Satan, corruption and our underdevelopment
I enjoyed Citi FM’s ‘Big Issue’ of Saturday, October 4, 2014, as I always do. A regular panellist and avowed anti-corruption crusader, Sydney Casely-Hayford called for a legal suit against Satan for being responsible for our woes as everybody blames crime and corruption on Satan. Sydney was only being sarcastic for our penchant to blame all evils on Satan.
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St Francis of Assisi was said to have tried a similar thing. He told his Roman Catholic faithful that he had captured Satan whom he was going to sue in court for bringing untold hardship to people through deception and temptation making them commit sin.
The church members, as witnesses, were to write their charges, go to the room where they would see Satan and lay their charges before him. He, St Francis, would collect and present the charges before the law courts for prosecution.
The faithful went, only to see their own selves reflected in the mirror which St Francis had placed on the table there. They did not have the courage to lay their charges as they would be accusing themselves. Any lesson?
Superstition
So if you thought I was going to talk about Satan being responsible for our underdevelopment for which we require deliverance, you are wrong. But you are right in my linking our problems to the belief in Satan. Ghanaians are said to be 96 per cent religious. Admittedly, our religiosity may well have protected us from civil wars.
However, we take our religiosity to a superstitious dimension. One falls ill and his reaction is: ‘Why me? Somebody must be behind it so let me probe’. He will spend precious time and resources to no avail and the false pastors will take advantage and dupe him.
These so-called pastors ruin marriages and family ties and engender laziness and poverty. Monday to Sunday, they ask their followers to come to church and all-night sessions instead of going to work.
When on a Tuesday morning a pastor is conducting deliverance for the church members, he is working while the members are not. A woman neglects her husband and goes for all-night prayers to strengthen her marriage and when the marriage breaks down she blames Satan.
By our greed as a nation we have felled all trees and disturbed the ecosystem. Yet when we have drought we blame Satan and want to appease the gods with cows for rainfall. There are road crashes on a particular stretch of road and we blame Satan for blood seeking instead of redesigning the road.
At Christmas accident rate rises because drivers are crazy speeding as they see many passengers for their “cocoa season”, or drink-drive because they might have money.
Yet we blame the road crashes on the innocent ‘Satan’. The child who was bright begins to perform poorly at school because the mother overworks her at home yet the mother says a schoolmate is jealous and has ‘spiritually stolen the child’s brain’.
You are in a vehicle and the driver is driving recklessly. Instead of the passengers unanimously advising the driver, the courageous lone voice who dares to talk will be called the devil, and should there be an accident they will blame him for being Satan to have predicted that.
At the time of the accident, you will hear all shouting ‘Jesus’, ‘Allah’, etc. A promiscuous teenage girl sexually abuses herself. Later when she becomes barren, she blames the grandmother. When our cedi depreciated, it was blamed on dwarfs, magicians and Satan. Poor us.
Our motivation to worship God stems more from our fear of Satan than our hope of heaven. The threat of Satan rather than the love of God is why we worship God. Yet the essence of true worship should be from neither the fear of Satan nor the lure of heaven. We are mature when we worship God for his own sake.
If Christ succeeds in killing Satan today, the next day nobody will worship God once the terror of Satan is gone. Perhaps it is in the interest of Christ and God or Allah not to defeat Satan now, and maybe that is why they have not done so for all these thousands of years.
So what do we do? As a nation we must find a way of controlling our penchant for superstition. The pastors who are making business out of the ignorant masses should be checked, or else should be taxed. Pastors who consult on air, claim they are doing ‘emergency’, and claim they are talking to the spirit of the dead, etc. should be dealt with. We need to begin to think and explain things scientifically.
“Chance” as a phenomenon
As a society we need to understand that ‘chance’ is a phenomenon. Some things can happen by chance. If you care, take this as a guide: ‘Evil’ or ‘bad’ happens to us for five reasons.
Firstly, by our own doing, mistake, omission or commission, we bring harm to ourselves, eg. taking to drinking by choice and suffering the consequences. Secondly it could be the doing of another physical human being, for instance an armed robber attacking you.
Thirdly (for the sake of the religious) it may come as an act of God to help you to grow (you could not have been reading this if you had not been tested or examined at school); fourthly through pure chance or coincidence, eg. when you are involved in a road traffic accident as a passenger, it is pure chance that you were involved. Fifthly it may be by a combination of the above.
Satan has no role. Satan is only a symbolic or metaphorical representation of our own weaknesses. If the scriptures were to be written today the authors would use a different terminology.
We need to teach our children at school to think and explain things scientifically. We should control the pastors who misinterpret the scriptures and brainwash the followers. Until we do that, our development would be very far. Let us simply admit our ignorance and seek scientific answers for things we do not understand.
Let us not continue to use Satan as an antidote to our ignorance. If somebody is corrupt, it is he who should be dealt with. If somebody blames Satan for his wrongdoing as if he has no willpower, let us tell him that he is Satan himself and requires to be punished.
Imagine the child who was instructed by his father not to swim while he, the father, was away. The father came back to see the child in his swimming costume near the swimming pool.
When asked what he was doing, the child answered that he just prepared himself in case Satan pushed him into the swimming pool. So there you are. Our development is in our hands, not in Satan’s.