HOW RELIGION HAS ENSLAVED NIGERIAN MINDS: PASTOR ADEBOYE'S POST HOC RATIONALISATION AS A PRIME EXAMPLE

As usual, a lot of religious garbage has been flying around during the Covid-19 outbreak. Ranging from people being told not to be afraid of the virus, to outright floutings of government protocols for containment and curation, to very ridiculous claims about a state in West-African Nigeria that only began to exist in 1991 being recorded in a middle-Eastern Jewish book of legends allegedly written by goatherders thousands of years ago, we have heard it all. But nothing caught my attention quite like the pathetic, sordid claims of Pastor Enoch Adeboye, the general overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God.

Earlier this year, Pastor Adeboye had come up, as he and other "prophets" always do, with a series of predictions that God had allegedly given him for the year 2020. He had claimed in this set of predictions that it was going to be a "year of joy and series of victories" for his church members. He also notably said that "sin is becoming rampant" and that for this reason there was going to be a lot of "earthquakes in many places where there had never been before," "changes of government" and other similarly mundane things. However, spectacularly, the current wave of the Covid-19 pandemic was conspicuous by its absence from this set of predictions. If he was being inspired by God and was being given information about what was going to happen ahead of time, how come God left out warnings about the most significant event of the early parts of the year?

Anyway, Covid-19 is upon us, and it is spreading across the world faster than a wildfire. As of the time of writing, there had been over 330,000 cases reported globally, with 14,000 deaths. Nigeria had reported a total of 31 cases at this time, with no deaths on record. If an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God was speaking to Pastor Adeboye, we would expect him to have communicated about the coronavirus outbreak to him and told us to be prepared for it specifically. But alas, we heard no such thing in his new-year prophecies.

But in perhaps the most egregious case of post hoc rationalisation I have ever seen, Pastor Adeboye said recently that God had, in fact, told him about the Covid-19 outbreak, but he had declined to tell the world about it. According to Pulse NG, Pastor Adeboye said:

“[God] told me loud and clear that the whole world will be on compulsory holiday. I knew the time the world got close to a compulsory holiday was when there was an attack on the World Trade Centre in America. So when he said the whole world is going to be on compulsory holiday, I thought something like that was going to happen as it happened during 9/11 and if somebody had prophesied it. When it happens, the Interpol will come and pick up the person and say you heard about the plot. You knew when they were planning this thing and you didn’t speak so I kept my mouth shut. Now, the compulsory holiday is here.”

But this is only coming after the event had already happened. It’s what we all do. You're asked, say, to guess someone's age. You say, “25.” The person says, “You’re wrong. It's 23.” And then you respond, “Oh, I was going to say that, but I just decided to toy with other numbers first.” That is exactly what perhaps the most famous M.O.G. in Nigeria just did and will get away with.

If this is not a classic example of post hoc rationalisation, I don't know what else is!

However, it is not Pastor Adeboye's embarrassingly obvious goof and face-saving attempt that worries me. It is the fact that Nigerians have given these men of God so much confidence, so much temerity, to say just about anything to them. Nigerians have given these men the boldness to lie to them with no consequence coming out of it. Pastors, prophets and other spokespersons of this invisible entity who never bothers to show himself directly to the ones he allegedly loves (at least not in any independently verifiable way) have been given a primal seat in the hearts of Nigerians. They are allowed to lie and get away with it. They are allowed to toy with the intellects of our parents and youths, who are the future leaders. They are allowed to manipulate and flutter about with the minds and intellect of the Nigerian people in the most emasculating of ways. Nigerians are now effectively at their beck and call. In a nutshell, they have mentally enslaved the people. 

This is one reason why I always say that religion is mental slavery. People's minds have been tethered to the opinions of these men. Many people quite literally cannot live, think, act or do anything of note without them getting approval from "Daddy G.O." or some equivalent of his from another ministry. And the mental bondage is so strong that, regardless of what these men say, regardless of how contorted and disjointed their theories are, regardless of how false and ridiculous their claims are, regardless of how obvious the failures of their predictions are, regardless of how vacuous their contributions to actual problems are, and regardless of how condescending they treat their members' intellect, their church members will always pay prime obeisance to them. 

We are in troubling times, a scientific age that sometimes looks and feels like a throwback to the Stone Age, and the only way forward is to promote proper education to children and youths, to get rid of religious indoctrination, and to teach critical and logical thinking skills.