What does death mean to God?

We can start by recognising two things, however uncomfortable the very pious may find it to live with the knowledge.

Number one: All gods are human inventions. This does not mean that it is always wrong to worship them, or some of them, or one of them. Societies and whole civilisations are partly built on myths.

Once the complex cultural interests of a society describe the attributes of its god(s), and people begin to deify them, they are deemed to exist, and they gain their authority as gods, albeit sometimes very slowly.

Religion is the enterprise that manages and regulates the world of gods and their devotees. Number two: All religions start as cults. The great Abrahamic (so-called revealed) religions of our time are no exception.

Now, if all this stuff is by man’s thought processes and handiwork, why shouldn’t new gods and new religions grow in our midst in abundance? Why do new gods and new religions almost always sound hollow and false? Indeed, new gods and new religions are often regarded with suspicion and are thought to be potentially dangerous.

Why is establishing these new entities as hard as wiping out the old ones? Age and mystery may partly explain the paradox. Rather like with artistic creations in architecture, sculpture, painting and music, being ancient enhances the value of gods and religion.

The veils covering their exact origins and the length of their stories over the years bestow on them a kind of impersonal monumentality, a degree of cultural authenticity that a new god or religious faith cannot enjoy.

About two weeks ago, in Kagadi District, two panga-wielding brothers in their 30s, David Munyirambe and Obed Baguma, slaughtered 10 of their own family members (including their father and mother) for refusing to abandon the Seventh Day Adventist church and join their new faith, ‘God, Holy Spirit, Son, Man, Man’. The two brothers were subsequently shot by the security forces.

Grim as the story sounds, it is not the first and will not be the last on the African continent. Several thousand years before, when the Israelite (and Christian) God, Jehovah, was young, His prophets and the rulers who were designing and contesting to establish His supremacy were not strangers to barbarism.

While the Kagadi brothers killed 10 family members, Elijah slaughtered (or supervised the slaughter of) 400 of Baal’s prophets at the Brook Kishon in the days of King Ahab. Ironically, although Elijah had been ostensibly empowered by Jehovah to play the role of a miraculous/magical fire maker and anti-Baal executioner, the prophet could not quite trust the same God to protect him against Jezebel, who gave succour to Baal’s priests. So Elijah fled to hide from Jezebel’s wrath.

The old Christian traditions that were spread around the world by imperial powers have tamed and idealised God into a figure of compassion, mercy and benign but very limited power. God’s secular analogy is the glorified but relatively powerless constitutional monarchs in functioning democracies.

No serious thinker or lucid theologian expects God to perform miracles. The pedlars of new Christian cults are generally impatient with this quiescent God. 

They are imagining a God who can only be asserted by staged trickery, extreme devotee manipulation, blackmail and sometimes violence. This is the danger.

If the religious background becomes a generalised return to a primitive spiritualist ethos, it may be only a matter of time before Africa witnesses a catastrophe of biblical proportions. To a God in a state of divine rest, that will mean nothing.