By Bayo Ogunmupe
Spirituality is important but religion is optional. We cannot overcome what we ignore. Nigerians ignore their religiosity too often, and this is inimical to our unity. Whether you choose to follow Hinduism, Islam, Christianity or the African traditional religion, the choice to become a follower of any religion will not increase your spirituality and growth, but hinder it. here are the reasons. A religion demands absolute obedience. There is no greater authoritarian regime than our traditional religious institutions.
These institutions are designed to rule all of your free will and they do this on purpose: the more followers resemble sheep, the easier they are to be commanded. Religions are built to make you docile and weak; so that they can preach their dogma without worrying about dissent. Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time. But spirituality is for the uneducated. If you had any high education, you should be well aware that religion and spirituality do not truly add to your awareness of the universe.
Indeed, religion lowers your understanding of consciousness, by bottling the meaning of the universe into a book with a thousand rules that need to be followed. This burdens your mind with false notions, giving you none of truths you seek. From the best selling author Carl Sagan is this quote: "How is it that hardly any religion has looked at science and concluded, "this is better than we thought! The universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?" A religion that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths."
Moreover, churches and mosques are filled with pedophiles nowadays. See how these religious institutions regularly ask for donations and contributions for conferences and conventions. The hard truth is that every naira you donate is another money that goes for the protection of pedophiles. Hundreds of Catholic teachers and priests have been ousted as pedophiles, harming children, yet the Pope and the church continue to keep them on board. And with that they flush away your time. Time as a most important asset you can never buy back, is wasted for no justifiable cause.
The problem of religion is that it takes all your time if you want to turn yourself into a devout Catholic. You are wasting this time learning concepts that could take a fraction of the time to understand. So much of what religion teaches is repetitive ritual like going to the mosque a dozen times daily repeating prayers and memorizing ancient lines that nobody understands or listens to. Much of the scriptures is plain weird. As you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, revised, translated, distorted and improved by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries.
Answer this question: why are you currently following the religion you follow? There is an incredibly high chance that your answer is that it's the religion you were born into. You inherited the religion from your parents, who taught you to worship their God for their sense of security and safety. Most religions are just a collection of myths and legends from previous religions and traditions most of which are based on pagan cults. However, you are well advised not to indoctrinate your children. Teach them to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and to disagree with you and their friends gracefully.
In Nigeria, the religions teach fake compassion. But religions love to preach compassion, but how much of that compassion do they actually follow? Haven't you heard of how a pilgrim welfare board embezzled hajj fares in Plateau some years ago? Kidnappers, insurgents, herdsmen and Boko Haram members all have religion. Unconditional love is a foreign concept when it comes to the promotion and spread of religions around the world. People aren't being willingly allowed to accept religions; instead, most of the time they were forced into adopting the religions of their conquerors and colonizers. Thus clannish christians and muslims, herdsmen and Boko haram have no compassion to teach.
One thing most religious leaders won't admit is that they breed incest, they promote marrying and breeding within small communities. This is how they keep their beliefs contained and thrive off us versus them mindset and keep communities as enemies of one another. That mindset discourages members from abandoning the religion while still enabling them to proselytize. Thus mainly to maintain social order than rewards loyalty and punish freedom of thought.
A great misunderstanding in religion is that piety enhances spirituality. Sadly, the opposite is the truth. By forcing yourself down the throat of a single religion, you prevent yourself from understanding more than one perspective of spirituality. Your spirituality immediately loses depth because you have blocked yourself from other theologies and perspectives on life.
The first way the religions market themselves is through fear. They teach us to be afraid of the Man in the sky judging our every action instead of actually teaching us the difference between right and wrong, why we shouldn't do evil; we're simply taught just to fear God judging our actions. We do not learn why it is bad to hurt or steal from or cheat others, only that we should make sure we do not get caught doing it.
Therefore you can only retain your religiosity as a hypocrite. You either blindly follow the drivel the priests and imams tell you but still hypocritically follow it. Either way you have no way of getting out of this with your dignity intact. You don't need religion to have morals. If you cannot determine right from wrong, then you lack empathy, not religion. Knowledge has made religion obsolete.
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