Ndugu Mitayo,
Interesting stuff. I applaud your assertion that there is "No need to
abandon our African spirituality!" We are the worse for embracing
totalitarian religions that set brother against brother, etc, leading to
the absurdity of an all-powerful deity requiring that feeble men fight
his wars.
But I must say that you're wrong to trace the origin of monotheism to
Constantine the Great, who became emperor in 306 C.E. (or A.D. for the
devout Christians). No, Constantine didn't come up with monotheism. He
converted to the already existing monotheistic cult of Christianity,
then one of several religions in the Roman empire, and imposed it as a
state religion.
The earliest recorded evidence of the practice of monotheism goes back
to Kamitic (ancient Egyptian) times. Pharaoh Akhenaten (also known as
Amenhotep IV), who ruled Kamit in 1364-1347 B.C.E. (or B.C. for the
devout Christians), imposed a monotheistic version of the cult of Ra,
the sun god on the Kamau. But it was shortlived. But the Hebrews, who
were nomadic interlopers in Kamit at various times, adopted Akhenaten's
ideas and gradually developed it into the monotheistic cult of Yahweh or
Jehovah as they wandered through Africa and the Middle East.
Abraham, the mythical ancestor of the Arabs and Jews, supposedly
embraced the monotheistic El (or Yahweh/Jehovah) as a family or clan
god. And the world has not known any peace ever since the intolerant
spiritual heirs of Abraham (Jews, Christians, and Muslims) have sought
to impose their idea of one god on all of humanity.
Otherwise thanks brother for the courage to speak for those of us
Africans who refuse to submit to the will of the god made in the image
of an Oriental despot (as philosopher Antony Flew beautifuly puts it in
the signature quote after your name).
Mitayo Potosi wrote:
**
*_Enough With the 'One God' Stuff_*
*The author below is superficial, as he does not go into history to
show that it was Emperor Constantine of Rome, in the third century AD,
who wanting to be the only one to be obeyed by the citizens of the
Roman Empire, came up with monotheism. i.e. that if the idea of one
God is forced down the throats of the citizenery then it becomes
easier to have them obey just only one Emperor.*
*All these Arab religions i.e. "Abrahamic faiths" -- Christianity,
Islam, Judaism are all just nonsensical.................*
*No need to abandon our African spirituality !!*
*_Enough With the 'One God' Stuff_*
**By James Foley
<javascript:ol('http://www.alternet.org/authors/7991/');>*
*
*Sam Harris's book "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future
of Reason
<javascript:ol('http://alternet.bookswelike.net/isbn/0393327655');>,"
which won the 2005 Pen Award for nonfiction, develops a smart,
knowledgeable polemic about the growing dangers of all religious
ideologies. Although I love Harris' rant, my personal obsession has
long been with how weird monotheism is. Monotheism insists there is
but one god, a man of course, alone in the universe for all eternity.
Even as a child, I found this to be a crazy idea.*
*The Greeks and Romans, the Hindus, and the Egyptians all imagined
many different gods who hang out together, the way people throughout
the world do. These cultures envisioned social gods with busy
existences who like pleasure, food, sex, art and other good things of
life. As with people, the social ties among the gods loosely constrain
their destructive impulses. Mostly these gods are so involved with
each other they only sometimes notice the lesser beings, just as
people only sometimes notice their household animals. The multiple
gods of great cultural systems, and the gods and spirits of many
tribal cultures as well, are familiar, understandable. They project
the human world into the sky, the same way science fiction does
(except, of course, science fiction understands it is offering
/fiction/).*
*But monotheism posits one omnipotent, lonely sucker all by himself --
"the sky god" as Gore Vidal once called him. The first five books of
the Hebrews' Bible reveal, not surprisingly, that the sky god is often
angry, jealous, vengeful, and even murderous -- regularly toying with,
manipulating and punishing the puny beings he creates to worship and
amuse him. Not surprisingly, he's a self-absorbed ascetic who invents
for his "children" bizarre, impossible-to-comply-with rules governing
a multitude of tiny details of daily life. Sometimes he goes berserk
about minor infractions; frequently he ignores major violations of his
own rules. He's the original bad father, threatening awful
punishments, with no wife, lover, siblings, friends, co-workers,
neighbors or relatives to reign him in.*
*Early Christians and then Muslims added to monotheism the great
creative innovation of the promise of eternal life. A person gets to
live forever if, and only if, that person closely follows the sky
god's rules. This made monotheism much easier to sell, especially when
coupled with the offer of extra credit toward salvation for converting
others. It also made monotheism fantastically effective in motivating,
inspiring, controlling and ruling people. Fueled by the monotheists'
inexhaustible missionary zeal, in nearly 2,000 years this peculiar
ideology has spread throughout much of the globe.*
