I Will Be Praying For You

I would not be a millionaire if I got a penny each time someone said the title of this piece to me, but I would have a lot of pennies that is for sure. Last night, I asked a relative who is continually praying for the salvation of my soul what exactly she asks her god to do for me, and the answer I received was the usual vapid christian mumbo jumbo of asking god to forgive me of my sins, save my soul, show me the light, bla bla bla.
What is this light that all except christians have failed to see? What exactly is it that I (or any other 'unbeliever') have done that requires forgiveness? She even reminded me that the bible said that "all have sinned and come short of the glory of God" and also that "if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature, old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new." I stopped myself from alerting her to the fact that the bible was full of bullshit such as she had quoted to make one feel extremely guilty, and then recommending Jesus as the remedy for that guilt.

I remember reading a tract about 20 years ago which told the story of a man who confronted a pastor with his many sins and wanted to know if God was going to forgive all if he accepted Christ as he had been told. The man told the pastor about his domestic life; how he beat his wife and reviled his daughter. The pastor told him that he would be forgiven. He then told the pastor how he had robbed several persons and homes; the pastor responded by telling him that all was forgiven since Jesus had "already paid the price on the cross." He then pulled the pastor close to him, pulled out his gun and told the pastor that that gun had killed a man, and asked if he was still in line to be forgiven. The pastor's answer was a resounding "yes!" The contents of that tract never left me, but as a boy barely in his teens, it definitely did not have the effect those who wrote that emotively cheesy story would have wanted it to. It only succeeded in ebbing away whatever faith I had left.

My interlocutor also told me she would enlist the help of a handful of pastors ("powerful men of God" was what she called them) in praying for my poor lost soul. She unfortunately is among millions of Nigerians who believe in a mysterious and abstruse bible that has to be revealed by God to his 'servants' who will in turn share such esoteric knowledge with laity such as her.

I have always equated faith with superstition; for me, the difference between them is the same as that between six and a half dozen. Religion is simply a collection of superstitions designed to exert the most subversive and wicked control over its subscribers. Religion is slavery; it enslaves the mind and distorts its thought processes. It ensures an unquestioning and a zombielike compliance to its tenets, which is why religious persons can easily justify the most dastardly deeds done in the name of their deity or religion. Over the last 2 weeks, there have been calls from politicians, preachers and political parties to pray for an ailing Nigeria, but it should be quite obvious to any honest observer that prayers do not work. I have suggested that Nigerians ditch the prayers and begin to source for the kind of leadership that will pull us out of the cauldron of calamities in which we currently find ourselves; I suggest the same to those who are praying for the 'salvation' of my doomed heathen soul - they should just give me a penny and let us all move on with our lives.