Why Africa has no room for Atheism

I was reading an odd essay on “The Literature of Exhaustion” by John Barth, which I must warn you has nothing to do with the notions in this opinion, but was having enough trouble understanding already, given its erudite approach and esoteric undertones – vices most accomplished thinkers incidentally, ‘proudly and deliberately’ succumb to – when I got to thinking about my own philosophical struggle with faith in the supernatural.

It didn’t help matters any, that in the adjoining room an irritatingly noisy fellowship of Evangelical Christians was in session, and it was all I could do not to storm the farce and assert my constitutional right to freedom of silent worship!

Anyhow, as the hysterical singing and cacophonous vociferation typical of such gatherings subsided, the preacher took to the stage and began his ‘public counseling’ - which is essentially the only helpful thing religious leaders specialize in, over and above the collection of money from hell-terrified congregants.

The role of pastors, priests or sheikhs as counselors is amplified by the fact that they are the only people capable of consoling us in the face of our inescapable biological destiny; namely, death.

Of course the consolation they give us is false and fabricated – no one having ever verifiably returned from heaven or hell to testify, or 'taken pictures' to confirm it – but most of us believe it for obvious reasons.

One - we don’t want to do die, or face the finality of death. We prefer the idea, however illusory and sometimes laughable, that we shall survive our biological annihilation and live on as members of a divine choir, husbands to six-dozen virgins, or be reborn as cows or trees in the next life – as Christianity, Islam and Hinduism; the world’s leading faiths, teach respectively.

Two – the idea that a world without the terror of hell or promise of heaven is hedonistic and anarchic; which is to say that many people believe that God, or godliness, are the guarantors of human morality.

Without the fear of Hades – what is to prevent us from killing and raping each other?

I won’t go into the entrails of this argument – because I think it should be evident that we don’t ordinarily think about heaven or hell before we make ethical choices on a day to day basis!

If that’s what informs your ethical thought-process, then clearly there is something wrong with you – and you may need to get that ‘looked’ at!

But I am beginning to better 'understand' African pastors and why they do what they do; realizing that they are essentially victims of general social poverty.

Many of them, in the doldrums of economic struggle, happen to 'hear' voices calling them to ministry - and heed these voices as a final resort in economies where youth unemployment is simply atrophying.

Alas - it may be argued that the only reason society has prelates is the same reason it has prostitutes and drug-peddlers. 

Demand and unemployment.

Prostitution exists because, on the one hand young women ran out of options in life; but also because men demand commercial sex owing to failed marriages or the costliness of conventional relationships.

Drug-peddlers, similarly go into the business as a last resort, before realizing the number of potential 'druggies' out there looking to drown their miseries in the illusion of a 'high' - after which it becomes too lucrative a vocation to abandon.

Where prostitutes provide false intimacy and drug-peddlers provide false confidence; religious leaders provide false consolation.

But as I was saying – it was fortuitous that I got to eavesdrop on the sermon of the pastor in that fellowship, because he broached a subject I think merits some response from the ranks of professed non-supernaturalists who expect to win over more intellectually honest thinkers to their cause.

I fancy myself as engaged in doing just that.

Now – said pastor began with an anecdote, as he related an experience which he’d had talking to an atheist, to his flock, and went ahead to question the former regarding the reasons he’d lost his faith to begin with.

It so happened that the reason this nonbeliever (or claimed nonbeliever) had discarded his religious affiliations was owing to a case of personal tragedy – in which he had lost his mother to cancer early in life, despite vainly beseeching God to save her.

Naturally, he’d turned his back on the church since then, due to what, in his unobjectionable view, was God’s incurable impotence in the face of man's travails. 

A rather trite example it may be, but the lessons to be drawn from it may be worthwhile.

To hear the pastor tell it, though I think he exaggerated the tale, this atheist had been a very ardent believer whose expectations of divine intervention had been quashed by God’s presumed indifference to his plight.

One can imagine that this poor fellow's mother died with the expectation that she was bound for eternal bliss in paradise, and that her death was God's ''will'' - while ironically, her son was left abandoned and orphaned, compelling him to attempt a go at Job's ''way'', i.e. to curse God and die!

The pastor then went ahead to, very conveniently, reduce atheism to a band of frustrated ex-believers who ran impatient with God’s long-term plans for their lives, and react by declaiming faith.

