God. Who?

Would you serve God if Hell didn’t exist?

If you are the type with zero tolerance for this sort of ‘loose’ thinking euphemistically labelled ‘free thinking’, you probably have me tagged already as a troublemaker for posing this question let alone thinking it. You’re probably also convinced I’m bound for the hottest parts of Hades.

Maybe you are right. Anyway, lets allow God be the judge of that, shall we?

World religions generally follow an identical system of rules and principles based on reward for good behaviour and the opposite for misconduct. Whatever the label, the underlying concept remains the same: ‘Heaven’ for the goodly and ‘Hell’ for the erring; Earth automatically acquiring the intermediate status of a ‘Middle Earth’ [pun intended] like processing hub/orb where the chaff gets trashed.

This tit for tat dynamic I would like to tag the ‘bogeyman effect’ is uncannily omnipresent in human structures everywhere on the planet: in schools, the workplace, relationships, society as a whole. It’s the standard to train the world, maintain normalcy and sustain civilisation as we have it and it starts with telling every child a bedtime story about the bogeyman…

Even with this tried and trusted system, we still have delinquents; societal misfits etc. who somehow hack around the bogeyman effect and go against society. However alarming this might be from time to time, it is reassuring that such a structure is existent.

Basically, the ‘Devil’ is the afterlife’s bogeyman and Hell is his place where those who have angered God will go.

         

It is an overarchingly nice proposition and by design structured to cause a reasonable deficit for the Devil.I especially get riled up when I read of or listen to preaching along the lines of hell, brimstone, and damnation. From experience, such preachers and preaching have little to do with a God of love or forgiveness and more to do with fear of an unforgiving megalomaniac being. Such experiences always leave me wondering about God and Hell; love and fear.

Questions like: ‘would mankind serve God without the threat of hell fire?’

‘Is love greater than fear?’

‘Does hell exist?’

‘Is there a God somewhere just waiting to put his creations in it?’

Questions I still don’t have conclusive answers to.

Maybe like the Jedi saying ‘There are questions to which we can never have answers. We can only be answers’ and we have to die a ‘death’ to unravel these mysteries.

To attempt the first question above, in all fairness I think if I would serve a God at all without the threat of Hell, it would be way different. Less routine and more similar to plain adoration than what is currently de rigueur. All this is hypothetical, don’t take me serious please.

I think the brimstone brand of every religion while effective in enshrining a bogeyman culture and training adherents to conform inadvertently breeds overzealousness, religious intolerance, and fanaticism. My sentiments on this is simple; ‘God’s not dead. If you have to fight for your God, there’s need to rethink who is creator and who is creation’.

In submission, I believe the entity God is many and the same thing: Nature, The Big Bang, The Cosmic energy physicists study; The Life biologists continuously attempt to decipher, God is us.

Yet the God of the Old Testament, The Quran, New Testament; Supreme Deities worshipped by our ancestors etc. may be near impossible or difficult to reconcile with the neo-God we now serve due to obvious and gaping dissimilarities. So, does God change over the times or has God changed?

Forgive my manners but I may need to employ some question dodging here by answering the above question with another which is ‘Do humans change?’

If your answer is the same as mine, perhaps it may be safe to infer that humans over the ages have been serving the same entity and possibly due to alterations in their cognitive, intuitive and intellectual composition evolved varying perceptions of the said being, recorded this in scriptures and unwittingly created the many-faced god [again, pun intended] we currently know.

Thanks for reading.

Valar Morghulis.

He was starving to death

He realised late

Ignored to invisibility

His new best friend, Paranoia

In his ears

Loneliness ever cooing comfort

So, the first time he had a thousand likes

Two thousand hearts

Three hundred retweets

He fainted and passed on

And on his grave they wrote

“Here lies him who was killed by love”

Black

Giloba village

Good evening fellow sufferers

Or bad, should I say?

I see it all

Rumpled undies

Wet armpits

Forced to tears

By heat, exhaustion

And frustration

Auntie’s stretch-marks are stretched to a gory length

Giving out a scare-crow smile

Amused, no doubt they are

Why should one get a TV?

When Lagos streets are full of so much action?

I greet you too

My brothers and sisters

Towering above us in the BRTs

Looking down on the rest of us in all your ‘upright standing’

Thank you

For keeping Great Fela, prophetic since 1970

Su kere, fa kere, this is the song traffic sings

Yoruba seems to be the lingua

Everyone in this village speaks it

And then you hear ‘ko ni ye e!’

As a bumper kisses another

There’s too much to watch

One can hardly focus

Gala hawkers are making hay

Or to be more succinct, making money

There’s no place for hay in this village

A conductor’s still-born sputum finds home near a beggar’s niche

Hurriedly dying a slow death seconds into existence

Which should one pity?

The armless, harmless beggar

Or the sputum freed into death?

Cries of ‘wo le wa, wo le wa’ swims into my reverie

And several drivers re-enact ‘fast and furious’ in beautiful confusion

Alomo is somewhere in the system

And I suspect, doing most of the driving

None amongst us can complain of being hungry

Not with the heavy serving of stench and exhaust smoke

I see it in all eyes

We’re being fed

Till we’re fed up

All these stories I tell with my eyes to my fellow sufferers

But none seem to take hint

I do not blame any

Their eyes spin yarns of the same story

In this village, we all are beggars

Some are the “Jagaban’s” children

With blood-red eyes and a raggedy voice

Croaking “oun da?” at every stop

Other kinds will show you Heaven’s doors

If you’re kind enough to leave offering

You will meet also,

Those whose pills cure all ills

If you would but help yourself.

 

Appendix

BRTs are big commercial buses  which provide cheap transportation

Su kere, fa kere is the Yoruba way of describing heavy traffic.

ko ni ye e translates to “It won’t be well with you”

wo le wa, wo le wa means “enter here, enter here”

Alomo is a strong rum/gin like alcohol drink

A Jagaban is a very influential politician (LOL)

oun da is the “where is it?” touts ask when they request their daily devotion from commuters

Col' World

The World is a cold

Hard spinning globe

Indifferent to tears

If it would stop, just once

Then, I’d know it cares

Life must go on

Yes, but why it must

Dares no one say?

Or is Time to blame

For this Earth’s non-stop?

Time is harsh

The Watch constant reminds

Tick, tock, tock

When I’m happy, when I’m sad

Tick, tock, non-stop

Oh! If Night would once

But delay pomp

Of rising Sun

Then some comfort

I might have in gloom