Religion will be the end of us

Religion, mankind’s second oldest foe after disease, is back in a big way.

Right now a caliphate that stretches from Spain to the Middle East has been declared, and Kenya falls in the lower reaches of this newly established state.

Nigeria, on the other hand, is experiencing what seems to be a season finale as a united country as whole towns are machine-gunned by assailants.

India has a Hindu nationalist who seems determined to match Pakistani bluster with shows of force, meaning that a nuclear winter draws ever closer.

The Middle East remains an open sore and our low-intensity skirmish with Al-Shabaab occasionally flashes with gruesome killings.

We need to talk about religion because between unlearning the power of the atom and turning our backs on worship, the latter seems the simpler thing to do.

The threshold for nuclear winter is embarrassingly low; we only need a few hundred nuclear explosions to ensure that the northern hemisphere is uninhabitable for the next couple of centuries.

While we only need a few hundred of the damn things to end life as we know it, the world’s arsenal stands at tens of thousands of nuclear missiles.

Aside from Kashmir being turned into glass by an over-eager general from either side and the reprisals that are sure to follow, the idea of a lone bomb being set off on a city fills me with dread.

End our species

The worst quality in humans is absence of doubt; and religion thrives in certainty. People certain they are going to heaven blow things up.

The cocktail that would be formed by our Stone Age ideas on religion and our 20th century ideas on physics could end our species.

There are some people, of course, who would think that using our most fearsome weapons would serve their religious ends, the apocalypse isn’t such a bad idea when you have your eyes set on the next life and not this one.

It isn’t surprising that the history of religion is a blood-soaked, xenophobic, misogynistic descent into human misery.

Religions rarely reach across the aisle to ask for compassion of their fellow men of a different belief; it balkanises people between those who think that idol is mystical and that mountain is divine.

Many complained when Gatundu MP Moses Kuria quoted the Bible in delivering what they claim is a message of hate.

First, I do not think Kuria did anything wrong because free speech, to me, has always been an absolute.

I was surprised at the shock. Isn’t that what the book is for? Doesn’t it tell a “chosen” people to keep off from the children of a lesser god?

Hasn’t it been used to support slavery and the disenfranchisement of women? Why shouldn’t it be used for tribalism?

We underestimate religion’s ability to make war without end. Aside from the Crusades and other wars of conquest that enslaved populations, even our recent wars bear the markings of religion.

The reasons for World War I were economic. However, there is something about the actors that still sticks in my mind.

One of the players was a king- emperor who was head of a church. He fought against the head of a caliphate who had a divine right to rule.

In World War II you had an emperor in Japan who also happened to be a god. His divinity did not stop him from losing the war.

His accomplices were individuals who committed what must be the worst action in human history, marching with belt buckles and declaring that God was on their side.

It isn’t a coincidence that our big wars were fought by parties that were formed by the elision of church and state.

Religion always seeks power in this world and the fight to remove it from the public square is never an easy one.

To this day when all mankind has been declared as equal, we have men and women in three continents who rule because they supposedly have a hotline to heaven.

Even a cursory look at religions origins would shatter anyone’s illusions about its origins.

Take Christianity, the belief system to which I had the misfortune of being born into, for instance.

It is partly evolved from a mishmash of existing ideas in the ancient world. It was imposed by the sword, and then violently force-fed into our grandparents during colonialism and transmitted unquestioningly by our parents to my generation.

It is embarrassing that, as a black man, I walk around bearing an Irish name in my birth certificate because someone poured magic water over my head when I was an infant and gave it to me.

The religions we cling to in this country did not organically evolve on our land, but were imported.

Never sang a hymn

A lot of the ideas contained in religion never appealed to me. The idea that meekness is a virtue as praised by religion seems ready-made to keep the oppressed in their place.

Love thy neighbour isn’t a commandment, but an evolutionary requirement; all apes are kind to members of their troop, and they have never sang a hymn.

Morality predates our ability to speak and write and all our ideas of God. Moral progress on matters like slavery and xenophobia has been in spite of religion, not because of it.

A higher rate of belief, particularly in the literalism of whatever text is supposedly divine, is almost a guarantee for increased homicide and violence against women.

In this country we are slowly importing Puritan notions that money is a sign of blessing and poverty is a moral weakness. The immediate danger of this is that it will erode our social spending.

The sad part about the continued spread of the prosperity gospel is that it will erode compassion to the less well off because they aren’t “as blessed”.

We need to wean ourselves off the malleable gods held together by wisps of thought and the intellectual gossamer called theology, the celebrated celestial tyrants who impotently sit out human affairs.

The challenges our planet face are great and require sacrifices that can only be made if we are rational.

We need to realise that there will be no celestial escape plan, no cherubic retreat, if we unbalance the carbon content in the atmosphere.

Ninety per cent of life on earth has died once before because of rise in temperature and it could do so again for the same reason.

We can never confront this fact head-on if we think we have a beneficent deity guiding us.

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Sonko Rescue Team is doing more damage than good

In the movies, a black SUV is usually a symbol of the bad guys, especially when they drive in convoy. Captain America, Resident Evil and Transformers are some of the movies that come to mind for using black SUVs to denote the bad guys.

This came to mind when I recently saw Sonko’s Rescue Team convoy of black SUVs patrolling Kasarani.

They are fearsome cars; people buy SUVs out of fear because they feel safer when they are wheeling several tonnes of metal across the road. The hummer H1 that started the trend was 7.6 tonnes.

Perhaps Sonko uses the size of the cars (which also have tinted windows) to strike fear into the hearts of criminals everywhere, but I think the people of Nairobi would be better served if the senator used a Probox.

Because of their added weight, SUVs are more likely to kill people in accidents than normal cars, which is partly why SUV insurance is more expensive.

Also, a Probox would get more kilometres per litre than the monstrosities that Sonko uses. It would be able to cover more distance and hence more patrols.

Sonko also said that his guards have high-caliber guns to provide security that will also intimidate terrorists. Why stop at just assault rifles then?

He should have guards walking around with rocket-propelled grenades. In fact he should fit machine guns on the back of pickups like they do in Mogadishu, and then Nairobi will finally be safe.

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An apple from South Africa? Yep, fuel is dirt cheap!

FUEL PRICES HAVE dropped but some people still think that the price of a litre is still too expensive. If you want to know whether fuel is expensive or cheap look at how it is used.

That which is expensive we use with care. When it is cheap we gorge on as much of it as possible.

Well, the supermarket I frequent buses in bananas from Kampala. We eat apples from South Africa. You can buy a litre of juice from Egypt at less than Sh150. You can drink half a litre of yoghurt from India for less than Sh100.

All these items cross international lines to get onto our shelves using vehicles, ships and planes run on either diesel or jet fuel. Fuel is too cheap, not too expensive.

Even before factoring in the deathly cost of flying fruits and shipping juice to the ozone layer, you would have to admit that combustion engines have got so efficient that we can now feast on the bounty of the world for next to nothing.

Cheap fuel has opened up an Eden on our plate; we can enjoy an apple that has travelled 4,000 kilometres for Sh20.

If we are honest, fuel is too cheap and the reason that Kenyan apples will never get a market locally is that it is still cheaper to freight the fruit from down south.

Those saying that oil is too expensive and should go down further ignore international prices and just how wasteful we can afford to be with the resource that our civilisation was built on.