La Raison

We were interviewed for the January 2012 edition. 

Examples:

1. Should I invest in this business scheme?
2. Should I buy this car?
3. Should I vote for this politician?
4. Should I try this herbal treatment for my illness?
5. Should I pray for a miracle?

Still, we often make bad decisions. Why?

It could be because there are roadblocks we’ve erected in our minds that prevent us from examining all the evidence objectively, or impartially, prior to forming beliefs. These mental roadblocks might be pre-existing beliefs that have been informed by culture, religion, political/social ideologies, personal prejudices, peer pressure, etc.

Having these mental roadblocks is one problem; the other problem is not knowing that you have those mental roadblocks. But perhaps the worst problem of all is not acknowledging that as human beings all of us are susceptible to having these mental roadblocks, at any given time. Acknowledging this should compel us to structure our thinking in such a way as to minimise, as much as possible, the degree to which these mental roadblocks might impede our ability to think objectively.

We should be willing to evaluate all kinds of information, including information that might go against what we currently believe about something, without allowing our mental roadblocks to interfere with that evaluation process. We also need to train ourselves to be able to use logic effectively – and to consistently use it when trying to make inferences about what it is we are forming beliefs about.  This, in a nutshell, is what it means to think critically.

Edward M. Glaser in his 1941 book  “An Experiment in the Development of Critical Thinking” describes critical thinking as:

A persistent effort to examine any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the evidence that supports it and the further conclusions to which it tends.

Youtuber Qualia Soup explains what critical thinking is in this video:

As a freethinker, I advocate for the application of critical thinking across the board, on all issues, and I also encourage people to be consistent in their application of it. Indeed, I often have to remind myself to be consistent as well, because I know that mental roadblocks can pop up anytime, and unbeknownst to me, some might already be lurking about in my mind.

It is not easy to consistently apply critical thinking – but there is great value in striving to be as consistent as is humanly possible in our application of it.

THE DISCUSSION

In a world where all kinds of people are offering all kinds of get-rich-quick schemes or miracle cures for all kinds of ailments, it greatly helps to be a critical thinker. A person who applies critical thinking will be less likely to lose money to professional con-artists fall prey to medical quackery. He or she will also be able to do a better job of analyzing problems and finding solutions to them. People who think critically will probably make better  business/investment decisions as well, as compared to people who don’t.

From a social perspective, a good critical thinker is also less likely to hold prejudices that would prompt him or her to discriminate against people on the basis of race, tribe, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. He or she will also be less likely to engage in extreme forms of religious expression that are detrimental to their well-being, and the well-being of others.

What we’d like to discuss at the upcoming Freethinkers’ Night is HOW to communicate CRITICAL THINKING to the general public.

How do we encourage people to apply critical thinking, and to apply it consistently, in their lives? How do we get people to recognize that their mental roadblocks might be preventing them from thinking objectively?

Let’s discuss.

This is a crucial issue for us, as it touches on what we consider to be our mandate as Freethought Kampala, which is:

Promoting Reason in a Highly Superstitious Society

Much of our focus for the last two years has been mainly to apply critical thinking in the evaluation of popular mystical/religious claims that abound in this country’s spiritual landscape – because there was simply nobody doing it. We acknowledge that the scope for critical thinking is much wider than this, but for strategic reasons we initially chose to narrow our focus to an area which we felt was completely being neglected in the national discourse. Perhaps at this meeting we might also talk about this focus, and whether or not we should broaden it.

The January 2012 Freethinkers’ Night will take place on Thursday, 26th January, at 4 Points Bar & Restaurant, Centenary Park, Kampala, starting 6PM. Entrance is FREE.

If you are an open minded person whose opinions are formed on the basis of science, logic, and reason and are interested in meeting like-minded individuals – you are more than welcome to join us.

Oh, and we’ll also be marking 2 years of Freethought Kampala as well!

If you are an open minded person whose opinions are formed on the basis of science, logic, and reason and are interested in meeting like-minded individuals – you are welcome to join us for our end of year party.

Just one thing, though…

Everyone’s buying their own drinks.

I dug up some photographs from my recent trip to the UK. I thought I’d share with you some interesting things I saw in the city of Cardiff while I was there.

From afar it looked like a church:

Closer inspection revealed that it was actually a shop!

Care for Durex condoms? No problem…

…just check right below the hookah (sheesha pipe).

