Awash with Gods; slaves to Christianity

Gerard McGrath in ‘The Pontiff Pontificates’ (Inside Time May 2009) exposes so succinctly the dangerous and ill-conceived responses of some of our religious leaders to the African crises of poverty, HIV/AIDS, economic disadvantage and other social ills that it beggars belief the Catholic hierarchy, as pointed out by Gerard, should advocate that abstinence from sex and marital fidelity are the remedies to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS. This patronising and condescending nonsense must rank as the most naïve advice and can only come from those who rely on superstition in their daily lives, and are forever protected from the harsh realities of life behind the obscenely wealthy and arguably out of touch Catholic institution known as the Vatican.

I would go even further than Gerard, who argues that the Pope was wrong to offer his own prescription to halt the pandemic of HIV/AIDS which might be advice better aimed at so-called celibate Catholic priests than a troubled continent.

Africa does not need such ill-informed advice from a servant of God. In fact Africa needs many things … and God or the Pope is not one of them, and least of all the Catholic Church; for wherever the Catholic Church is strongest (South America, Africa and the heavily populated Philippines) so too is poverty, illiteracy, infant mortality rates and the lack of any meaningful healthcare provisions.

Women in the poorest economies who have child after child with no realistic chance of upholding what is expected of the meaningful maintenance family life, because of the Catholic Church’s ban on contraception, inflict the heaviest toll on community life where we see significant numbers of children being subjected to malnutrition, disease and early death; and what we get from the Church is, ‘it’s God’s will and Africa needs God’.

Which God does Africa need? Is it a tribal God? Africa has thousands of them. Or the Jewish God? Or the Christian God? Or the Islamic God? Which deity does the Pope think Africa needs? None! In fact Africa is awash with Gods.

The early missionary movement in Africa claimed that they were carrying out God’s work and sought to convert as many as possible to Christianity, whilst the latter day missionaries tell the ‘converted’ that the provision of a water pump in an isolated village is evidence of God at work. No it is not. It might be the result of one of many humanitarian projects carried out by non-religious groups which have impacted in a positive way on the lives of Africans; and missionaries who take up teaching in African villages do not allow Africans to think for themselves or to exercise and express their individual curiosity and thought. They educate Africans to become slaves to Christianity and to accept blindly and not to question or challenge Christianity’s God in areas where people are poor, in desperate need and illiterate, and thus prone to being indoctrinated and exploited.

Whilst missionary hospitals do indeed heal the sick, they also kill by denying women the rights to abortion and to reproductive health services, and it is important to note that in these hospitals the sick are healed using scientific means, not prayers or some so-called ‘power of God’, and water is provided by installing water pumps using modern technology and not by some hocus-pocus Catholic dogma.

Such dogma has achieved very little in the lives of Africans except to replace one organised superstitious system with another, and with modern day witch-hunts, sanctioned and sanctified by the Church, we see sexism, the persecution of gays, the right to contraception and abortion all used as a means of control – to keep people subjugated and disempowered.

What Africa needs is good governance; good infrastructure; good roads; good schools, colleges and universities. Africans need sound education and training that would help them to think, create, criticise, debate, invent and innovate freely; but most of all it needs freedom and this includes a free society, a free mind, free will and free expression of intelligence and reasoning, not superstition or the kind of advice from the Vatican that shackles their minds and chains their intellect.

This, not the Catholic Church, is what Africa needs and then and only then might we see a decrease in the HIV/AIDS pandemic which is causing so much devastation to the lives of millions of Africans.

The Pope’s solution proves only one thing; that it’s often religion which is the bar to human progress and advancement, and rather than be seen as the solution, as he would argue, it is often the problem.