Bad religion keeping masses in servitude

World news these days is frequently like a weather report. We witness hurricanes, drought, flooding and forest fires as they happen.

Something is not quite right and most if it is due to human activity.

Global temperatures are rising and climate change a reality as Kenyans now know.

As Pope Francis warns, climate change has grave environmental, social, economic and political consequences.

It threatens the whole of humanity and the future of the planet.

The call from the Pontiff to an ecological conversion challenges the false theology that catastrophic weather patterns are acts of God.

In the Odyssey, Zeus complains: how shameless the way these mortals blame the Gods, from us alone, they say, come all miseries, yes, but they themselves, with their own reckless ways, compound their pains beyond their proper share.

Creation has its own laws and any evil has its origin in our planet. Blaming God suggests that the Creator is sadistic.

Yet most religion fails to address the structural causes of climate change, starvation, cheap labour, unaffordable medical treatment, sanitation, corruption and inequality.

There is immense human suffering in Kenya but there is helplessness and a certain resignation surrounding it.

Suffering is not allowed to be visible and is considered inevitable by most.

If we don’t blame God for our misfortunes then we blame the devil or demons.

Desperate sick, poor, unemployed, depressed people believe that the devil is to blame and the solution is to get saved.

No wonder that travelling crusades are more frequently found in poor estates than in opulent suburbs.

The government is happy to facilitate with permits for it lets them off the hook.

WHAT TO DO

Blame the devil instead of Jubilee when you die because you can’t access cancer treatment.

Harriet Tubman, the great American abolitionist said: “I would have liberated many more if they had known they were slaves.”

But those in servitude will troop off today to Jubilee and Cord events and identify with the fuel guzzlers and helicopters of their masters.

Thereafter, many will walk back home to find empty plates.

The two eyes of freedom are inclusion and equality and neither are present here. We have economic growth but no reduction in poverty of exclusion.

Glamour, splash and colour have replaced substance. So projects are foisted on communities and any resistance is deemed anti-development.

Housing projects that will benefit the rich are applauded by slum dwellers; coal plants that are not needed proceed because it’s our turn to destroy the environment.

Generations in servitude will be repaying loans to Chinese banks.

So evil is seen as good and suffering the price we have to pay for our masters’ warped notions of development.

Instead of blaming the devil for our tribulations, why do people not rebel against the injustices and evil that afflict them if God is on their side?

That must be the great theological debate of our time. Pastors and priests, however, personalise social problems.

Bad religion shields the state against rebellion or resistance. Maybe you doubt.

But tell me in a country where extra-judicial killings are everyday affairs, how come no priest has been eliminated since John Kaiser 16 years ago?

[email protected] @GabrielDolan1