COLLATERAL DAMAGE THROUGH RELIGION (3)

By NBF News

Around the world, especially in Nigeria, parents have had to battle their children taken to other religions. Parents have been said to bark out from attending their wards weddings for choosing another church or religion. Some parents actually preferred their children dead instead of bringing shame to the family by converting to another religion. Instances abound on this in Nigeria. When one takes a look at the numerous wars and internal strife within Africa, it dawns on you that 75 percent of them were religious- motivated crisis.

And globally, the issue bothering on religion and its attendant vice have often left many wondering why a mere belief and adherence should ever cause so much attention and destruction. Nigerians seeking employments into white-collar jobs and other assists from employers of labour and people in power, have had to battle this 'Monster' called religion. Most often, religion is considered before a job or contract is given favorably to the applicant. In some areas of Nigeria, they would prefer to give employment to a nurse, rather than employ a qualified medical officer from a different religion. Religious discrimination have eaten deep into our national fabric and thus affected us in all strata of life. Has religion taken the place of secret cults?

Today, the rest of the Middle East, would wish the Israeli State turn Islamic; or face the prospects of being 'Balkanized;' and 'exterminated;' as if the trouble with the Balkans was as a result of the application of the choice of religion. After all, were the Balkans a healthier people until they emerged from the ruins of the wicked and oppressive Ottoman Empire; which was unprogressive and retrogressive. Likewise, the Hausa-Fulani Islamic race would have wished the entire Nigerians turn Muslims, or Christians wishing, the Muslims could start professing Christ.

The federation of Nigeria is today as corrupt, as unprogressive and as oppressive and irreformable as the Ottoman Empire was, in Eastern Europe more than one and half centuries ago. And in contrast, the Nigeria Federation in the form it was constituted by the British, cannot by any stretch of imagination, be considered an African necessity. The British committed blunder in 1914. The monumental error at fusing and trying to harmonize 'the Islamic culture of the North,' with the 'Christian civilization of the South,' is the bane of her advancement and greatness.

Nigeria is stagnant! Today, we are being forced to sacrifice our very existence as a people to the integrity of that ramshackle creation that has no justification either in history or in the freely expressed wishes of the people – bringing to focus, the much Campaign for National Sovereign Conference. Nigeria's economic, religious and socio-political problems have been overtime, blamed on religion, greed and tribalism. Religion too has become a defect, and a vice. What an irony and an anticlimax!

The Prophet Mohammed said when he was forty years old, the same Angel Gabriel, which the Christians are very familiar with, especially on the account of the messages relayed to Joseph and Mary concerning Jesus, appeared to him, inside the cave asking him to become God's prophet.

Christians never doubted this, for a second. But, if this claim is anything to go by, does it not leave all Christians and Muslims world-wide on the cross-road, pondering over reality, with a feeling of shame and guilt that, we may have harmed, tortured, abused, or at least deliberately annoyed or insulted one another in the name of an 'alien' practice called Religion.