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Killing christians to spread a religion

By Sunday Adole Jonah
09 June 2019   |   2:43 am
Historical narratives about how Christianity was violently uprooted from the Arabian Peninsula in the Dark Ages so that a new religion would thrive will surely elicit a feeling of recoiling in horror in sincere Christians; the butchery....

Pakistani Christians mourners push stretchers carrying the dead bodies of relatives who were killed in a drive-by shooting outside a church, at a hospital in Quetta on April 15, 2018.<br />Two Christians were killed in a drive-by shooting outside a church in southwestern Pakistan on April 15, 2018, officials said, the second such attack on the minority community in the area this month. / AFP PHOTO / BANARAS KHAN

Sir: Historical narratives about how Christianity was violently uprooted from the Arabian Peninsula in the Dark Ages so that a new religion would thrive will surely elicit a feeling of recoiling in horror in sincere Christians; the butchery, slave-taking, and scorched-earth proselytisation of this new creed abroad was even more horrifying. Over the centuries, Christianity lost its strongholds of present-day Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey, and a host of other places but it is how present-day North Africa was de-Christianised and thus could not tag along the economic and technological strides of Italy that bothers me especially.

Christian colonisation of Southern Africa has had better consequences so far (try to dispute this fact before South African shareholders of MTN and DStv and see how they’d think you are nuts), and if the northern segment of Africa had not de-Christianised, surely the central and sub-Saharan sections of Africa would have been wedged in developmental positivity.

But brand-hot religion came and stumped attempts at imparting positive colonisation in the shapes of schools and hospitals, especially; however, with strong European colonial willpower, there was prospect for co-habitation until the hatchings of the Ayatollah and al-Qaeda thoughts in the late 20th century took some parts of Africa back to the Dark Ages (Nigeria is one prominent victim here); now, it is fashionable to uproot whole contiguous Christian communities (like those 13,000 churches destroyed in the Northeast of Nigeria)and not even blink in guilt about it, made worse when there is an organised government vehicle that spread propaganda that all in well out here and it is “not only Christians” who have been uprooted.

This government now plays fast and smart with “Western Christians” NGOs and “Western Christians” financial institutions like the World Bank and others that now pledge rebuilding funds in the hundreds of millions of dollars to set up schools where there is no Christian child to go to any more; the few girls who were bold to hang around at Chibok and Dapchi have been kidnappedjust to teach “Christians a lesson or two.”

Meantime, the scourge of Christianity blossoms in population like flies and with a weak, poorly-run non-Christian-inclusive economy that does not promote free enterprise this human mass constitutes the poverty capital of the world. What does the government propaganda machine do next? Oh, this loudmouth “remembers” that birth rates are falling in “Western Christians” countries and it puts a feeler out, just to elicit reactions initially, that “Christian Canada” has indicated to “Mr. Integrity” that it has the economic wherewithal and space to accommodate a million butchers of Christians, maybe ex-fighters from the Sambisa Forest.

In Nigeria, decimation of settled Christian communities is achieved by a three-pronged terror army, viz: the semi-settled Boko Haram, the mobile Fulani, and the mobile but restricted, hit-and-run marauding bandits; it is a painful fact that the Christian population falls where any one or two of these terror groups are active. The ideological aggregation of these terror groups is the spread of religion, and Olusegun Obasanjo could not have been more correct at Oleh in Delta State.

The country of China knows the facts of the foregoing arguments, and this is the reason China is hostile to religion to the extent that, in order not to be weakened economically like Nigeria, China has adopted a compulsory “re-education” programmes for certain class of people so that their religiously-acquired “education” that they are “superior” to non-adherents of their faith does not form the nucleus of destructive terrorism that would slow this country down. In fact, if you are caught fasting during the “holy month,” Chinese authorities will force-feed you so as to discourage your intolerant religiosity.
Sunday Adole Jonah, Department of Physics, Federal University of Technology, Minna, Niger State.

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