Prime
Sinful pastors are still pastors
Author: Alan Tacca. PHOTO/FILE
What you need to know:
- One pastor has sacrificed his landlord’s child in a ritual murder.
You do not have to be a scholar in comparative religion to observe how the minds of our pastors and witchdoctors operate in very similar ways.
Listening to our pastors daily castigate witchdoctors as wicked agents of Satan, promoting themselves as the holiest agents of Jesus in our midst, the average consumer of religious stuff is usually deceived that the pastors are doing something diametrically opposed to the witchdoctor’s work.
In many African traditions, the priest is often also a diviner, herbalist and witchdoctor.
As priest, his rituals appease the god(s) or spirit(s). Thus rendered well-disposed, the gods/spirits exercise their supernatural power through the priest.
The key issue is supernatural power, both benevolent and malevolent. The Pentecostal/Born Again pastor does not deny the witchdoctor’s power. He actually promotes it, telling his congregation every day that the witchdoctor’s power is real and evil, but assures them that his (the pastor’s) power is both greater and anti-evil, and it is from Jesus or the Holy Spirit.
Without that power, which (supposedly) drives the phenomena of witchcraft and miracles, the pagan African priest and the Christian pastor are helpless.
All successful pastors and witchdoctors are client manipulators, and in varying degrees occult/dark art illusionists. In that sense they are frauds, but some actually believe that the supernatural power they claim is ‘real’.
On the cosmological scale, a modest witchdoctor’s shrine and a huge pastor’s church are equally insignificant.
The size and natural power of the universe are in fact far bigger than the imagined supernatural power of anthropocentric gods, including the biblical Deity.
That is why you cannot ritually influence the path of a killer storm or pray away a volcanic eruption.
As if to outshine the Kenyan pastor who starved hundreds of his followers to an early tenancy in Heaven, Uganda’s pastors have been on something of a spree.
One pastor has sacrificed his landlord’s child in a ritual murder. Another has married a second wife, joining one with four to blow up the polygamy taboo.
Meanwhile, a pastor in the Kitende/Kajjansi area, has a novel scheme that he encourages his followers to shock-spread on social media. And it is straight from the witchdoctor and illusionist’s handbook of wizardry.
To cure persistent or chronic conditions afflicting his followers, he purports to extract all kinds of small animals and objects from inside their bodies.
From the private parts of a woman with fibroids, the pastor might pop out a small snail shell, the supposed cause of her discomfort!
At his Impact FM/Dream TV talk show last Sunday, the Victory Church honcho, ‘Apostle’ Joseph Serwadda, castigated our newspapers for referring to all these fraudsters as pastors.
Serwadda’s moral hubris is sometimes astonishing. According to him, Born Again people, especially when they are pastors, do not sin or commit crimes.
However, virtually every day at his own church, he purports to exorcise demons and ‘untie’ or demolish evil ‘things’ that plague his clients.
Investigations show that it is mostly the same clients/worshippers he is cleansing or liberating.
What are these demons that flee and return every Sunday and every day to trouble the same ‘saved’ clients who do not sin or commit crimes?
Are the demons less false than Mbabazi’s physical extractions only because they are abstract concoctions?
On Uganda’s scene, how many pastors, apostles or prophets are not self-appointed? How many are not frauds? How many have not incorporated enhanced pagan elements in their pulpit craft? How many are not killing Jesus for Mammon?
Alan Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.
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