“We, like the people of Israel, would like to name God. By naming God, we hope to get the kind of god we need;
that is, a god after our own likeness.” –Stanley Hauerwas
that is, a god after our own likeness.” –Stanley Hauerwas
|
Exhibit one:
I am in church on a sizzling Sunday morning. The fans do not seem to remember what they were made for. They are just loud, revolving blades blowing nothing. I am too uncomfortable to focus on the Pastor’s preaching. Bored, I look at the attentive faces of others in the congregation, wishing I could perform utmost devotion like they do. But I am exhausted. My attention is regained when it is time for us to pray. Who does not want blessings? Like everybody else, I rise to my feet and raise my hands; waiting for the Pastor’s word of prayers. And then, it happens: “Men, no matter how successful your wife is, may she never be as successful as You are. May you surpass her ten times over,” he declares in prayer, enthusiastic choruses of amen filling the air. “A woman who is more successful than her husband will not be humble. For it is written that the man is the head.” The men scream amen. And so do the women. * * * Who owns God? That is a question which has followed me around for as long as I can remember. At some point in the past, I had dismissed it as one of my passing obsessions; owing to unchecked flirtation with the radiant philosophies of freethinkers like Sam Harris and Friedrich Nietzsche. But now, I know my curiosity is not transitory – like black smoke, it has settled into things, darkened everything once bright and contaminated the essentials of my being. There are many mysteries I need demystified and I am afraid I will never truly be at ease until I find answers; or at least semblances of such. The major questions revolve around the same things: who is God? How can we know him? Or her? Or it? Is it plural? Who gets to define what God permits or forbids? For years now, I have declared a private war on religion. It is not that I do not believe in God – I have had personal encounters with the paranormal. The problem is that in man’s quest to define Them, They have been made into a distant, unknowable thing. I can no longer deny the need to redefine God for myself. And I find it lethargic – impossible, in fact – to rely on religion to help me reach this purpose. Religion, though beautiful in theory, has been and is being used to perpetuate some of the greatest injustices of mankind. How do we excuse the imperial bloodlust of Abrahamic evangelists terrorizing the world in the name of spreading their religions? How do we excuse the Islam-and Christianity-motivated wars of conquest that scarred our civilizations during the Middle Ages? How do we explain the ammunition given to colonial fiends by the Catholicized vision of liberating us, the freewomen and freemen [read: the satanic negroes]? Many bigots use passages of holy books to defend their hatred of and violence against other people. The oppression of women and queers the world over is tied to the ancient dictates of many religions; religions whose moral compasses are solely defined by the cultural strictures of the time and place in which they were founded, instead of being transcendent across time and cultures; religions which contain absurd superstitions attempting to explain the unknown world before science could arrive on the scene. Many groups of people have claimed ownership of God, making claims about what They would want: the skin shade They prefer, the kind of love They permit, the gender They say is superior, what sex position They want couples to involve themselves in. People reduce God to their own biases and spread that version of Them as the ultimate truth to the rest of the world. And because I refuse to be a helpless victim of social programming, I will not blindly buy into religions invented by men thousands of years before now; men who probably had less knowledge about the maddening complexities in humanity than I do. Yes, I am terribly arrogant. And it is exactly that arrogance, that refusal to respect any bullshit presenting itself as sacred in the name of religion, that will save me. First of all, the notoriety of religion rests on its numerousness. Most of us only identify with the religion of the families we are born into. And that is a tragedy, isn’t it? Being born into a Christian family, for me, is just an incidental consequence of random selection. Why, then, should I defend Christianity as the ultimate religion, when I know that I could have just as well been born into a Muslim family, in which case the teachings of Prophet Mohammed would become my gospel? My father was a casual Christian-identifying man who seemed to have a lot of reverence for the Yoruba traditional belief system. My mother is a Muslim-turned-Christian by virtue of marriage. This religion is not in my blood. Like everyone else, it is passed down to me through the instrument of conditioning. It is necessary then to detach from accidental affiliations I have not chosen for myself. Each religion makes a very distinct statement about the mind of God, claiming to have cracked the code on that most spiritual of matters. By logic, only one religion, if any at all, can be absolutely right. If so, then virtually all religions are empty creations of men, devoid of the true will for humanity—if that were to even exist. They simply created God in their own image. If they believe women are inferior, they will include it in their holy texts as the divine word. If they are convinced slavery is justifiable, they will include a passage of a religious figure endorsing it. Once again, if all of this is factual, then how do I know I have not been born into one of the forged religions? The only way to know the truth in the end is to look at the world through the lens of my humanist morality, my belief in the dignity and freedom of every human being. I have to define God for myself. And I have stopped looking to religion to do that for me. I do not believe that God could be male. I am certain the use of the masculine pronoun for Them is per the patriarchal linguistic configuration of the cultures in which the religions arose. It is an idea springing from equating masculinity with superiority. How does a supernatural, ethereal being like God even have a gender? My friend, Oyin, says that when she thinks of God as “him”, she feels this uncomfortable distance. She has since resorted to identifying God as “her” in order to refuel the connection between them. She is a woman, after all. If patriarchal men would pin God to the gender they would prefer, then she would do the same. For me, I am no longer labelling God in masculine or feminine terms. I have made the decision to name God only in gender-neutral terms. My God is a They/Them. That is the only attribution that makes sense to me. While many people envision God as a bearded white man, I only see a hovering cloud. |
Let me be clear: I love God with a riotous passion. That is exactly what motivates my quest to find Them, avoiding being conned by the endless vulgarity passed down in the countless holy books in Their name. If your god is a misogynistic, racist, trigger-happy idol who wants you to maltreat people who are treated differently, then I respectfully reject your god. If your god is a projection of your flawed self, then I respectfully reject your god. Was it not Xenophanes who once said that if bulls could invent their own gods, they would have horns too? The Yoruba gods are fat-nosed, dark-skinned deities with tribal-marked cheeks. The Greek gods are white, curly-haired divinities with the same indulgences as the Greek people. The Jewish god will murder and maim any tribe to defend the Jews. If your god does not go beyond you, are they real?
