An Adaptation of Philip Ochieng's Article - I ask Blomfield: Who gave God to whom?

As if in reply to Massie Blomfield, the Dalai Lama once said: “We Buddhists are atheists”.

From the head of the world’s largest confessional movement, this must have perplexed the Judaeo-Christian world in its perennial claim that “atheism” is absence of “spirituality”.

For I know no religion more spiritual than Buddhism.

Yet — since “atheism” is such a dirty word in Western religiosity — “non-theism” would perhaps have been more tactful. Definitely, it is more accurate.

Buddhism is simply “non-theistic”: it does not worship any deity who exists apart from human beings. It teaches that divinity lives in every human individual.

The non-theistic object of worship is like Paul’s Jesus: He reveals himself “in me” (from inside), not “to me” (from outside).

The Gnostic religion of my Nilotic ancestors was akin: God’s mind was writ large inside his creations. To discover the God, then, one must study the internal structures of such bodies.

The Greeks called it Gnosis (“knowledge”). Today we call it “science”. Among my ancestors, religion and science were indivisible.

We owe today’s rigid dichotomy between them to the much more recent rise of Aristotelian metaphysics in Europe.

Before that, knowledge of the human body — the acme of God’s handiwork — was the height of worship.

Thus, such Greco-Roman converts to Nilotic religion as Archimedes, Democritus, Epicurus, Euclid, Leucippus, Lucretius, Plato, Solon, Pythagoras, Socrates and Thales — all trained at the Sais Temple in the Nile Delta — taught that self-knowledge is the godliest of all things.

To “Know Thyself” — as Socrates admonished — was possible only through introspection

Through it you automatically came face to face with the deity’s supreme commandment — namely, individual goodness to other individuals.

Though the teachings of all churches, synagogues and mosques subsume this self-commitment to humanity, the assertion is embarrassingly spurious.

It is a mere lip service through which, like “charity”, the priesthood seeks to assuage its guilty conscience.

Yet, when genuine, such a supreme individual self-effort is what proves our humanity.

Spiritually and morally, such a self-initiative — which only non-theism can teach you — is superior by far to the doctrine that only a third party (the discrete deity) can compel you to be good to other human beings.

Of course, morality is also possible through that route. I have great admiration for those — like Father Dolan — whose statements (in non-religious contexts) are completely in line with their premises about God.

But the personal lives of most of those who shout the loudest about God sharply contradict their fulminations.

Edward Carey Francis, my high school headmaster, daily condemned his fellow missionaries for the “mere piosity” of their lives.

Mohandas Gandhi said that what India needed most was Jesus Christ minus Christians and the Church.

The Aborigines, Afghans, Amerindians, Indo-Chinese, Iraqis, Kosovars, Palestinians, Saracens and Tasmanians would have agreed.

So would the victims of apartheid, the Black Hole of Calcutta, the black slave trade, colonialism, Lari, Manyani, Sharpeville and Europe’s own “Inquisition, Witch-hunt and industrial tyranny.

In all this, England’s “God-fearing” upper-classes were the number one culprits.

Yet, in Kenya — week after week — a racist and colonial diehard called Massie Blomfield uses our own newspapers to eulogise England as “God’s Chosen People”. Anybody who criticises England for these historic crimes against mankind is criticising God!

Why? Because — listen to this! — England was the race that gave “God” to us. If you are “God’s Chosen People” — a title which the Anglo-Saxons long ago grabbed from Semitic Jewry — you must be infallible and above criticism even if it was through your “God” that we succumbed to your racial bigotry, political tyranny and financial filth.

But — I ask Massie Blomfield — between the Nilotes and the Anglo-Saxons, who gave God to whom? That is a question I hope to answer decisively.