Musings: An Atheist Tale

by Prosper

Articles like this posted on DNB Stories represent only the views of the writer and not the opinion of DNB Stories. 

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I am not one of those people that had their faith crumbled by one terrible misfortune or the other.

No.

In fact, I stopped believing because I appeared too favoured. And there is nothing too special about my then relationship with God anyway. Absolutely nothing. It was just the common norm—sin, ask for forgiveness and then sin again.

You will quickly tell me that it is Grace, right? God’s grace upon me.

People get rich, remain poor, get sick, die and stuff like that and it seemed the Almighty has no control over these things.

Christians, in their quick nature of defending their master, will shout Grace. I’ve sought, but never truly understood the force behind the selective nature of grace, anyway. Why God had to be so discriminatory with His Grace.

It wouldn’t be any too surprising if one began to think, maybe, just maybe, He never existed after all.

I was born into a nice Christian family. My dad was an elder in our church. So devoted was he that many addressed him as Papa and sometimes turn to him for spiritual counsel.

Since I began to reason, every older person in my family I knew taught me about Jesus. I grew to love him.

I knew things about him. I knew, as I was taught, the things that made him happy and those that made him unhappy. I knew about sin.

When I got into the University, I still worshipped with steadfastness. I never missed service nor slept without praying. I fasted once a month, as advised by my mum.

‘You are supposed to do it weekly,’ she’d said, ‘but do once a month if you don’t have the strength,’ she’d told me.

I always thanked God for all that were good and blamed Satan for everything bad. But at a time I began to ask— why can’t he that brought all that were good stop the devil from contaminating his works? Why just stand there and do nothing? And yet he was the Almighty.

Why allow Satan bring so much ruin to his world?

I started finding Christianity a bit uncomfortable during my service year in Calabar. A group of corps members had just been roasted in their bus on their way back to school.

One of them was Christian, our NCCF coordinator. He was, well, what I’d call the true definition of a Christian youth. He was honest, never coveted, never made trouble. He didn’t go with us to Love Spot in the evenings, where women were cheap, and sometimes free. Women that had special attraction for corpers.

He preferred to remain indoors, singing and praying in his high, faith-filled voice.

But God hadn’t saved Christian in the accident. He saved none. I know Christian. There was no way he would have started the journey without first asking everybody to close their eyes in prayer.

He once prayed for me when I was sick. I got well the next day. But I had taken an anti-malarial too, so it was difficult to tell if it was God that healed me or the drug.

I know you will say God healed me through the drug, or, a little further, ask me if it wasn’t God that had given the scientists the wisdom to create the drugs. All fine, not in the mood to argue.

But it’s all quite baffling why the almighty God would choose to invest so much time in pharmacology when he only would have just made a disease-free world in the first place.

Now you will tell me that it had all been Satan. Satan is the cause of all evil on earth.

But God is stronger than Satan, right? Way stronger as the Bible had always made us believe. What would it take him to render him powerless and salvage what’s left of this world? The world he created.

You will mention free will now, won’t you?

The idea of a God who is always ready to sacrifice the lives of His beloved children for the upholding of free will is somehow laughable, don’t you think?

One is free to kill, rape, steal, do all sorts of evil and then await his punishment is in hell. Okay. The same hell a harmless woman that had sex with a man who is not her husband would be put in. Tell me something else.

The same hell a teenage boy who is so shy to mingle and decided to turn to masturbation to quench his inescapable natural urges would be in.

And so I asked during our Tuesday meeting why God had allowed Christian to die and someone told me it was because that was what was best.

I asked how and whether she did not realize Christian was his mother’s only child. The girl answered that maybe—her emphasis on this word – maybe, that just maybe, if God had not taken him, he may not have died righteous again and therefore miss heaven. I was told God’s plan is to see all of us in heaven.

I said okay. From this girl’s view, which seemed the most palatable of all the others, I was able to deduce that God caused accidents and deaths too. So first I should stop blaming Satan for all evil, because a gruesome road accident might only have just been an act of harvest by God.

I now asked this girl what if God had decided to use a less extreme means to harvest Christian’s soul, maybe take him in his sleep or something, instead of allowing over 10 other persons to die with him in the bus.

She was quiet for a long time, and then finally she said, ‘You can’t really question God.’

Really? This statement makes me want to laugh and I get to hear it so often from christians.

A God that created us, sent us here and told us to turn to him in time of trouble, that we can’t ask simple questions.

Many claim God talks to them, but ask them to describe this and they will tell you of a strange voice in their head or the more common—a strange, revealing dream.

You know what? Atheists dream too. Everybody dream.

So many things that happen in this world are only just natural. Science is the new God.

I bet all these business men parading themselves as men of God all hear from God too.

A young man once said to me, ‘If you say there are no God, then why do people fall under anointing in churches?’

I didn’t answer and he smiled and said to me, ‘You see, you don’t know.’

He was right by the way. I really don’t know where to begin explaining to him that hypnosis is an explained scientific process. That even entertainers were able to induce it just as the pastors.

There are very much to be said, but you must understand that the purpose of this article is not to invalidate any faith. This is only a mere observation of a one-time believer.

I read this quote a lot –‘For what shall it profit a man to gain the entire world and not make heaven?’

I leave you with this— ‘For what shall it profit God to watch and see all he created perish and do nothing?’

Have a lovely Sunday!