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.

The Seychelles

August 8th 2011 was not any ordinary day, i will remember the day very well since it was the day i was leaving my motherland for the first time and it was also the  first time i was getting on a plane. the excitement was  from the fact or fear of leaving my family, friends and my ''life'' behind to start over in a new country and in a new job. i remember thinking on the plane rather primitively how the people on the other side looked like whether they lived ''normal'' like us in Kenya...how were there roads, houses, food and funnily i even wondered whether they had Games like football since i had never heard of them compete in any.


I had never seen a view of a country so beautiful from above, so much water everywhere and it was all green - water and the vegetation alike. well its now 4 months and i like the change, the people, the work culture, the governance style and social life. all a contrast as is back home. If only i was a  Kenyan politician or  if i could pull a politicians' ear as a voter i would whisper to him about the Governance style in Seychelles, a government so people oriented,  that the elderly ride free on public Buses, school children ride at half fares to school and all the wananchi can afford to ride the bus since rates are fixed to any destination. Every citizen has water and electricity and Alas! no one cooks in charcoal or paraffin, since all can afford cooking gas and its affordable compared to Kenya which has a refinery. 

Eden Island in Seychelles



The heat is unbearable though and i miss the paradise weather of Nairobi, at times its so hot you skin sticks and your gaze has to be squinted otherwise you may hurt your pupils. i cannot dress in my fancy jacket or my nice sweaters i brought from home just incase. wishing for a cold break here is like wishing to squeeze water from a rock.

Seychellois strike me as the race revolution that is already happening in the rest of the world only that here it has completed a full cycle, there are the real black African and then the entire 95% of the population is made up of people of mixed race, atleast more than half of the entire world race is represented here due to intermarriages and tourists who visit the Island and leave their wild oats to thrive on the island!

this is will be my first Christmas holiday spent far away from home and family at times i cant help but marvel at the dynamics of life, i had never imagined  i would be on the other side of the world with my family and friends on the other and that such a crucial holiday in the calender would be spent in a foreign land, it never even crossed my mind in the beginning month of January 2011, i remember i had even started saving for the big day in June but then again seems like someone else plans your life rota.