held mind and reason hostage to agents of demonic and devilish persuasion personified in some close blood relation who was either envious or jealous of a person’s circumstances.

It allows for every misfortune to be blamed on some unnamed enemy or some hapless powerless victim that cannot fight back against accusations of sorcery or witchcraft.

The hold and the sway

Much as the bible appears to be their source inspiration, the powers of the churches derive from seers or prophets if you like and people convulsively possessed of influences that portend to prognosticate or exhibit telepathic or clairvoyant tendencies. This provides a great draw that one might well find of the terror of shamanism.

In the process, people who have bought into this religious chicanery are literally fleeced by these “false” prophets whose church establishments have all the trappings of some outward show of holiness and purity but are bastions of the occult gaining some Christian legitimacy by excitable references to God and Jesus along with even more violent exertions in battling Satan as the prophets operate like modern-day Levites and the laity recite the Psalms repetitively with Christian numerological symbolism of threes, sevens, twenty-ones or forties.

Many religions of Christ and others

You can imagine the confusion of “Christianities” the boy had, as his mother took him to strange prayer meetings before he was 5 where the family friends were bedecked in flowing white robes and red sashes, candles taking a prominent place in the homilies, those were seemingly secret liaisons.

Publicly, the family was Anglican though his dad had dabbled in bizarre animist rituals for protection and other life needs. However, every religion was tapped from medicine men through witch doctors to Islamic mystics. In the case of the Islamic mystic she used an episode in the boy’s life of terror and fear to warn him off telling anyone they had been seeking help there.

It was a nasty thing to do but with hindsight the boy felt mother hens will do anything to protect their chicks and this was just a personification of that justification.

The boy deciding

By the time the boy left home, he joined up with what was at that time termed an extreme Christian fringe which brought quite a bit of friction with his parents because they were at variance with other Christian practices.

Meanwhile, in that boy’s life, he had been cut many times, incisions made on the scalp, on the check, on the face with all sorts of potions rubbed in, he had bathed in forests, drank the most dastardly concoctions, seen the indescribable, experienced a lifetime of Steven King kind of horror and to culminate all, had eaten and swallowed razor blades; all in the name of protection, safety and help.

Then came this day as he returned from his church, she called him into her room and after much railing and agitation she cursed her child telling him, if he returned to that church again, he will not find his way back home again.

What is right?

It could have been literal but elements of the child’s upbringing meant that this act will hold less significance as it might have held for someone else steeped in their culture. The rationality of doing this unclothed never dawned on the child for his Christian persuasion at that time put him on a trajectory that gave him a sense of safety from that episode.

The child is then left with many questions on what really is Christianity from the established versions through the African-initiated ritualistic establishments to the ones steeped in dread of evil and a brand of ultra-evangelical exuberance whilst at the same time, he is yet to find his way back home – all because the conflicts in doctrine that govern all these congregations sometimes persuade people to do the most unlovely and inhuman things.

That is the story of a boy and the many “Christianities” that vie for his soul and claim to offer him protection.

On the rise of juvenile witchcraft stigmatisations

A horrible development

It is sad and disheartening to hear that there is a rise in child witchcraft accusations in Africa [1]. I have never been able to watch the harrowing depictions on child witchcraft exorcisms that have appeared in documentaries in the recent years.

Worse still is the violence meted out to these accused children with the aim of cleansing them of their witchcraft powers.

I cannot understand if witchcraft were metaphysical, paranormal or spiritual how physical torture with increasingly bizarre rituals of unbelievable cruelty can be the means of negating the power and influence of witchcraft.

The hold of superstitious gullibility

The fact that certain of these charlatan exorcists can be religious leaders holding sway over frightened, superstitious and gullible congregations is bad enough – these crowds aid and abet childhood cruelty with the thinking that they are doing good.

Anyone who allows reason and common-sense to influence their judgement would very well know that if indeed these children were witches, wizards, sorcerers or more, they could easily have pooled their powers to wreak havoc amongst their tormentors teach them a veritable lesson they will never forget.

Helpless against a baying mob

These helpless, hapless, deprived children who are usually orphans, handicapped, destitute or different, especially albinos who for no reason of theirs have encountered misfortune and should find a more sympathetic, humane and compassionate society are rejected and what better way to reject them than to cast them as practitioners of witchcraft then engage in a public lynching of the children dressed as an exorcism.

Religious leaders themselves, frauds and agents of devilish concepts with their eyes on filthy lucre find a ready audience who are ready to believe any tale about their lot in life being hindered by the activities of their wards. There is money to be made in pointing accusing fingers and almost nothing can be done by the child to fight back against false accusations.

Either way, once accused of witchcraft, you are stigmatised and can never be innocent of it in the eyes of those who are lead to believe such atrocious claims.

Nothing Christian about this

From a Christian perspective, even Jesus said [2], suffer (allow, encourage) little children to come unto me and every child that suffered any affliction was humanely and compassionately healed r delivered; not brutalised as we find done today by apostles and evangelists of malevolent wickedness, gratuitous sadism and criminally actionable grievous bodily harm.

To which Jesus did say, perpetrators of violence against children can expect nothing better than drowning in the sea by hanging a millstone [3] round their necks. The preceding verses [4] talked about the need for childhood innocence, trust and humility, hardly anything about childhood witchcraft a concept that have developed for no justifiable reason than to feed the iniquitous ministries of people pretending to run a legitimate church.

