Oh Canada, my home of milk and honey.
May you continue to prosper for generations to come. May you remain a place of hope, safety, growth, and new beginnings for everyone who calls you home.
You have been good to me, and even with the ups and downs, I am grateful.
Happy Canada Day to us.
Hi Asake @Olatoun_ thanks for asking rational discourse.
You ask what makes Yoruba spiritual darkness and Christianity good?
Well, it is because religion is more than a social practice but life and death.
Your religion will determine your eternal fate. If that’s true, then one must make sure their own is true.
And that’s where the problem is. Why is one true over the other? Why can’t they all be true?
This question is in the realm of pluralism versus exclusivism.
The first says all religions are true and ultimately leads to “God”.
The latter says just one religion is true and others false.
But the first problem is all religions believe they are true.
If that’s true, all of them cannot be true because they all contradict themselves.
But Christianity stands out.
Why? It is the only one that can be historically verified.
It’s God isn’t abstract. He came down amongst humans.
From Abraham to Jesus we see actual evidence of the Christian God making absolute claims over reality and they are verified.
And this God said other gods are idols, spirits He himself created who rebelled.
If this God is true, and this God determines our afterlife, then it is logical to follow this God.
Lastly, the claims of the Christian God being the One who made the universe is the most logical.
The gods in Yoruba spirituality are made of things in this world so they can’t be the creator of this world.
But we have an infinite God who did with incredible precision.
The evidence points to him. This is why we believe Christianity is true.
Yoruba traditionalists need to sue on what grounds?
That a religious organization expresses its tenets through art?
This glorification of "African Spirituality" only signals ignorance of the true nature of ATR.
Historian Elizabeth Isichei noted that in the eighteenth century, Asaba;
There was a customary chiefly ascension rite involving the killing of two slaves, and additional killings at the funerary rites of chiefs.
This means that human beings were killed on a large scale for politico-theological reasons.
Furthermore, she notes other practices that stemmed from ATR before missionary contact reformed many of them:
Infanticide. The abandonment of twins.
Isichei reported that in the Igbo-speaking region in 1879, after "a missionary attack on the practice," Samuel Ajayi Crowther remarked:
"This is the first year that a direct attack has ever been made against heathenish superstition."
Should we talk about the moral-legal jurisprudential practice of truth-seeking that involved taking a toxic substance, the Esere Bean, in Calabar?
In a nineteenth-century episode reported in a Cambridge documentary chapter on Old Calabar, the ordeal is presented as mass-lethal:
"At the death of King Eyamba in 1834," roughly fifty family members "seemed to have taken the esere bean ordeal," and "forty died."
This is the "African Spirituality" that many now glorify.
You have no idea what you are calling for.
The increase in ritual killings witnessed in Southwest Nigeria over the past six years is consequential to African herbalists using human parts in concoctions for 'Yahoo boys.'
There are rituals in which an entire human body is burnt and turned into powder, then mixed with oils that the Yahoo boy applies, supposedly to increase his chances of successful fraud.
I know this firsthand. I grew up in Ife.
Whenever people died, say, a suspected thief was publicly lynched, people would come, cut up the corpse, and take parts of it.
Why? They wanted to use human parts for charms. Where do they go to make these enchantments?
African traditionalists.
African spirituality is inherently ritualistic, and morality is not atomized to the individual but to the community.
This was why it was easy to kill some people for the 'good of the collective' in pre-colonial African society.
Christianity came and introduced the sort of morality that universalized moral worth and conferred inherent moral worth on the individual.
African Spirituality is demonic, and it should not be espoused by anyone.
So, we thank God that Mount Zion has done an incredible job of shedding light on its barbarism.
When Yoruba movies portray ritual killing for money as socially acceptable, no one sues them.
Mount Zion will go on and go up, by God's grace. Amen.
To God's glory.