This shop actually used to be a Presbyterian Church, once upon a time. People stopped going, and it got sold off.

Now it’s a shop.

Related posts:

• UK/Ireland Speaking Tour – Day #2 – Cardiff

Our news department had the idea of doing some kind of ‘special’ for Christmas during their news bulletins – where they’d present some background to the origins of Christmas, analyse its significance for Christians, and ask various people how they plan on celebrating it.

Today they aired the first in this series of specials, and their first interviewee was an atheist you might know. He talks about his understanding of the origins of Christmas, and why he plans on joining in the celebrations, even though he is a non-believer.

I’m in the mood for sharing; it’s Christmas, after all, right? So here’s the audio, just for you .

The article deviates from the familiar defeatist attitude many religious leaders in Uganda have about corruption, where they urge Ugandans to rely on ‘God’ to save them from corruption, since, in their minds, all other approaches seem to be offering no solution because ‘Satan’ probably has his hand in it. The Archbishop instead appears to call for religious introspection:

The best our government can do – the IGG, the Anti-Corruption Court, laws passed by Parliament and enforced by our police and other agencies – is to give us moral and civil speed governors, external rules that are followed by us only because the police force or parliamentary investigative committees have been expanded to put fear into our hearts and ensure our compliance and proper behavior.

But, God said through the Prophet Jeremiah in the Old Testament, “The time is coming when I will make a new covenant…It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers….This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel…I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts.”

In other words, my fellow Ugandans, we must acknowledge that the problem beneath our rampant corruption, witchcraft, child sacrifice, domestic violence, and immorality is the problem of a sinful human heart.

Only Jesus, whose laws of love are written on our hearts because he lives in our hearts, can solve this problem Only acknowledging our human problem of a corrupt heart will lead us to the ultimate and true solution to our problems – Jesus – because his name still means “he will save people from their sins.”

I guess what he’s trying to do here is to appeal to Christians to clean up their act by recognizing that they are ‘sinners’. Corruption is ‘sin’. So by accepting Jesus and turning away from such ‘sin’, then everything will be okay and there will be no more corruption.

Of course this is a rather simplistic approach to dealing with the problem of corruption in Uganda – one that does not take into account the cultural and economic realities on the ground (vis-à-vis our all-too-rapid transition from a historically traditional African society to a pseudo-democracy) that give rise to the conditions that make nepotism and patronage inevitable.

As for witchcraft, the Church is doing a rather fantastic job of promoting, and reinforcing extant cultural beliefs about its efficacy, isn’t it? With magical thinking as the driving force of Christian theology (and more so among the charismatics/born-agains), the church is very much complicit in validating the irrationality that is witchcraft in this country.

Anyway, this post isn’t intended as a point by point critique of Orombi’s article, but rather to bring attention to the fact that Peter Kisirinya, chairman of the Uganda Humanist Association, wrote a response that was published three days later, also in the Monitor, titled: Uganda is a Christian-dominated nation but why the corruption?:

The Archbishop suggests that belief in Jesus as Saviour is the only important thing. But evidence shoes that this belief alone is neither necessary nor sufficient to improve our society. The Archbishop says of Jesus that “he will save people from their sins”. But we are the ones who must save ourselves. If we pray, that is fine, but we must also act. If we believe, that is okay, but we must also be good. If we worship Jesus, fair enough, but we must also respect our fellow humans beings regardless of their religious beliefs.

Anyone can say they believe in any religion, but what matters is their personal integrity. Do they respect what is fair and just? Do they want to empathise and understand other people? Do they contribute positively to society? The world is learning that these are the important questions.

Whether we happen to believe in the divinity of an ancient Nazarene preacher is one thing and it is easy to say that you do. But can you truthfully answer “yes” to these questions? Would the people that know you answer “yes” on your behalf? It is not our faith which make us, it is our values and actions – and that is what Christmas is really about.

I have frequently been asked about the Uganda Humanist Association. I must confess that at this juncture there is not a lot that I know about them. They have a cool website – check it out.

Related Post:

• Christopher Hitchens at his Best
• DEBATE – Tony Blair (Catholic) VS. Christopher Hitchens (Atheist)

My recent talks in the UK focused particularly on the dangerous beliefs that were being promoted by the charismatic Christian belief system (Born-Again/Pentecostalism/etc).

