Religion On The Contemplation of Bad Havoc And Good Havoc

    Ben Okri has said this. Azaro, the spirit-child, has lived our life for us. All these rubbles, this grieving and sorrow, began from A Songs of Enchantment and didn’t end in arcadia. Nigeria. Azaro on a divining chain with a phantom came upon an existence where the workers worked eternally, their work denuded into sediments at near-completion. Azaro, an innocent monocle, questions this phenomenon. But the answer is the same for us all; this was, is, and will be. And I’ve resigned to fate. Unfortunately, fate – like fetishism – is overhyped, and in the Nigeria case, I’ve stopped believing in resignation to sacred or abstract identities and powers. This is our greatest suffering – my crudest realization.

    I’ve come to learn of things that come in double entendres, in opposites, in imageries of death and life, of pain and pleasure, of agony and eudemonia. In contemplation, in intangible presences, an animate discussion suffuses between the duos. Unlike generalissimos, this has no interregnum. There’s only loss, and win. The wins are atypical, and unaccepted. Because to win is to be a coward; to accept the other, to reimagine life as it ought, and in common cases to come against the sacred, belling the cat for humanity.

    To take the fall for the other person sometimes is to denounce religion; sometimes, it is to tackle the hope of paradise, which is unseen but felt, for the person, which is seen and felt. This results in the antagonism of love and religion, which connotes that, in any religious setup bound together by half-consciousness – or no consciousness at all – the pursuit of love, if it is not the end of the structure will inevitably result to the end of the people it seeks to make optimistic about the afterlife.

    Consequently, humanity will always be the opposite of religion. In that, religion requires raconteurs, requires people who are assumed into positions of immense power, whose evidence of good rulership isn’t ubiquitous. The priest, in religion, assumes full responsibility of God-like, and his rule is the rule of God whose existence isn’t bilaterally felt but fostered through refrain and imageries and the assumption of its reality. So in social protests, because his rule is reinforced by the recompense backed up with the crude imageries of hell, his desires are immediately the delicate wishes of God. And to fight for him is to fight for humanity; to fight for the unilateral existence of God.

 

    Humanity, on the other hand, can’t be manipulated. It is objectively felt. I know when I’ve done badly, and when I’ve done well. To do good in larger proportion is to be humane; but otherwise, is inhumane. Humanity is then rarely given a platform, because the human does not know how to control his wish to dominate, to be animal, to answer the call of the wild. And for violence to be legitimate, it has to come under the cover of religion. The façade of sacred power. The pretence of lust for power to lust for responsibility.

    Especially in a heterogeneous, highly religiocentric, setting as Nigeria, we seem to have ended up in a recurring orbital illusion – like a quicksand – and we try to wriggle up. But the way out is way in. Religion is with us, but it is above our love for humanity – and if any sacred power shall be responsible for the dilapidation of humanity, it will be summoned for questioning, and ought to be banished into the wild.

    In a setting as this, our problem – I find this necessary – ought to continue. Our questions ought to widen concurrently. Because in the questioning, the most reasonable answers are felt. In the division into blocs, the apogee of solidarity is realized.

    We want peace and war at the same time. Outward, we protest peace, profess tranquility, blame any outburst of violence on the unseen, and we conspicuously wage a false war against what we know as Satan – or Shelton. Inward, we house war: pulverization, disembowelment, death, desolation, doom. Nobody wants to acknowledge the want for violence to abstain being labeled the social criminal – enemy of the state. But this demon is there and in moments of loss, anger, sense of duty and responsibility, the restraining chains are loosened, wreaking havoc. A good havoc.

 

    An example is when you abuse my father. I will want to kill you. Why? Because by abusing my father, you have insulted any dignity I have, you have wreaked bad havoc. So as retribution, I ought to kill you. Though by the time I’m done with the killing, I realize I have to dig two graves: one for you, the other for my father – because he is dead too. Because most times we string our dignity and honor to things that initiate our destruct sequence; that elicit the feel of imposition, of a bad havoc. Those things which we hold dear – which we regard as the anchor of our restraint – those things which agitate for the harm or molestation of others, and not the improvement of our ethics of living, are solid illusions, and in these solid illusions Satan is clearly visible – or otherwise known in less-apocalyptic language as enemies of the state.

 

    One day a born-again Christian boy walks along an old path. He meets an old man adorn in fetish and kaoline and all manners of supernatural enhancements. And the old man says:

-         Your God is a fool. He teaches people nonsense. I’ve met him in ways you wouldn’t imagine.

    These words are eligible to warrant violent opposition, eligible to wreak a bad havoc. But what would be the essence of revolting against the effects of repression more than the causes? What is REVOLT if not a necessary violence to elicit a society free of strife and class dominance. It’s unwise, a violent reaction in such instance. To provide a solution is to imagine the cause and to work in line with a thesis. Will the ends of my violent reaction justify the means? Whose victory is it if the man is revolted? The child’s? Or God’s?

    The creation ought to not fight for the creator, or the sacred. The sacred fights for the profane, at most. Vice versa of this hypothesis is nothing than the perpetration of evil, the wreaking of bad havoc. And that is the only enemy of the state.

    Or if the child agitates. Then for what? No answer sufficiently counteracts. If the sacred needs warriors to agitate for its right to, and on earth, then are there no soldiers again beyond? Why would the sacred hide behind the ignorance of the profane – or specifically, why would the profane hide behind the abstraction of the sacred to necessitate their lust for power into generality? If the sacred will not fight for itself, then the profane must never fight for it. This is my philosophy of the pursuit of common peace.

    But you, my Nigerian friends, are wounded. You think cursing my father or my mother means their honor and dignity is tainted. No it isn’t. We only need to restructure our perspective of things; to realize the fundamental nature of inner worship of self to society, that protection of the other and society is beyond the worship of the supernatural that binds the empirical world.

 

    In conclusion, any religion or worship of the sacred by the profane, which supports the vanquishing of things or people perceived to be enemies is not acceptable and ought to be questioned. Consequently, the profane can desert the sacred in search of humanity. And if you, the profane, thinks identification with the sacred is reasonable than with humanity, then we have a problem – the eyes cannot see beyond the nose; the love for the sacred has outdone the essence. We continually wreak havoc. Bad Havoc!