*Here in the high-tech futuristic 21st century, the punitive,
vengeful, sky god is as strong and legitimate as he's been in a long
time. Modernity, it turns out, was no cure for monotheism. If
anything, it increases extremism, especially -- but never only --
among the dispossessed. And now in the Middle East we have the
volatile blend of pissed-off Jews, Muslims, and Christians, each
convinced they possess an a iron-clad mandate from their one and only
angry god. Mixed in as well are many weapons, lots of oil, and the
dangerous, born-again idiocy of George W. Bush and other prominent
Republicans. All this is concentrated on the turf that monotheists
everywhere see as their origin, their home, their "holy land."*
*Present-day America's most popular form of lunatic monotheism --
fundamentalist, evangelical Protestantism (and especially end-of-days
Christianity with tens of millions of believers convinced that Jesus
is returning soon) -- is deeply obsessed with the holy land. Crazed
Christian fundamentalists love it when crazed Jewish warriors battle
it out with crazed Islamic warriors. The Pat Robertsons regard the
wars as win-win and ordinary believers see them as signs that the
saved will soon be lifted to heaven. Unfortunately, these
fundamentalist Christians now have enormous influence over the foreign
policy of the most powerful nation in the world.*
*Most monotheists want governments to punish people who fail to obey
some of the sky god's ascetic rules. Even moderate, middle-of-the-road
monotheists -- like the Roman Catholic Church -- pressure governments
to criminalize and punish homosexuality, drug use and abortion. The
large and growing numbers of Christian, Muslim and Jewish
fundamentalists have far grander ambitions.*
*Inevitably, some prominent believers turn out to have long been
hypocrites, liars and secret sinners -- adulterers, gamblers, drug
users, homosexuals. But hypocrisy poses no threat to the monotheists
who say the hidden sins demonstrate the awful power of the evils they
battle. The self-righteous condemn the sins, of course, but they
actually approve of the lies, insisting that "hypocrisy is the tribute
that vice pays to virtue -- to the one heavenly lord.*
*Monotheists, especially in scary and desperate times like our own,
easily hate other monotheisms and often loath variants of their own
brand. And while they have often been happy to butcher polytheists by
the wagonload, monotheists do not ordinarily hate polytheists (except
when armed and dangerous). Traditionally, monotheists have regarded
pagans as primitive or backward peoples who just don't know any
better. But they, the other monotheists and the apostates, do know
better, or should.*
*The historic battles within monotheism are legendary: Hebrews vs.
Christians, Sunnis vs. Shiites, Catholics vs. Protestants, Lutherans
vs. Calvinists, Church of England vs. dissenters, Puritans vs.
Baptists, and so many others. Currently some Islamic extremists have a
hard time deciding who they despise more: Is it the evil Christian and
Jewish heretics, or is it the evil Muslims heretics? So much heresy,
so little time.*
*For monotheism, it always comes down to heresy, to the rejection of
orthodoxy. Starting perhaps with Zoroastrianism, each monotheism
itself began as a heresy, instantly generating its own orthodoxy.
Heresy -- free thought and choosing to reject the rules -- is the
primal offense against the monotheists' conception, and love, of their
solitary deity.*
*The chief authoritarian ideologies of the 20th century were secular
and even anti-religious. They are not gone, but they are exhausted.
Now, in our global warming, nuclear bomb-loaded world, especially in
the United States and the Middle East, we face an older, far more
popular and durable ideology: the angry god as mandate and role model.*
*Like Mark Twain, Bertrand Russell and others before him, Sam Harris
insists that the basic premises and literal texts of monotheism are so
authoritarian and repressive that people who believe them also easily
and frequently support all sorts of other repressive causes. For
evidence, see the last 2,000 years of history, or tomorrow's newspaper. *
*
==============================================================
*
***" I'm thinking of a God very different from the God of the
Christian and the God of Islam, because both are depicted as
omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam Husseins." Philosopher
Antony Flew 1922 - . ***
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
Ugandanet mailing list
[email protected]
http://kym.net/mailman/listinfo/ugandanet
% UGANDANET is generously hosted by INFOCOM http://www.infocom.co.ug/
The above comments and data are owned by whoever posted them (including
attachments if any). The List's Host is not responsible for them in any way.
---------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
Ugandanet mailing list
[email protected]
http://kym.net/mailman/listinfo/ugandanet
% UGANDANET is generously hosted by INFOCOM http://www.infocom.co.ug/
The above comments and data are owned by whoever posted them (including
attachments if any). The List's Host is not responsible for them in any way.
---------------------------------------