I have always contended that charismatic Christianity plays an IMPORTANT role in promoting and reinforcing beliefs about the efficacy of witchcraft in this country. In this post, I am interested in presenting direct evidence of this contention.  I will look at two widely read charismatic Christian books in Uganda (and sub-Saharan Africa).

Snatched from Satan’s Claws:

The book, “Snatched from Satan’s Claws”, was given to me by my mother two years ago. She felt that, being an atheist, I needed to be reminded of the threats we face as humans in this demon haunted world. Being reminded of these threats, she thought, might make me think twice about not accepting Christianity. She implored me to take seriously what was written in it.

Reading this book, I concluded that the authors of this book must either be deliberate liars or fraudsters; or they are insane and in need of psychiatric help. There is simply no other way to make sense of the blatant and outrageous assault on rationality that emanates from this book.

The book, co-written by Pastor D. D. Kaniaki and Evangelist Mukendi (from the Democratic Republic of Congo), is about Mukendi’s alleged ordeal as a former sorcerer, who later converted to Christianity.

Here is an excerpt from the first chapter:

I was not the first born of my parents, but my father, a sorcerer and a witchdoctor, had had 13 other children, and he sacrificed them all, one by one, to the devil. When I was born mysteriously, it was not my mother who brought me up, for she was not allowed any access to me; I was breastfed and brought up by a mermaid.

In fact my conception and birth were through magic, and my Aunt Ndaya had helped my father in this. My mother had had difficulty in conceiving until my aunt met with someone who had obtained magical powers from a white man who brought them from Mount Calvary is Israel. He gave them to my father with a doll, a cross, and a long chaplet with instructions on how to speak to those flowers when he needed help, and that is how I was concieved.

Those magic items enabled my father to get connection with the mermaid who was to breastfeed and bring me up in the first few years of my life.

With those items, my father could perform great magical tricks. He could sever his arm from the rest of the body, and it would bleed, but he could easily put it back again. He could also drop himself on a pavement, divide himself into small parts, and reform his body again. He could become a goat with a human head, and walk on a bicycle, and so on.

Mukendi elaborates on what some of his abilities were, as a young sorcerer:

By the time I was an adolescent, I could fly abroad to any country where Lucifer commissioned me. I could make a helicopter out of a stick or my shoe and fly off to India, America, and back home. I could also change in to a fly and a take a rid on someone’s shoulders. The man would carry me for some distance, only for me to drop and walk in front of him without his knowledge. The following day, the person would feel sick and listless with pain in his shoulders because of my actual body weight on him.

I could also enter any house day or night and spy on people’s activities as I chose. I knew every open bedroom in homes. I could turn my self into a cockroach and rest near the fire place. I also knew how to transform one thing into another. I could turn a man into a goat for slaughter and eat him with a clear conscience. I was also skilled in using someone’s spirit when they were asleep to ride on as a horse all night long. By the time the man got up in the morning, he would feel plain all over the body because he acted as a human buffer or human shield for all the arrows aimed at me in the spirit world. This was particularly so if he was physically strong in the physical world. Even in the spirit world, he would appear strong and masculine. The victim would either fall sick or even die.

Yes, you heard right. Evangelist Mukendi claims that he could magically turn his shoe into a helicopter and fly to India, America and back home.

Of course, according to him all this is ‘evil’ and so he decides to turn over a new leaf:

The Lord Jesus Christ has saved me, and I wish to let you know how deep I had gone with Satan, as a lesson to deter others from falling into the same pit, and to show you Jesus is the only “Way, the Truth and the Life”.

I know there are many who are involved with witchcraft. If you are involved in any of the things that I will mention, repent and open your heart and ask the Lord Jesus Christ to save your soul.

Throughout this book, great emphasis is placed on how purportedly REAL the threat of witchcraft is, and how believers can protect themselves from its ill effects. He talks about his various adventures with Satan and his demons that were determined to keep him on the ‘dark side’. He also talks about how Satan has built a network of underground cities located in the former Zaire (modern-day Democratic Republic of Congo), one near the Inga dam and another near Matadi. It is stuff of pure fantasy, and yet it is swallowed wholesale as infallible truth, by millions of born-again Christians across Africa.

Delivered from the Powers of Darkness:

There is  another extremely popular charismatic Christian booklet called Delivered From The Powers of Darkness, by Emmanuel Eni, a West African evangelist.

