Why young people are questioning religion today

Once in a while, you're forced to go to a government office. Unless you have the money to pay someone else to do it.

Since I haven't secured any government tenders yet, I have to line up with the plebeians until the day they will recognise my royalty.

It was as inefficient as expected and I went up and down four different floors trying to get the right person.

No one was taking responsibility, much like Nairobi baby daddies and I was trying to get their attention just like most wives insist from their husbands.

I eventually got to the person I needed to see and he handed me this form asking for the minutest details.

The most annoying part was the question of religion. It's irritating because I don't fit in any of those boxes.

I asked the guy at the counter what form to fill because I didn't have a religion. He was dismayed and told me that I still needed to tick a box.

NEW ATTITUDE

I asked him whether he wanted me to lie on a government form; he grabbed it, looked at it, then looked at me, then asked me what my parent's religion was.

I told him that my father is dead and thus has no religion but my mother is a Christian. I could see him annoyed by my response but he quickly ticked the Christian box and told me I was wasting his time.

Religion is always a fun conversation to me and sometimes a hair-splitting one.

I went to church for the longest time until I was 25 and so a lot of the people I know remember me from those 'good' old days.

Days when I was on the pulpit leading worship at some point. Days when I was in church on Saturdays and on Sundays, and days when I was a shining beacon of hope and an example that would be used for children everywhere.

Maybe I'm exaggerating a bit but you get my point.

I'm at a point in life where I'm an agnostic and a lot of the people around me are on some sort of religious journey.

HIGHER EDUCATION

We're all people who grew up deep in the church, went to Christian schools and knew all the verses that there were to know.

One by one, though, we all started veering off and never looked back. We all started questioning the faiths that we were born into and for many of us, it made no sense to us.

We all started to read about our history and we started to understand how apart from the fact that our native religions had been deemed to be primitive and backward, religion had been brought for the specific purpose of colonialism and subservience.

We read more about the church and its role in conflicts and the even more hush-hush stories of sexual assault in the pulpit and all the other millions of scandals which they tried to cover up and which Christians still don't talk about.

We learnt about how the church perpetuated and still upholds racism and anti-blackness and we decided that we weren't going to be a part of it.

In deeper discussions, we started questioning all these beliefs that we were told to take by faith.

FAITH AND SCIENCE

We were supposed to believe in stories about magical chariots of fire, talking donkeys and people rising from the dead.

It just sounded like a really dramatic fairy tale and it made no sense that in the age of knowledge and science, I would ignore my logic to believe in something that makes no sense.

It's not a sole phenomenon though. Young people all over the world are marginally less religious than their parents, and they all have the same reasons and questions.

We need a better explanation for life than a naked man, a woman, a fruit and a talking snake. The truth is that there is no logical explanation for any of it.

One of the reasons you educate your children is that you want them to think, do and be better than you were, except in this case it's to do with the one thing that we were never supposed to question. Well, we did and we're not going back.

Religion isn't the mark of a good human being and we're doing fine without it.

We're realising just like other men before that that you create and work with your own moral code and that's the kind of man that you define yourself by.