Prime
As God rests, Kenyan cult kills
Author: Alan Tacca. PHOTO/FILE
What you need to know:
‘‘ Carry your burdens with intelligence and earn all the credit, or stumble and fall”
As God’s dog, patrolling places where He is the nominal Lord of Everything, I sniff and detect many foul souls.
As you have heard, God helps those who help themselves.
Our (pre-Christian) African traditions also abound with proverbs and fables affirming that their gods did the same.
However, there is something relatively new in our civilisation; the retreat of God into a quiescent state, which should be a welcome development. Why; because if God, or the gods generally, can deliver nothing on their own, their role in human affairs is at best dubious.
This allows God to enjoy His rest, retaining His omnipotence as the Lord of everything only in a metaphorical sense, with humans working on their destinies in the circumstances where they find themselves.
Recognising that God is in a state of rest greatly clarifies the human condition, making men squarely face their world.
Carry your burdens with intelligence and earn all the credit, or stumble and fall in the dust as degraded creatures.
Now, for various reasons, there are times when those burdens are too heavy and too many, imposing on us a sense of doom. This can happen to individuals or to whole nations.
Today, with the West being tested by Russian barbarism; with turmoil, hunger and economic distress in Sudan and many other parts of Africa; with storms and earthquakes devastating so many lives, it is easy to despair, or to yearn for some kind of divine or magical intervention to stop the suffering.
Unfortunately, the recognition that God is in a state of rest, and that most other gods are comatose, is not universal. Many people, especially Africans, still pray until they are hoarse, turning their faces and stretching their arms upward.
They scream like wild animals. They howl and twist their tongues like witchdoctors, conjuring supposed effects of an invading Holy Spirit and the death of demons.
In extreme weirdness, they see the Divine. When God is quiescent, they peddle the exact opposite about His condition, telling the gullible that He is in a state of super-activity.
They come in ‘charismatic’ shades of Christian spiritualism. Demon worshippers masquerade as prophets and apostles. Merchants of death masquerade as pathfinders to the Redeemer.
As the ongoing hunt for the brainwashed victims of Pastor Paul Mackenzie Nthenge and his Good News International Church in Kenya uncovers hundreds who are dead or starving, questions about unlimited freedom of worship are louder. But they will subside. The quest for rational thinking is more effective than government laws.
Occasional spells of fasting may bring some health benefits. But prolonged fasting in Abrahamic religions reflects the negation of gluttony, establishing the most intimate expression of self-deprivation, the denial of food, as a form of religious observance leading to a higher level of spiritual connection with God.
Because Pastor Nthenge does not know that God is resting and, therefore, indifferent to his enterprise, he taps into this ancient ascetic theme.
In his madness, the pastor devises to save his followers from this wretched world and fast-track them to salvation by imposing the harshest regime: Fast until you die and instantly enter Heaven.
Suddenly, the Pastor’s Good News International Church looks like very bad local news for Kenya, its 800 acres of land now a sprawling graveyard.
I often hear some of Uganda’s prominent pastors painting pictures of a wretched world and toying with the idea of End Times. They want to sound urgently relevant. As God’s dog, I know that a wise nation ignores them at its peril.
Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.
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