Mental Freedom for the Ordinary Ghanaian. Part Two

By Dr. Samuel Adjei Sarfo
Attorney and Counselor at Law
Few people can withstand the badgering that attends the subversion of age-old assumptions, and I wonder if Mzbel will not fall on her own sword after disclosing that she does not believe in the story of Jesus Christ. When it comes to seminal beliefs about our religion or party or tribal/cultural affiliations, we want to settle into the comfort zone of our preconceived notions and to take no prisoners. We will fiercely condemn all those who dare dispute any of the things which we have held sacred from infancy. We are too invested in these beliefs to even dream of questioning them. It is possible to wish for some grave disasters on those who question our faith, and we might even take the law into our own hands to eliminate them.

One such concrete faith occurs in our partisan posture. In this respect, we are not willing to review our political philosophy in order to determine the sanctity of our allegiances. We form our allegiances and thereafter build iron-clad rationalizations to maintain them. Consequently, our parties become the basis for our sycophancies and our minds become controlled by those who own the party. We see no evil about the party no matter its disastrous conduct. And here, salient issues that are to be debated and pertinent questions that are to be asked are never analyzed. Rather, our parties become cults in which we become the unquestioning devotees, and we will vote for this party even when we see a ship dock on our shores ready with endorsed documents by the said party to sell us into collective slavery. So the benefits that ought to accrue from our exercise of the franchise to kick a bad government out are all lost and wasted because our partisan affiliations are cast in stone. And our posture perfectly merges with that of the political merchants who use us as mere machetes for the excoriation and diminishment of our national aspirations. Partisanship has simply traduced our political affiliations into concrete cast where we accept the worst from our camp while heavily scrutinizing the least aberrations from the other side in order to enlarge the least of faults into superhuman proportions.

And it is possible to draw a definitive co-relationship between our partisan faith and religious faith. Our religious faith is, to be tautological, simply faith, and not logic. Any intellectual incursions into the religious world takes us back into primitivity wherein nothing is reasonably or psychologically assessed for any objective truth. For religion stakes its power over ultimate truth and unquestionable wisdom. It claims a hold on the imagination for both past and present and even the future. It provides the platform for the mores and ethos in the past, and dictates all our conduct in the present and projects all our fate into the future. Religion is therefore ubiquitous in its knowledge of everything and anything about humankind, and it does not broach novel analysis under new circumstances and newer knowledge. So no matter how extant and distant the words of the fathers, we will unquestioningly accept them and fast-forward them into our time as a gauge for our righteousness today and our prospects for tomorrow. And this is what makes religion quite dangerous for our time, because with religion, life and the way to live it is already pre-packaged , and the way to live in peace, what to say, what to wear, how to think, and one’s sense of ethical conduct are all predetermined and pre-packaged by somebody that lived in the extant past. And when this happens, there is little room to let the brain breathe and let the mind conceive of the new and novel ideas that must advance our generation. In the context of religion, there is no new questions to ask, and no new ideas to add or no new opportunities in which to apply our faculties to answer the peculiar questions of our time. We have to abandon our intellectual talent in order to subordinate ourselves to the omniscient and all-knowing others to guard and guide us through life.

All these work against our inventive minds and creative genius. And if you analyze this carefully, you will conclude that it answers the question as to why our people have failed to compete in the world of scientific and technological inventions. They are too religious and have chosen to live by faith; so their inventive genius and creative capacities have been burned in the great fires of religion, and what they can do by way of critical thinking has been sacrificed on the altar of the ancient gods. Our childlike acceptance of religious faith simply proscribes new frontiers for new thinking. And as long as religious faith remains, our minds must stay in the past, and nothing new could be condoned.

With our religion, our world does not evolve. A person will be living in the present while in actual fact, the mind dwells in the world of some two thousand years old, feeding on the cultural beliefs and superstitions of people that lived eons ago. So here, superstitious ideas like witchcraft, demons, devils and incubi and succubi influence simple occurrences in nature. Hence, a person becomes stubbornly attached to the archaic concepts as a religious duty and he will not go beyond the explanations given by the religious scriptures for why things happen. Indeed, it amounts to blasphemy to offer non-supernatural explanations or unscriptural notions to occurrences that have been explained away by the religious fiat. We must remember what happened to the Italian scientist Galilei Galileo when he tried to explain the spherical nature of the world. He was swamped by the religious order of the day to recant what was then deemed as blasphemy. He had to recant or face certain death. Many others who found out the truth earlier than Galileo were accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake.

But that was in the medieval times. In those days, intelligent persons were simply stoned for uttering anything that went contrary to the accepted beliefs of the times. Others were also beheaded or pressed down with huge stones, while others were mutilated or decapitated. But the enlightenment came to sweep away the thick medieval darkness and to pave the way to new thinking. Today, when we marvel at the heights of our scientific and technological advancements, we must understand it to be the product of our uninhibited freedom to think. That is why today, our advancements in science and technology supersede that of the preceding millennia. Man was stuck in the first gear of religious superstition for the preceding millennia, and could therefore do nothing of significance for himself. He simply relied on miracles and magic performed by those considered as deputies of the gods. For example, ideas about electric energy and communication gadgets were deemed as complete wizardry and the inventors forced to confess to their witchcraft and burned to death, or fail to confess and burned to death all the same. Dreams might have been considered as true predictors of evils to come without further questions. And all the new-fangled concepts that challenged existing ideas or the prophets’ revelations might have been quashed or destroyed. Humans sacrificed humans to the gods to appease their wrath. And food and animals were burned as offerings to expiate the gods to properly align humankind to the mysterious unknown.

But when men woke up from this body of superstition, the world changed, and humankind began to live like the gods, knowing the things to do to become truly free, and removing from their societies all religious notions and superstitions that enchanted the mind and held it spellbound. Unfortunately, it appears that within our society, this enlightenment passed us by. Like Rip Van Winkle, the legendary figure that drank wine with the goblins and slept for a generation, we as a people have slept through the new philosophies and the new enlightenment. But worse than Rip Van Winkle, we have been asleep for over two thousand years, and we have no idea when or how to wake up from our slumber. That is why, instead of developing new concepts for our societal survival, we still rely on the ideas propounded in foreign societies millennia ago and given expression through the conduit of religious scripture. So in effect, we are living in the twenty-first century with ideas and thoughts that are over two to ten thousand years old. Thus our way of thinking is over two to ten thousand years old, although our lifespan may be less than a hundred years old.

And in this sense, we are a lost people not attempting to find our way home. We will remain in the wilderness forever unless we jettison these frozen concepts imposed on our minds by our religious faith. Present notions will not turn back to accommodate the requirements of ancient religions because the world knows better now. And those struggling to maintain the old ideas have no place in this new world. For this reason, our religious, educational and cultural systems must be radically reviewed to give room to logic, science and reasoning. We must overhaul our psychology to reject faith and to embrace analytical thinking, reasoning and logic as the sine qua non of our world view. We must give our brains the freedom to breathe and evolve away from the past and to develop new ideas for the present. And therein lies our true salvation.

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]