Mental Freedom for the Ordinary Ghanaian. Part Four

Dr. Samuel Adjei Sarfo
Attorney and Counselor at Law
The extent and purposes of all religions is to teach wisdom. And wisdom is nothing more than knowing the right things to do and being aware of the consequences of the choices we make. In this sense, the aim of religion is no different from that of philosophy and the goals of our education. They are all aimed at the greater good of creating honest and responsible citizens, united in the work of advancing our societal goals. Therefore, if our religion is not able to make us any wiser or any better human beings, then it is of no use to us or our society. And the teaching of wisdom is for the purpose of the individual’s righteousness, and therefore if we think we are wiser but not righteous, we are deceiving ourselves. Religion becomes a dangerous death cult to the physical world if it loses track of its original intent and purposes: that of infusing wisdom and its concomitant righteousness in its devotees.
And as regards this whole issue of the measure of righteous conduct imbued by religion into its followers, there remains a huge hiatus of imponderable questions. For instead of religion making us wiser and therefore righteous, it has imposed a huge cloud of hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness on our people, and thereby cast itself out as no more than a cultic worship in which irrational conduct perpetrated on its behalf becomes a sign of ultimate devotion. So then, Christianity is no longer a path to the righteous life as taught by its prophet Jesus Christ, but rather a way in which the religious leaders exploit the masses of the people by putting a twist on the word of the gods, and a method whereby the mass followers indulge in useless exercises to satiate their sense of godliness or holiness. So, our religion has lost its original intent and purpose to make us holy and righteous, to make us good and ethical or to make our society any better than that of our forebears.
And instead of dwelling on the bigger issues of righteous living, we are caught today in a debate as to the style of our clothing, the shape of our beard and the posture of our prayers. Jesus Christ came to find the religious establishment steeped in these religious frills and condemned them for their hypocrisy. And so did the prophet Mohamed in his time. Before the time of the prophet was Jahiliyya, the era of ignorance in Arabia when the people engaged in revenge killings and dangerous acts of terrorism. And the prophet sought to change the society through his teachings. The work of these two prophets was in accord with those that came before them, all of who cherished as their objective a more righteous society in which men and women sought the face of God through righteous living and proper conduct. Of these prophets and leaders according to the needs of their societies were Buddha, Moses, Zarathustra, Confucius, Lao Tse, Martin Luther King and Okomfo Anokye among many others. These were neither gods nor ghosts; they were ordinary men who tried to point the path of their societies to that of righteousness, unity and prosperity. And if their messages sink deeper into our consciousness, we will realize that the prophets had only one intent and purpose although articulated through different means: and that intent and purpose is to create a wiser and a better human being and thereby, a better and more peaceful society in which all men live in dignity and respect for each other. They anticipated that their followers be not stuck in the minds of any antiquated teachings, but rather that they improve upon the work of the prophets in order to adapt these to suit their times, and to advance the cause of the society in which they live. That was the extent of their selfless love and goodwill toward all humankind. They sought to honor god by saving his creators from sin. Our task today is to fulfill the mission of the prophets by making their messages even better for our time.
And we dishonor and limit the wisdom of our god if we think that at a certain point in time, he infused into the heads of his prophets all that we need to know and do, and all that we are required to wear, or all that we have to believe forever. And we also dishonor the prophets if we think of them as gods and replace their words with the wishes of the gods. Even if we assume that the prophets articulated the words of the gods in perfect language, we have to understand that they were trying to state the infinite words of the divine in finite human language, and their messages could not therefore have been perfect no matter how hardly they tried. Consider also that what they must have said were also skewed over the centuries, and may not necessarily reflect the true meaning of their messages. That is why faults and foolishness could be ascribed to every prophetic message in history, and that is why all of them are excusable. The prophets had their faults and foolishness because they were imperfect human beings; but they were prophets because they spoke wisdom and taught righteousness and advanced progress within their own societies. And they built on the past ethos and mores to lay the foundation for our time, and to create a template for future behavior and conduct. In our time, it is our duty to improve upon what the prophets taught and to work harder to perfect their messages to conform them to our times.
Sadly, it is a salient fact that there is no prophet whose words, intent and mission have not been distorted by their followers to suit that which they came to abolish. The pattern of the religious phenomena has been that the prophets’ words are often adapted to suit the falsehoods of the establishments they came to condemn, and to justify these untruths in their names. In this regard, when Jesus came to speak against the Pharisees and their false teachings, the modern-day Pharisees merely adopted his name and continued with their false doctrines, seeking the face of God in pompous apparels and useless practices and rituals and traditions which Jesus came to criticize.
The same applies to the Prophet Mohamed: when he came to abolish revenge killings and terrorism, some of his followers merely adopted his name and continued with their revenge killings and terrorism. The rest, instead of adhering to his message, prefer, like the Christians, to advance his cultural context and defend his rituals and prayer posture. Thus the real pith of the prophetic message, that of righteous conduct and peace and honesty, are all lost upon us. And the mission in our time appears now to defend in their names all the abhorrent things against which the prophets’ mission on earth was aimed. That is how we have dishonored the prophets by our supposed commitment to their message. We have created cults of fanaticism instead of faith in righteous living.
And that is why in a time of deep social and political malaise when corruption, fraud and dishonesty threaten our very survival as a nation, we have found it a great priority to defend what we must wear, how we must pray, how we must kill, and how we must humiliate and scorn those who refuse to believe as we do. And if this is what we are doing, we are merely undermining the work of the prophets and refusing to nourish it and improve upon it for our generation. Rather, we have become mere appendages for the spread of the very evils which they worked so hard to abolish. And we are seeking to firm for our generation and posterity the sort of misbehaviors which the prophets characterized as belonging to the devil……
In sum, we cannot advance the cause of our prophets without first analyzing their original mission or their aims. And when we do, we will discover that they all stood for extreme ethics: honesty, peaceful co-existence and national prosperity through abiding wisdom. Like lamps, they were all different in their shapes or forms, but they all emitted some light, some very shiny and some rather dim. And in our time, our work is to improve on their light and make it brighter, and not to be distracted by it by merely following after its silhouettes. In this sense, what we must always do is to reflect on the true missions of all the prophets in order to identify their intent and purposes, so that we can stay focused on their larger messages and principles to advance the true cause of our societies, our nation and our humanity.
Because I don’t believe that it was the prophets’ intent to burnish their egos by having factions established in their names and rituals and passions established in their memories, all to spur divisions and inflame conflicts. Rather, their original intent and purposes were to improve upon their societies by teaching wisdom and righteousness which they correctly parceled out as the message of God. To reap the maximum benefits from the mission and work of the prophets therefore, our task today is to distill from them all those virtues that bind them together, and abjure those peripheral cultures that separate them. And if we do, we would discover that their original messages are all the same: that of living in wisdom and peace and righteousness, and abjuring corruption and violence in our lives and times. And if we allow our lives and times to be guided by their common message of wisdom, we will find that how the Muslim behaves will be no different from how the Sikh behaves or how the Hinduist or the Christian behaves. All behaviors will be cultivated to meet the highest standards of wisdom for the evolution of the perfect person. And this very evolution will make us also true prophets in our time, because it would have enabled us to be united in righteousness, and to improve upon what the prophets taught and to pass it on to posterity forever in order to make our societies greater and better.

Samuel Adjei Sarfo, JD, MA, BA, etc. is an Attorney and Counselor at Law, a Teacher of Lore, Certified High School English Educator, Researcher and Scholar. He can be reached at [email protected]