I could hardly believe my ears as the sermon proceeded into a lecture on the need for Christians to ‘wait on God’ – and the pastor continued to make sneering, generalized references to atheists as a sulky lot of sour-grapers.

This time – I almost stormed the meeting, not to demand for any rights – but to get this libelous pastor to reason things out; before I recalled that faith-based gatherings hardly ever listen to the harsh tunes of reason, however systemically it’s presented, preferring instead the stupefying symphony of dogma.

I turned my angst instead to the word processor, and decided to make a few admissions.

It may right that perhaps the Third-World isn’t ready for genuine secularism.

The social environment and intellectual milieu in which many of us live certainly favors a religious outlook and simultaneously disfavors a secular or irreligious world-view; and this is especially true of the poorer parts of the globe.

The reason for this is not so much that people know of God’s existence or can empirically prove it; but rather that the inherently unfalsifiable wish of God’s existence and the attendant notions of determinism, manifest destiny and immortality give the wretched of the earth an existential consolation no degree of rational thinking ever can!

I mean, in societies where governments literally don’t care for or about their people; where education, health and opportunity are simply inaccessible by most – one has a jungle society in which a rich minority exploits a poor majority and is committed to preventing the redistribution of societal wealth by any means at their disposal.

It thus becomes necessary to keep people believing in a heaven in the after-life, when all they have known in their pitiful lives literally amounts to a ''hell on earth''!

This is because the divisions of class in our poor societies are so rigid and impermeable that if one’s grandfather was a poor man, for instance – then the entire lineage of that person will likely remain poor and deprived unto the furthest grandson in the distant future.

Nothing short of violent revolutions and bloody coups, which were all too possible in the past but are becoming less actionable as Africa’s petit-bourgeoisie begins to come of age and consolidate itself, can offset this type of oligarchic social-economic caste.

And while in most cases inadvertent, one finds that the religious establishment (Christian, Islamic, Animist, Buddhist etc, etc) – with its canny ability to explain away social problems and divert the attention of the masses from their immediate poverty to the promise of heavenly rewards – automatically lends itself to an alliance with the forces intent on maintaining the status quo.

In this context, atheism becomes very irrelevant, and actually detestable.

In the mind of a poor and disenfranchised person – an HIV victim lacking ARVs due to government corruption, an unemployed African youth (80% of the graduate population), a poor bachelorette for whom marriage is an escape from poverty – only religion and its ‘miracle candy’ can offer them enough hope not to commit suicide or succumb to insanity.

The atheist world view robs these people of any such hope – and reminds them that their situation is likely to be permanent, and will not change unless they do something about it themselves.

But because our governments are too despotic and difficult to overthrow – the individual realizes that they can’t help themselves, even if they wanted to, and thus must turn to some God and wait upon divine intervention if sanity must be retained.

It's essentially a case of religion-inspired cognitive dissonance enabling people stay afloat in their existential torrents.

In a society where the average person on the street has as their chief worries the finding of a job, a next meal, raising money for a wedding, getting married to a rich man, paying their siblings’  fees, meeting their parent’s medical bills etc, etc – one can see the necessity of religion.

Even the so-called intelligentsia prefer talking about European Club football or tawdry partisan politics (and how to cash in from politicians), as opposed to discussions on more pressing matters like Capitalism, Linguistics, Culture etc, etc.

Atheism thus becomes ‘immoral’ - and indeed demoralizing.

To tell a poor, suffering African that there is no God and no heaven to look forward to - is to emotionally and psychologically sentence them to an early grave.

It is to cut off the last tenuous thread of fanciful expectation, from a man hanging above the dark and dreadful pit of secular realism.

In the analogously immortal words of Franz Fanon - ''To deny a man the social meaning of his death is to kill him twice, first in the flesh, then in the spirit ...''

Th prevalent disconnect between subjective experience and objective reason is something I have discovered in a social experiment I try on the streets of Kampala, whenever I can spare the time;

I simply stop a random stranger and try to provoke them by averring, ‘Do you know that God MAY not exist?’

 While the answers are usually more nuanced by age and denomination – I’ve observed that the broad responses I elicit are often dependent on the ‘economic station’ of the respondent.

If the person is a seemingly ''upper-class'' fellow with some learning – they’ll sometimes listen and try to reason things out.

