The fear of God is the praxis of foolishness

When I was four years old, I asked my mother how the world came to exist. She answered that God created the world. I asked her who created God. She answered that God created himself.

“Out of nothing?”

“ Out of nothing Son”

“Then it means that nothing created God?’

“Yes, Son. Nothing Created God.”

“Well, then it follows that nothing created the earth!”

“Take your foolishness somewhere else Son. You ask too many stupid questions.” My mother waived me perfunctorily away.

After this conversation with my mother, I shut up for decades, and never asked this important question as to who created God. I attended church and was quite active in the propagation of the gospel of Jesus Christ until about age twenty, when I again contemplated the question of God. At that age, I had already read the Bible a couple of times and found the book to be morbidly insipid: I could not make head or tail of talking snakes, or why God should be angry with anybody for eating the fruits of knowledge of good and bad. I was appalled with the rampant genocide commanded by God, the stoning of offenders, and the general ennui that beclouded the children of God. I found offensive the notion of burnt sacrifice wherefore sheep and cattle were burned at the altar of God in order for him to smell their aroma whereas the people were fed with toxic birds and died in droves.

I found it unacceptable that God broached no questions and acted with gross disrespect of the people, killing them at will and showing them disproportionate and asymmetrical power in fearful acts of bullying and threats. I found it to be the acme of egotism that God commanded love and threatens revenge, and that in a last desperate act to propitiate himself, he slept with a betrothed virgin girl in order to begat himself. And thereafter, sacrificed himself for himself in order to appease himself for the sins of humans. At the same time, it turns out that the death was no death at all, because he rose up from his sacrificial death three days thereafter and escaped to heaven. Yet still, we are given the freedom to sin retroactively, intro-actively and prospectively in the assurance that all our sins are forgiven, whether we lived several thousands of years before this abortive human sacrifice or lived thousands of years thereafter. I found this idea very obscene and disgusting: I will never ask anybody to die for me or give me a pass to sin freely. To my mind, everybody should die his own death and suffer the just consequences of his own sins. Moreover, I abhor human sacrifice and will never permit it to be done in my behalf!

I questioned my spiritual masters about all these inconsistencies and contradictions, hoping that I will be enlightened about these confusions in my mind. But those elders became hostile to me, and told me that those questions required spiritual understanding, and that I should pray harder, and that God would reveal his truth to me. I construed their prestidigitation to mean that I was to take those doctrinal teachings like a child; because by spiritual understanding, they actually meant I should take whatever I was told as conclusive truth without any questions, and masticate it and regurgitate it as spiritual truth. And by spiritual truth, I gathered that the elders meant in code that I should stop thinking.

The belief in this God, created out of nothing, also implied thinking nothing, reasoning nothing and doing nothing with my education, my own experience, my analytical capacity, or my ingenuity or talent. I should mortgage all that to my spiritual masters who failed their regular exams and found refuge in Bible schools. In another parlance, I should become a retard and follow the teachings of all these school dropouts who have suddenly become spiritually strong after failing the exams we wrote together in school.

And who is this God who nobody can describe with any uniformity or worship in any regularity? And how has he benefitted mankind throughout history? The Jews that wrote profusely about him were pretty much obliterated by him. Abraham who worshipped him threw out his own maidservant with whom he had had a baby into the desert, there to prance around in search of water. This same man attempted to sacrifice his own son to appease his God. At some point in time, he was even pimping his own wife in order to survive.

Jacob’s descendants ended up in slavery in Egypt, where they were rescued by Moses, only to go in circles in the wilderness and wind up dead in droves. Later, they perpetrated genocide on others and stole their lands, wherefore they suffered extermination from generation to generation until it culminated in the holocaust instigated by Hitler. The only time the Jews got their relative comfort and security was when they jettisoned their Jahweh and became a secular state.

And lets talk about Job too. What happened to him when he worshipped God? Didn’t God gamble with Satan on his life? And when God won the bet, how much did he collect from Satan? Instead, didn’t God unashamedly bully Job, boasting vaingloriously of his power to bait leviathans and to draw boundaries for the seas? The amazing vanity of God in the matter of Job was instructive of his abuse of those that serve him well.

My point is that God has nothing for those that serve him well. He came out of nothing and nowhere. His worship is nothing and everything at the same time. All worship of him is therefore nothing to him. It can comprise the burning of food and meat, the hysterical utterances of gibberish, dancing, stomping, rolling on the ground, kicking one another in the stomach, shouting curses and expletives, drinking hallucinogens, going naked, having binge sex, masquerading, bowing before trees or rivers or mountains, reciting incantations and encomia, paying huge sums of moneys to others to spend, or even attacking your fellow priests and prophets in gangster style, burning people at the stake or engaging in suicide bombings or other terroristic activities. You can also worship God by doing absolutely nothing.

And the last one is much preferred option because you will lose nothing, This is because God is indeed nothing. He came from nothing and therefore he is nothing. As evidenced from all those that have worshipped him and supposedly served him, they have wasted their resources and died for nothing: The death for God is the death for nothing indeed, because the question I asked of my mother when I was four years old is still relevant today as it was then; and as in those days, nobody has, or can answer them.

We can also consider our own motherland Ghana, how the thugs calling themselves the ministers of God have fraudulently amassed their wealth from the people and deceived them into poverty. We can consider that if God can give us something, we should be the richest of the nations. We are among the poorest of nations. We have not been blessed nor become prosperous nor wise nor healthy. We are marking time forever. It is time for us to jettison the god and live in the reality of the times.

Samuel Adjei Sarfo, Esq.

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