Thoughts from a Thinker in Chains: A Response to Avraham and the CSF Movement

Avraham and his CSF movement say, “we use your own book to debunk your belief,” it means they use the Bible not to believe but to disbelieve and not only to disbelieve but also to dissolve Christianity in the ocean of common sense. After all, Avraham is a free thinker, and Christians are thinkers in chains, imprisoned by religion. But are they really free, these free thinkers? We are about to find out. I plan to use the CSF method to debunk its arguments in this piece.

As a champion of common sense, Avraham says, “if the mind is not working, the body suffers.” If l understand him correctly, he meant to say, “if we are not applying common sense, we suffer as a people, a nation.” And if this is what he meant, then l think he and his Movement have failed to see the deeper reality of the Ghanaian culture and common sense itself. It is not a lack of common sense that has made us unprogressive in our socioeconomic development. On the contrary, it is the abundance of it. As Okatakyie Afrifa-Mensah would say, “everyone in Ghana is a sage.” From the street of Kwanyako to the corridors of Mokola, people with common sense can be found everywhere. It is a cheap commodity. Everyone is an expert in everything, it seems, including Avraham himself. Ask any top student, and he or she will tell you that one of the secrets for acing a paper is avoiding the obvious answer choices sometimes. They tend to be traps. And that is how common sense in its raw form works. It’s obvious, top of mind, and yet a trap. So therefore, common sense is the problem, not the solution, a trap for Avraham and his followers in the long run.

Avraham is supposed to be the Azuma Nelson of thinkers in Ghana as some in the media would have us believe. And yet he makes sweeping statements about religion and economics without any validity. He churns out opinions regardless of facts, truth, and deep research. He uses conspiracy theories ( such as Jesus is a myth like Kweku Ananse’s story) and common sense.

However, conspiracy and common sense will fail him. They are limiting, and faulty. Common sense, as Einstein would say, is the collection of prejudice acquired by age eighteen. It is full of traditions and ideas unexamined. It cannot be what anyone should champion as the path to save the youth of mother Ghana. I doubt if Avraham knows this else why call himself the champion of common sense or name his group such. And l wonder why my hero, KSM, should be enamored by this.

On religion, when Avraham says things like, “God has not made man in His image, it is the man who has made God in man’s image,” he is speaking of anthropomorphic principles. Because of this, he thinks religion is useless and archaic. It can’t be real. For that, l say, the only god man has made in his image is the idols, which he now seems to serve. These idols are sold wholesale, exchanged, and traded on idol markets. But the God in the heart of Christians is not made by human hands and cannot be made in the image of man.

I heard him say, if we cannot tell who created GOD, why do we say he created us? Once we cannot prove who created God, we can’t make Him the creator of man. The infinite regress problem. For that l say we can find infinite regress in everything if we want to, but we stop at a point where reason can go no further. And where reason stops, faith or belief begins. For example, if I bought you a car on your birthday made by the Kantanka group, and you asked, wow, which brand is that, and l say Kantanka brand. Who made it, you asked, and l say it’s made here in Ghana by Apostle Sarfo. Then you asked again, who gave birth to Apostle Sarfo, then l say, l don’t know. Would you then say, because l didn’t know Apostle Sarfo’s mother or father, it means Apostle Sarfo did not create the car? What has my not knowing who gave birth to him got to do with his ingenuity, his creativity? Likewise, we cannot use our ignorance to deny God His existence and His creativity.

Whether God created Himself or did not create Himself, we cannot tell with certainty. Sacred scripture has not touched on that. God is, not was or will be, but is. If you start on the something created something road, you'd realize that different people have parts of the answers. For instance, if l say to you, from what was the wooden chair made, you may say wood, and the wood, tree, and the tree, atoms. As you probe deeper, you may need different specialists to help out: biologists, chemists, and physicists.

The physicist will answer the atomic part; the biologist will answer the biological. If this is so, you’d realize that some questions require a different state of being to answer. Not that the answer is not there; it just can’t be answered by the people asking it. Unfortunately, we do not have a specialist in the human race to answer the who created God question. Maybe we will know the answer when we leave the material realm and take on a spirit form like God. Who made God will then make sense to us.

