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Moral criticism and religious ministers’ perversions

By Tony Afejuku
29 March 2019   |   1:46 am
In our present-day country we tend to justify anything or everything, no matter how morally reprehensible it may be or it may seem. In truth, we tend to defend our respective perspectives and positions by enthroning in our discussions....

Muslim worshippers. / AFP PHOTO / Bandar Al-DANDANI

In our present-day country we tend to justify anything or everything, no matter how morally reprehensible it may be or it may seem. In truth, we tend to defend our respective perspectives and positions by enthroning in our discussions, disputes and arguments the doctrine, so to state it, of one person’s meat is another one’s poison. In other words, if I find dog-meat to be a delicacy, so be it, and leave me to enjoy it as I intend to let you be, and allow you to relish your snake-meat delicacy. What this means or may mean is that in our country each one’s cultural context is different from someone else’s or neighbour’s.

What is a taboo in one’s culture is not a taboo in someone else’s culture, which points to how disparate we are as compatriots in this our dear country. Our moral barometers can therefore not but be different, and no one’s moral culture can, or, better put, no one’s moral barometer can serve as a reflection of our national historical trends. Some of us may thus assert that our peculiar widespread beliefs, attributes and attitudes cannot but be ridiculous, oppressive and destructive to others; in other words, these beliefs, attributes and attitudes, no matter from the cultural populations they derive, cannot legitimise and lend succour to our moral emotions, ideals and choices.

What I am trying to say so far, successfully or un-successfully, is that whatever fundamental argument we make relating to our moral criticism or acceptance or consideration of any action by any person or people or group of persons or group of people will only have relevance or make sense if we do not give it universal significance. But this is not to imply or to mean that there is no modicum of accepted moral behaviour or criticism of an abnormal behaviour in our society or country. As a social philosopher, Laurie Shrage, says, … “how actions are widely perceived and interpreted by others, even if wrongly or seemingly irrationally, is crucial to determining their moral status because, though such interpretations may not hold up against “objective reality,” they are part of the “social reality” in which we live.”

In our country today, “part of the “social reality” in which we live” is that of our acclaimed religious ministers and their perversions which are akin to those of prostitutes going by their modus operandi, which many compatriots find troubling. These religious ministers are of different or assorted religious denominations and faiths – Christian, Islamic and Traditional. Let us begin with the traditional. The perversions of our traditional ministers of religion are legion. They heal and kill so long as the money from their clients and patronizers, their regular and irregular customers, is right. Hardly can we not trace many demonic endeavours and happenings in our country to them. Hardly can we not trace many reported cases of missing persons to them, missing persons who presumably ended up in their cauldrons of rituals. Hardly can we not trace to them horrible criminals who capture or kidnap or abduct many of our compatriots who have vanished forever. Many of our traditional ministers of religion are horrible perverters of our acceptable norms and morality. They are horrible people we forever must forbid to pervert our society. Various human parts sliced from maliciously murdered persons are usually taken to them to do demonic magic for political or electoral power and wealth and influence and other devilish things such as the ability to disappear when danger lurches near…

Among our traditional ministers are marabouts, who, it has been alleged, do “donkey-charms” for some of our political leaders, civilian or military. What are “donkey-charms”? They are, as I have been informed, powerful ritualistic or magical charms that give immense political power, wealth, influence, and longevity, in some cases, to those for whom the charms are made.

Significantly, they sexually must mount, without fail, their magically worked-on donkeys at specified days, months, times and intervals. This “perversity” of animal-mating for reasons and purposes specified above is repugnant and condemnable. But in the parts of our country where it predominantly persists there is nothing reprehensible and repellent about it. This is one example of our moral criticism of perversity that is relative. But we must ask: can our traditional ministers or marabouts not do charms that are devoid of perversions that are bestial or degenerate in the moral sense of the word, and instead help to give us our true harmony that we earnestly deserve in our country now and forever even when we disagree on issues among ourselves?

Now let us focus on our so-called ministers of God in our Christian Churches. How many of them are not customers of native doctors, that is, traditional religious ministers and Islamic marabouts, who give them sundry objects and charms that they plant or bury in their churches to divert their congregations to higher aims that pervert their senses and aspirations? Of course, our newspapers almost diurnally report stories of ‘pastors,’ ‘priests,’ and ‘prophets’ whose sexual escapades and sensual love constitute major components of their ministries. But their sexual perversions which compel them to be pathological adulterers and molesters of minors under their ironically Christianly care and watch, and to engage in other things and acts beyond the boundaries of the standard of normality hurt our country tragically.

Many of our leaders in politics or business and other professional areas who flock to many of our pentecostal and whit e-garment churches especially for different and various forms or kinds of spiritual favours cannot be said to have brought the harmony we cherish to our country. Whatever “SPIRITUAL” favours they got (or get or are getting) from the various worshipping places, including mosques, have not done us any meaningful good as a country, people and polity. It is no hyperbole to argue that alien or strange philosophy of demonic wickedness of our political leaders especially have no roots in our respective cultures or in the Nigerian polity. Why, for instance, has any leader, civilian or military, who has entered our central government house called Aso Rock become worse than his predecessor despite the respective “cleansing” of the place by imams and pastors and bishops who regularly visit there?

Perhaps the answer lies in this statement: The spiritual perversions of our religious ministers and of our political leaders are as disgusting as the shit, the excrement, that comes from the anus or anuses that some persons lick or consume for power and wealth (that don’t stop them from dying and that don’t accompany them to their graves). Horrifyingly, shit-licking or excrement-consumption is the new prescription by false religious ministers for seekers of perverse power and demonic wealth. This is a subject for our country’s moralists and psycho-analysts. Lo! I suppress my tongue….

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