Exhibit Two: We are split into groups in PHI 105 class. Prof. Oyeshile asks each group to choose its own leader. Group C picks BK, easily the most intelligent person in the group. I admire her. She gives the most spectacular presentations. She seems the obvious choice. She is the obvious choice. “She cannot be the leader.” It is FD who says this. I ask him why not. “A lady cannot be the leader where I am.” I am confused. How does that make any sense? Why? “It is against my religion.” Ah yes. Smart FD. Loveable FD. Friendly FD. It takes me sometime to understand the wretched words coming out of his mouth. But then I have seen the best of men turn mindless sheep by the power of faith. One moment he is rational, the next he is aggressively idiotic. What a bloody miracle! Hallelujah. Allāhuak bar. الله أكبر. BK relinquishes the position to him, for the sake of peace, or the greater good. Or some similar bullshit. * * * How do we get over the explicit permission many religions give for genocide? We often claim, in the spirit of pretentious political correctness, that to interpret these grievous acts of intolerance and bigotry encouraged by our most popular religions is to read them out of context. But that is just not true. In clear terms, our religious texts preach the alienation of divergent faiths, hatred of those who don’t fit into heteronormative gender binaries and the subjugation of women; defining the value of a woman in her subservience, in her willingness to be silenced and erased and tamed and humbled. “All religions are obsessed with my vagina”, a quote by Egyptian firebrand feminist, Mona Eltahawy comes to mind when I think about the discomforting preoccupation with women’s bodies rife within many religions. If a woman is clothed scantily and a man gets lustful thoughts about her, it is the woman’s fault. The man is not expected to exhibit self-control. The whole world is a garden belonging to man, anyway. If he eats the forbidden fruit, it is the woman’s fault for misleading him. Is it, then, a surprise that most of the religious texts are written accounts of men who claim to have got these misogynistic moral codes from God “himself”? Perhaps, it’s just a coincidence? I think not. My war with religion is an intertribal one. I am not apart from the average faithful in the core of belief — I also feel a God essence in my veins—but it is in the manipulation of God’s image to fit into some preconceived idea of a biased, deeply unjust socially-constructed reality which is particularly exasperating. Still, I confess: my faith is an ongoing war. It is one thing to believe for certain that a god [or gods] has to exist. It is another thing entirely to claim that it is the version sold by my religion which is right. I can only pick for myself which one works. And my choice is one of a constant questioning. I identify as Christian, not because of my accidental birth into a family of faith, but because of all the religions I have come across, it is the only one which has at its core a character who represents for me, the embodiment of all things good. While stories of apocalyptic floods, demonized women and undying deities are not particularly original—and I consciously edit out some parts of the Bible [there are too many inconsistencies and factual inaccuracies keenly contested by historians]—I believe the overarching narrative remains practicable. Still, I confess: my faith is an ongoing war. It is one thing to believe for certain that a god [or gods] has to exist. It is another thing entirely to claim that it is the version sold by my religion which is right. I can only pick for myself which one works. And my choice is one of a constant questioning. * * * I give you the image of a non-binary rock star. You know them. The whole world knows their name. Their music resides on every tongue. And every night when they sing on stage, our ecstatic voices erupt and merge into a melodious chorus of fire, burning desperately, trying to match their sonic light. Their words built kingdoms and birthed flesh out of dust and dry wood. The evidence of their soul is in their creation, their celestial discography. I have never met them personally but their music surrounds me. I feel connected to them through their music. I will never know what they like to have for dinner or their favorite Pokémon. I will never see into their mind. But that is alright. Our relationship will always be one of half-mystery, half-familiarity. My God is exactly like that. I will never fully know them, how Their mind works, but that is part of the beauty of loving a mysterious being. Through Their creation, the beauty of Their cosmic legacy, I feel Their essence. My faith is a private worship of my own. My God is a non-binary rock star; a genderless, colorless being with a message of love and light and empathy. And I see a little bit of God in everybody. I see a little bit of God in me. Isn’t that just a magnificent thought? To have tiny little deposits of the divine coursing through your veins. |
Kanyinsola Olorunnisola is a poet, essayist, and writer of fiction whose work interrogates anxiety, broken lineage, [in]sanity, grief, and the black body as a warfront — you know, typical stuff happy people write about. He is the author of the chapbook In My Country, We're All Crossdressers (Praxis, 2018). He is very, very famous on Twitter, where he spends his pastime tweeting about the socialist revolution and all that jazz to his 32 miserable followers: @K_tops