But if the chap is of a low-income bracket and bereft of any signs of ‘elitism’ – their response ranges from outright fury to conclusive incredulity, but is invariably resolute;

‘‘Do you know how far up from poverty God has brought me!’’ - as if life were a horse-drawn carriage; they the carriage, and God the horse.

A group of boda-boda fellows in Nansana even once went as far as accusing me of being an ''Illuminati'' (the current pet idea of the Ugandan church) - threatening to immolate me! 

The irony being that I also once witnessed a contradictory incident in Bweyogerere where boda-boda cyclists threatened to burn a local pastor for fleecing them; having promised miracles and failed to deliver.

Of course, the margin between an ''upper'' and ''lower'' class African is often so small, that unless one bears some level of consanguinity to the political elite - all it may take to slip, overnight, from a so-called middle class state to abject indigence is losing a job.

The middle classes of Africa are really just hand-to-mouth proletarians masquerading as affluent folk. 

                                

This is why most Third-World atheism isn’t really atheism per se; because it isn’t arrived upon through sober, rational and philosophically consistent cogitation – but is in many cases an angry defiance of God for ‘refusing’ to answer prayers.

Take the claimed atheist in the foregoing pastor’s sermon as an example; the young man abandoned God because, allegedly, God abandoned him first.

I call this brand of non-belief rebound atheism; and I deduce that it really can’t last either, juxtaposed against the untenable sort of wishful religiosity it antithesizes.

In the same way that a believer who joins a faith expecting a miracle soon jumps ship, simply because an nonexistent God can’t work miracles – an atheist who abandons religion because of disappointment is bound to get further disappointed and frustrated in his atheism; for the simple reason that atheism compels one to accept the unfair nature of the world based on Darwinian Natural Selection, and certainly promises no quick reprieve from existential dilemmas through miracle working.

I once engaged an acquaintance in a debate on the subject, and he declared pointedly;

''You know Manzi, if there was no God - nothing would stop me from killing you if I wanted!''

I gaped at him for the span of several minutes - after which I convinced myself of the benefit of keeping some people simply pious; whether or not God exists never having to be a question.

I can't bear thinking what such a fellow would do with a coldly and purely atheistic world view.

One shudders, just to ponder the thing.

Obviously, this is the sort of chap who would ran about lopping off heads, raping his mother and looting property simply because there is ''no hell to go to''.

Doubtless, there are millions like him, 'deservingly' bundled into the dark cave of religion, for the ultimate good of society.

Some men will use candles, not to light the way ahead, but to set the world aflame.

A mostly illiterate and ignorant population whose only experience with religious 'truth' is childhood indoctrination and guilt-inflicting sermons in mosques and churches - is more likely to take secularism as a free pass to wanton crime and moral licence.

Unlike religion, which relies on threats of divine retribution, the gods' wrath and eternal damnation to secure allegiance to its teachings; atheism demands a self-discipline and behavioral continence which comes not from sermons reiterated weekly, but from an individual effort to appreciate the authentic human condition.

Africa is simply not ready for this type scientific secularism.

To vent their frustration with life's blockades - some people go for a run, shoot buffalo or write poetry. This provides a 'healthy' release of anger and ire that would have been directed into more destructive enterprises like overthrowing incompetent governments.

Africa's poor seem to have been convinced that cursing and blaming an imaginary character called Lucifer is the best outlet for their emotional and psychological angst. 

For them, prayer is catharsis.

We still need a mesmeric charlatan to remind us to ignore the rickety buses of our decrepit public transport system, and instead wait upon God to bequeath us personal jets - after which, excited and befuddled by the utopian sermon, we are impelled to donate half our weekly earnings to the collection plate.

At the day's end, non-belief is a luxury only afforded by those with full-stomachs, well-read minds and jobs to rise to each morning.

The complacency (even arrogance) it takes to doubt, let alone dismiss the supervention of an immaterial other, is only born out of the deceptive, scarce-available certainty of material comfort; and just as singularly borne upon the wings of an existential certitude.

It’s a harsh truth we must admit - that religion, even if some scientific proof of God’s nonexistence could be found, should be allowed to retain a foothold in society – certainly for no other conceivable reason, except that it just may be the only thing capable of keeping the world’s poor, illiterate and ignorant masses from neuroticism.