Thank God I am an atheist
If Rome had conducted a referendum on whether the earth was flat, 99.9 per cent of Europeans would have voted Yes. In the 15th century, perhaps only a single individual — a Pole called Nicolaus Copernicus — would have said No.
Even the most learned astronomer was a purveyor of this cosmological ignorance. It stood to common sense and was, therefore, taught as heavenly wisdom. You impugned it only on the pain of death.
It took Columbus and other graduates of a navigation school at Lisbon, run by the Knights-Templar — a Hermetic anti-Church movement — and patronised by Prince Henry the Navigator, to prove that one person alone can be right against the cosmos.
That is why I do not accept the liberal dogma that every issue must be voted on to identify what the majority want. Copernicus and Galileo Galilei long ago showed us how wrong the majority can be. That is why I never put any premium on majority opinion.
Whichever position they take in the coming referendum, it sticks out like the Kilindini pier that most Kenyans will vote only according to dogmas pumped into them by self-seeking ethnic, sectarian, gender and political party leaders.
Like the numskulls who, in 2005, announced that they would not read that time’s draft — because “… Agwambo has read it for us . . .” — most Kenyans will be voting in absolute ignorance of the issues and of their own long-term self-interests.
It does not bother me
That is why it does not bother me much that I stand practically alone in the controversy on abortion. Though I hope Kenyans will say a resounding Yes to the draft constitution, I live in no illusion that the Ayes will have it.
Our society’s ignorance of its own objective desires — desires, that is, of which most of them are not even aware — is deep. That is why it is so easy to carry them along (like so much seaweed in a ship’s wake) just by claiming that you are speaking on God’s behalf.
After I had shown that the idea of God need not contradict science’s definition of life and that, therefore, all of them were guilty of murder, they moved the goal posts to say that only human life — not all life — is sacrosanct and cannot be taken and that this sacrosanctity begins only at conception.
I reacted by reminding them that the very European Church which cooked up this dogma has killed more human beings than live in China today — and this for reasons that no god (except the Deuteronomistic one) would entertain.
Why do Europe and its adopted intellectual juveniles in Africa seek to mildew our brains with the self-evident untruth that a foetus is more sacred than millions and millions of fully grown Aborigines, Afghans, Amerindians, Congolese, Iraqis, Jews, Kikuyu, Palestinians, proletarians, Saracens, Vietnamese and women (the so-called witches)?
I have received absolutely no answer to these questions. Instead, I get a brand new set of goal posts. It is that my position is guided by my “atheism”. The word “atheism” is uttered with a knowing wink and a contortion of the face to claim that atheism is immorality.
Yet, if I may define morality as active goodness and justice to mankind, the question arises: Which of my duties to humanity have I neglected because of my atheism?
Ever since I became a moral adult, I have not slammed the door on any hungry one on my threshold. I have not murdered, robbed, raped, defiled a baby girl or slapped my wife just because she answered me sharply.
I have not imposed my confessional beliefs on my household. I have not suppressed members who profess to be “born again”. I have not banned the prayer meeting that takes place in my house every week.
And I can tell you that my attitude owes a great deal to my atheism. But, surely, if God is unhappy with it, it is a matter between Him and me.
Even Jesus would have condemned the self-righteousness which allows Tom Okoth and Angela Ndindi (Sunday Nation lead letter on May 16) to judge Philip Ochieng as the devil and to nominate themselves as the holy ones.