Prosecute the practice mercilessly

This rotten practice has to stop and it can only stop when followers begin to follow good and sound doctrine.

Meanwhile, civil authorities [5] must not be afraid to visit the full force of the law on anybody who abuses children especially those who do it under the guise of witchcraft exorcism or some bizarre religious persuasion; the life of these children is hard enough, to make it a living hell is just unconscionably evil and an abdication of society of its responsibility to help the vulnerable.

Just because we cannot love the children or dare to like them for whatever reason does not give the license to make injurious accusations that offer the opportunity to visit the wickedest imaginations of evil violence on them.

Sources

[1] BBC News - Rise in African children accused of witchcraft

[2] Luke 18:16 | bible.cc

[3] Matthew 18:6 | bible.cc

[4] The Little Children - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[5] Witchcraft: Akpabio Warns Churches

Other references

UN publishes IHEU statement on witchcraft in Africa | International Humanist and Ethical Union

Beliefs - A Nigerian Witch-Hunter Defends Herself - NYTimes.com

Dispatches - Saving Africa's Witch Children - Channel 4

The people are high on opium - IV

Usher in the lady engineers

And so continues my journey down the annals of the memory of Muslim encounters beyond home.

We usually do encounter ladies taking up engineering courses especially, mechanical and civil engineering which at times is considered physical and quite manly for the fairer sex.

In Nigeria where male chauvinism can be overbearing ladies might not just be the butt of nuisance and sexist jokes, but some men would scheme to cause serious embarrassment to the ladies just to make them both uncomfortable and unwanted.

As it happens, the ladies who take up engineering are usually made of sterner stuff than puny men can throw at them.

They not only excel in academic activity, but also beat the men in craft too.

Whilst I was down in the South for the entrance examinations to secondary school, the aunt who gave me lessons was a budding Electrical engineer.

Overalls without a manicure

In polytechnic, we had a lady who rolled up her sleeves in the mechanical engineering class as she would so soon be under a car, as she would have her overalls caked with precipitation of motor oils; hands that would have a manicurist hire industrial heavy duty tools, she was gutsy.

Then in my class, as I was studying Electrical engineering, there was a lady whose demeanour was such that no one called her by name.

Rather, she had the appellation Haja – inferring she had performed the Islamic pillar of visiting Mecca. What was striking beyond her manner was her mode of dress.

She was covered all over and even wore gloves, and had a scarf whose train was just probably a few inches short of Princess Diana’s wedding train.

Protocols for a handshake

That in particular had us musing to each other, quietly; the danger of the scarf getting caught in the moving parts of the lathe our curriculum including crafting bric-a-brac out of sheet steel like bottle openers.

She never shook hands with men, but I once had the honour of having my hand touched in greeting, a rarity that exuded mutual respect.

Both ladies were lovely Muslim girls, one a tomboy and the other as pious as Mother Theresa. The former mildly secular the latter rather devout and sometimes given to serious religious debate, but both utterly reasonable.

The might of the lecturer

Lecturers in higher educational institutions in Nigeria then could be quite interesting and megalomaniacal without sanction. They could as easily mark you down subjectively as they could score you well for devoting your every waking hour to excelling in their course.

To say they were prone to jealousy if they felt you were not committed to failing all else to barely passing their vocation would be an understatement.

Beyond our tuition fees, lecturers even produced cheap and poorly produced tutorials that they charged for and sometimes set their tests verbatim out of the tutorial.

Woe art thou – if your hard-earned and meagre resources did not augment the salaries of lecturers as they prey like vampire bats on their wards.

Qurani-Biblical Mentors

However, it was lecturers engaged in religious activity that exercised the worst type of abuse of power. Whilst we are used to Christian proselytising, the Islamic version was definitely a new development.

It was not more the Jihad, but a battle of the minds, the war for the will and the fear of failure; all colluding to convert you to other faiths.

Many at school sometimes suffered temporary apostasy as one who held the key of your success and failure called on your service with impunity and left you helpless that resistance meant instant failure; the reality of understanding futility in the face of lawlessness.

One such lecturer lead a Muslim group that met on Saturday evenings sharing the word of the holy book and debating with each other about the parallels with Christianity and the superiority of observed service to quiet faith.

Spiritual Islam – eyewitness account

The whole class was invited to a feast that celebrates the revelation of the Qu’ran; we all graced the occasion as we sat outside in rows listening to the preacher reveal the gems of paradise found in joining the group.

Suddenly, a young girl seemingly had seizures, convulsed and began to stutter as someone took the role of interpreting the “revelations” from god.

By the time we knew what was going on, a good few ‘virgins’ became convulsed in this mass hysteria as we all watched with incredulity.

Never had we seen people of an Islamic persuasion display the manifestation of some form of spiritual possession and activity reminiscent of the white garment traditional Nigerian churches.

Have no hand

We left soon enough as all the leaders of the meeting had to withdraw to receive and decode the message from afar – none said anything about the event – but when we next mentioned it amongst friends – we were in stitches for hours on end.

They would definitely have had our hands cut off from the wrist if we deigned to caricature the lecturer talk less of you know who.