In it, he also discusses his alleged life in the occult (as a witch) prior to his conversion to Christianity and a life of ministry thereafter. I first encountered this book when I was 15 years old when almost everyone in my high school was reading it. It is just as bizarre as Kaniaki and Mukendi’s – and also very widely read in Uganda.

Here is an excerpt from the chapter The Underworld Laboratories:

I   stayed   in   Lagos   for   a   week   and   went   back   to   the   sea ,   this   time   for   two   months .   I   went   into   the  scientific laboratories to see what was happening. I saw psychiatrists and scientists all working very seriously. The work of these scientists is to design beautiful things like flashy cars, etc., latest weapons   and   to   know   the   mystery   of   this   world .   If   it   were   possible   to   know   the   pillar   of   the   world  they could have, but thank God, ONLY GOD KNOWS. 

I moved into the designing room and there I saw many samples of cloth, perfumes and assorted types of cosmetic. All these things according to Lucifer are to distract men’s attention from the Almighty God. I also saw different designs of electronics, computers and alarms. There was also a T.V. from where   they   knew   those   who   are   born   again   Christians   in   the   world.   There   you   see   and  differentiate those who are church goers and those who are real Christians. 

I then moved from the laboratories to the ‘dark room’ and ‘drying room’. The dark room is where they kill any disobedient member. They kill by first draining the person’s blood and then send the person to the machine room where he/ she will be ground to powder and then send the dust to the ‘sack room’ where they will be bagged and kept for the native doctors to collect for their charms.

There were more things which are hard to explain in writing. Despite all these powers in me, I was not  yet  qualified   to  meet  with  Lucifer  but  only  qualified   to  be  his   agent.

A PDF of the book can be found here.

(Emmanuel Eni even has a Rational Wiki page devoted to him.)

Books like these bring to light an interesting phenomenon within charismatic Christian circles. There seems to be a correlation between a pastor’s claims of a dark and sinister past, and his perceived credibility and popularity among believers.  Since most believers are in perpetual anxiety about witchcraft, it is easy to see how a pastor who claims to have once been a witchdoctor might appeal to them. Such a pastor would be seen as a person experienced with the inner workings of witchcraft, thus, in believers’ minds, qualified to prescribe appropriate courses of action to deal with the various problems they experience that they attribute to witchcraft.

By positioning themselves as the bearers of the solution for these alleged witchcraft-related problems, they gain influence, prestige, larger congregations, and – of course – more money.

And this is perhaps why these pastors talk and write books about witchcraft so much. By promoting and exaggerating the threats of this imaginary problem (witchcraft) they reap big from selling the imaginary solution (Jesus). Indeed they reap big. One only has to look at the kind of wealth accumulated by the purveyors of this form of quackery on this continent to see just how much they reap from their desperate, impoverished, followers.

A Growing Industry:

In their paper Religion and Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa, published in the Journal of Modern African Studies, researcher/historian Stephen Ellis and scholar of religion Gerrie ter Haar describe this growing cottage industry of highly mystical Christian books and pamphlets being published in Africa:

There is a thriving literature of religious tracts in Africa. The few formal bookshops, and the far more numerous market-stalls and itinerant hawkers who sell books, offer for sale pamphlets and popular works on religious subjects in every country of the continent, it would seem. Some are theological inquiries into aspects of the Bible or the Koran. Others contain moral lessons derived from these sacred books. Perhaps the most common category, however, is testimonies of personal religious experiences. Much of this literature hardly makes its way outside Africa and is only rarely to be found in even the finest Western academic libraries.

The most puzzling genre, at least for anyone educated in modern Western academies of learning, is that of the numerous works on witchcraft and other perceived forms of evil, sometimes in the form of a description of a personal journey into a world of spirits. While many pious works on Christianity on sale in Africa are authored by American evangelicals and published in America, popular books on witchcraft and mystical voyages are almost invariably written by Africans and published locally. Similar material is circulated through churches, sometimes in the form of video recordings. This is also true of African-led churches in the diaspora, among African communities on other continents. It is impossible to know with certainty how many people give any credence to stories like these, but the indications are that very many do so. Not only do pamphlets describing mystical journeys appear to circulate in large numbers, but such accounts may clearly be situated within an older tradition of stories about witchcraft and journeys into the underworld which is to be found in collections of folklore and even in the literature of high culture. Studies of churches and of healers in almost any part of Africa indicate that incidents of perceived witchcraft and of shamanism or near-death experiences are relatively common, and probably have been for as long as it is possible to trace.

