By Chiedu Uche Okoye
What is Religion? Religion can be defined as a way by which a people
try to reach their gods or God. Religions are human creations.
However, not a few people believe that religions were founded by men
under the guidance and inspiration of God. And, almost all religions
in our today’s world have the doctrinal foundation of love as common
denominator. To the best of my knowledge, no holy books – whether
Koran or the Bible or Gita- contain teachings that encourage people to
perpetrate acts of wickedness such as murder, armed robbery, slander,
and others. Now, globally, we’ve many different religions, to wit
Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Shintoism, Christianity,
Islam, African Traditional Religion, and others.
Today, in Nigeria, Christianity and Islam are the two predominant
religions. And millions of Nigerians from diverse ethnic backgrounds
profess Christianity. Christians believe that Jesus Christ, the son of
God, is the ransom for our sins. And the Bible, which is the holy book
of Christians, says that those who exercise faith in the redemptive
death of Christ on the cross and abide by His teachings shall enter
the kingdom of God when they shed their mortal garments.
In the time past, Christian clerics always preached about righteous
living and holiness to their congregations. And they would inculcate
the virtues of charity, forbearance, temperance, and forgiveness into
adherents of the Christian faith. Not surprisingly, then, Christians
would exhibit good and exemplary behaviour. Righteousness was their
trade mark. And they became the beacon of hope in our vile and morally
depraved world.
However, sadly, with the passage of time, men of the cloth, especially
those of the Pentecostal hue, started espousing and enthroning the
message of prosperity above the teachings of love, righteousness, and
faithfulness. Nowadays, the founders of Pentecostal churches
glamourize ostentatious life styles, and despise poverty in all its
grotesque manifestations.
In those churches, the dirt-poor are despised and made to believe that
they are the scum and the accursed of the earth. But the Bible says
that we shall always have the poor among us. While the billionaire
church founders fly in private jets, a vast majority of members of
their churches wear disintegrating shoes and threadbare clothes. And
their faith-based schools were built with the money collected from
poor church members. Yet, the children of the poor cannot attend those
schools as school fees charged in those schools are priced beyond the
financial means of poor parents. What obtains in those churches is a
case of extreme wealth sitting side by side with abject poverty.
Again, the Pentecostal pastors are not exemplars of Jesus Christ’s
teachings. Most of them are religious mountebanks and spiritual
charlatans. In the name of being actuated by the Holy Spirit, they
deliberately utter gibberish and jabbering, which they call
glossolalia to beguile us into believing that they are true men of
God. In addition to this, they fleece unsuspecting members of their
churches of their hard-earned money and stage-manage miraculous cures
of people afflicted with terminal illness.
Worse still, debauched men of the cloth with fake piety prey on naïve
gauche female teenagers in their churches. Those ministers of God who
are supposedly the spiritual fathers of the gauche teenagers do take
advantage of them to deflower them. Recently, Busola Bakola, who is
married to a famous musician, alleged that the senior pastor of the
Commonwealth of Zion Assembly (COZA) deflowered her, and subsequently
raped her several times. The matter is still under Police
investigations.
But, it is not only Christian clerics who do hide under the cloak of
religion to commit atrocious deeds. Members of the Boko Haram group,
who are fired up and indoctrinated with distorted teachings of Islam,
have embarked on the mission of turning the north to an Islamic
theocratic state.