Again, Avraham says, “the 21st mind is greater than the Bible. Religion is ancient and archaic.” If he says archaic to mean “kolo” then he needs to understand not everything old is kolo. Our Ghanaian traditions are old, but many are still relevant today. Some are kolo, and some are gems; ours is to figure out what is what. From East to West, religious ideas are still shaping the world today. Check, no book has made a tremendous impact on the West than the bible, it is what gave them Harvard, Princeton, and some of the other elite schools. The Bible, which their ancestors embraced, while ours were still practicing paganism, was one reason why they got science and we got superstitions. In any case, the idol religion that Avraham joined is more ancient than Christianity and Islam. So why join them in the first place?

To support his argument about the archaicness of the Bible, Avraham cited Rev 6:12, where the author Apostle John wrote about the stars hitting the earth. Avraham, in his attempt to show us how advanced his mind is, and the ancient mind, archaic, said, “the stars are bigger than the earth, so how can a star which is bigger hit earth?” He then mentioned Orion specifically. Our 21st-century Ghanaian free thinker failed when he named Orion a star. And not only did he fail in this, but he also failed to understand that some stars are similar in size to the earth. In any

case, Apostle John did not mention size. Can’t a star hit something smaller than itself? Can’t an articulated Truck hit a Tico? Our thinker says no and he laughed at the Apostle and the Bible. So it’s not correct to say John was wrong. If anybody was wrong, it is Avraham, and if anybody should be laughed at, it is him, not the 1st century Apostle. What has become of my country that our thinking champion cannot compete with a 1st-century mind?

I know Avraham now says he believes in God—after nearly becoming an atheist—but not the God of the Bible. It’s ok. He is not the first not to believe, and neither would he be the last. But if he thinks that idol religion is better than the Christian religion, then he should think again. By becoming a disciple of a shrine, he has put himself into trouble, a logical problem. One that he can’t free himself from using common sense, neither will the ancestors be able to help him. I think he knows this, so he is hiding it; he doesn’t want the public to know where exactly he stands. Because once he declares himself a shrine disciple, he automatically ceases to be a free thinker, and he loses his authority to label the rest of us captive thinkers needing enlightenment. Avraham, the free-thinker turned fetish. I think he should be stripped of his free thinker title.

Avraham and his CSF movement should know this, “to disbelieve is to believe, and to believe is to disbelieve. If you don’t believe in Christ, your unbelief is belief itself. So you see, his common sense took him through the three Abrahamic faith and landed him at the shrine, not at the altar of atheism. And yet he thinks he has rid himself of the shackles of religion when like a crab, he has been pulled back in. He is back where he started, just worse off. How can he say he is on a mission to free Christians from the shackles of religion when he is not free?

So those of you who have abandoned Christ to follow him, know, who it is you are following. He is not sophisticated to take on the task of challenging Christianity. But if he could get you to not only put Christ on trial but to convict Him as a criminal, a Kweku Ananse, then l wonder about the gullibility of some Ghanaian Christians. The one who got you to abandon Christ, got you to abandon religion, is back into religion himself. But you know the thing about our God, He is merciful; He forgives, and l know He looks tenderly even on Avraham himself.

And yet this merciful part is also an aspect of Christianity that Avraham says he doesn’t like. He prefers the God of instant justice to this merciful God. He prefers hanging for our sins to being pardoned. While some of us are crying out for mercy over our sins, Avraham, the sinless one, is calling for the thunder gods of the past to come and rule us again.

I think l may have succeeded in using the CSF method to debunk them. I leave it for you, the reader, to judge. I just showed you how his arguments have potholes and that he cannot be trusted as a champion of free thinkers. I showed you how even the common sense he is championing is a trap for the youth. I know he has said many things over the years worth touching on, and as and when time permits, l will try to point out his errors on Jesus, Religion, and Economics.

The times we live in call for deeper reflection on religion and on God. We live in a time when people can use disinformation to sway others from their faith. Avraham is just one of many with the same agenda. So if you are out there calling yourself a Christian, then know your Bible, and hold on fast to your faith, because if you don’t, people like Avraham will come and use your ignorance against you and may end up pulling you away from God. And even if they fail to do so, they might end up with your children. The time for shallow & sentimental Christianity is over. The age of deep Christianity has come.

Written by: Lenny Kuuku Simmons
Email: [email protected]