Such evidence may be drawn not just from studies of the Pentecostal churches which have attracted so much scholarly interest of late, but also of many other sorts of church including African independent congregations, of Muslim communities and of indigenous religious traditions. Thus, the popular literature written by people who claim to have experienced spiritual journeys or to have expert knowledge of witchcraft is not, we believe, an ephemeral genre but rather represents a modern form of an important tradition of mysticism in Africa.

Consequences:

The obvious result of the pervasiveness of beliefs popular books like Snatched from Satan’s Claws and Delivered From the Powers of Darkness perpetuate is that it helps to sustain a state of constant anxiety and paranoia among believers, who fear that they are constantly being besieged by demons or evil spirits courtesy of witchcraft.

What is unfortunate, of course, is that whereas reason and science could otherwise be brought to bear to steer Africans away from this kind of thinking, the beliefs that inform this kind of thinking are being reinforced everyday by charismatic Christian churches, who have the means and the resources to promote their brand of extreme irrationality to an already gullible and superstitious public. Traditional animist beliefs thus end up being reinforced, rather than fazed out over time, which they should, given advances in science that explain a lot of the phenomena formerly attributed to evil spirits.

That said, it is quite likely that in the short term, the harsh economic and social realities on the ground will continue to keep Ugandans (and Africans everywhere) predisposed towards holding irrational beliefs about what causes their problems, and what they might do about them. Research does indicate a strong correlation between poverty, economic insecurity and religiosity, after all, so this is not surprising.

When desperate people are short of options, they will opt for whatever offers itself as a solution – and the less educated they are, the more irrational their preferred solutions will be. That’s probably why charismatic Christianity (Pentecostalism, in particular) is growing so rapidly across sub-Saharan Africa – and why belief in the efficacy of witchcraft thrives even today.

This is starting to make me wonder whether the cure for Africa’s obsession with mysticism might instead be economic and social empowerment, rather than sensitization campaigns by rationalists like myself and others at Freethought Kampala.

Food for thought.

Related Posts:

• New Series – WOO TAKEDOWN
• Charismatic Christianity in Uganda (Part 1 – Introduction)
• Witchcraft in Nigeria Related To Evangelical Christianity?
• Does Christianity Reinforce the Belief that Witchcraft Works?
• The Christian Obsession with Satan and Demons

Within the next few decades, the east African nation of Uganda is likely to have the highest population growth in the world, according to a new report from the Population Reference Bureau (PRB), a Washington, D.C.-based research and advocacy group. The country’s current population of 27.7 million is projected to explode to 130 million by 2050, a nearly fivefold increase, notes the study. According to Carl Haub, a demographer at PRB, such expansion will entrap the country in poverty and instability. “No one would consider such a rate of growth to be sustainable,” he says.

At 3.6 percent, the African island nation of Mayotte, an overseas collective of France located in the Comoros chain, has the highest annual rate of natural increase today, according to the study. Uganda’s current growth rate is 3.1 percent, while the world average is 1.2 percent.

The Ugandan government’s lack of commitment to family planning is the main reason for the country’s extraordinary population growth, says Haub. The PRB study indicates that only 20 percent of married Ugandan women between the ages of 15 and 49 have access to contraception. Women in Uganda have an average of 6.9 children, compared with a global average of 2.7 and an African average of 5.1. Some government officials consider this a boon and may in fact be encouraging high birth rates; President Yoweri Museveni has called the nation’s population explosion a “great resource.”

Uganda’s growing population is our most important asset that should be used for increased productivity in order to achieve economic transformation for the country, President Yoweri Museveni has said.

He said Uganda’s growing population is not a problem, but it is important to exploit it in order to address the country’s development needs. He added that the Cabinet has adopted a revised National Population Policy for social transformation and sustainable development.

If you are an open minded person whose opinions are formed on the basis of science, logic, and reason and are interested in meeting like-minded individuals – you are welcome to join us at the meeting.

The November 2011 Freethinkers’ Night is going to take place on Thursday, 24th November, at 4 Points Bar & Restaurant, Centenary Park, Kampala, starting 6PM. Entrance is FREE.