Author: Ophelia Benson

One compelling reason not to believe the standard-issue God exists is the conspicuous fact that no one knows anything at all about it. That’s a tacit part of the definition of God – a supernatural being that no one knows anything about. The claims that are made about God bear no resemblance to genuine knowledge. This becomes immediately apparent if you try adding details to God’s CV: God is the eternal omnipotent benevolent omniscient creator of the universe, and has blue eyes. You see how it works. Eternal omnipotent benevolent omniscient are all simply ideal characteristics that a God ought to have; blue eyes, on the other hand, are particular, and if you say God has them it suddenly becomes obvious that no one knows that, and by implication that no one knows anything else either.

We don’t know God has blue eyes – we don’t know God has red hair – we don’t know God plays basketball – we don’t know God drinks coffee. We have no clue. But then, how do we “know” God is omnipotent, or eternal? We don’t. It’s just that the monotheist God is supposed to have certain attributes that make it a significant grown-up sophisticated God, better than the frivolous or greedy or quarrelsome gods like Kali or Loki or Athena. (Oddly, this does leave room for one particular: we do “know” that God is male. God is more ideal and abstract and generalized than Aphrodite and Freyja and he’s also not that particular, earthy, blue-eyed, coffee-drinking sex, he’s that other, general, abstract sex: the male.) We don’t know that God is omnipotent, we simply assume that anyone called God has to be omnipotent, because that’s part of the definition, and we know that God is called God, so therefore God must be omnipotent. That’s a fairly shaky kind of knowledge. It also provides hours of entertainment when we ask ourselves if God has the power to make a grapefruit that is too heavy for God to lift.

The knowledge is shaky, yet it’s common to hear people talking as if they do know, and can know, and have no reason to think they don’t know. A lot of people think they know things about “God” which they have no good reason to think they know, and even which seem to be contradicted by everything we see around us. It’s odd that the discrepancies don’t interfere with the knowledge.

People seem to know that God is good, that God cares about everything and is paying close attention to everything, and that God is responsible whenever anything good happens to them or whenever anything bad almost happens to them but doesn’t. Yet they apparently don’t know that God is responsible whenever anything bad happens to them, or whenever anything good almost happens to them but doesn’t. People who survive hurricanes or earthquakes or explosions say God saved them, but they don’t say God killed or mangled all the victims. Olympic athletes say God is good when they win a gold, but they don’t say God is bad when they come in fourth or twentieth, much less when other people do.

That’s the advantage of goddy epistemology, of course: it’s so extraordinarily flexible, so convenient, so personalized. The knowledge is so neatly molded to fit individual wishes. God is good when I win and blameless when I lose, good when I survive the tsunami and out of the equation when other people are swept away and drowned.

This is all very understandable from the point of view of personal fantasy – there’s not much point in having an imaginary friend who is boring and disobliging and always picking fights – but peculiar when considered as a kind of knowledge, which is generally how believers treat it. The winning sprinter doesn’t say “I think God is good,” she says God is good; the survivor doesn’t say “I believe God saved me,” he says “God saved me.” Claims about God are treated as knowledge. Hence the frequent thought – “but you don’t know that … .” If one is rude enough to make the thought public, the standard reply is that God is mysterious, ineffable, beyond our ken, hiding.

And that’s one major reason I don’t believe in the bastard, and would refuse to believe even if I did find God convincing in other ways. I’d refuse on principle; I’d say: “All right then I’ll go to hell,” like Huck Finn.

Because what business would God have hiding? What’s that about? What kind of silly game is that? God is all-powerful and benevolent but at the same time it’s hiding? Please. We wouldn’t give that the time of day in any other context. Nobody would buy the idea of ideal, loving, concerned, involved parents who permanently hide from their children, so why buy it of a loving God?

The obvious answer of course is that believers have to buy it for the inescapable reason that their God is hidden. The fact is that God doesn’t make personal appearances, or even send authenticated messages, so believers have to say something to explain that obtrusive fact. The mysterian peekaboo God is simply the easiest answer to questions like “Why is God never around?”

The answer however has the same flaw that all claims about God have: nobody knows that. Nobody knows God is hiding. Everyone knows God is not there to be found the way a living person is, but nobody knows that that’s because God is a living person who is hiding.

Nobody knows that, and it’s not the most obvious explanation of God’s non-appearance. The most obvious, simple, economical explanation of God’s non-appearance is that there is no God to do the appearing. The “God is hiding” explanation has currency only because people want to believe that there is a God, in spite of the persistent failure to turn up, so they pretend to know that hiding is what God is up to. The wish is father to the thought, which is then transformed into “knowledge.”

It’s a pretty desperate stratagem, though. The fact that we wouldn’t buy it in any other context shows that. If we go to a hotel or a restaurant and everything is dirty and falling apart and covered in broken glass, we want a word with the manager; if we’re told the manager is hiding, we decamp in short order. We don’t forgivingly hang around for the rest of our lives: we leave.

We’re told, in explanation of these puzzles, that we’re merely humans and we simply don’t understand. Very well, but then we don’t understand – we don’t know anything about all this, all we’re doing is guessing, or wishing or hoping. Yet we’re so often told things about God as if they were well-established facts. God is “mysterious” only when sceptics ask difficult questions. The rest of the time believers are cheerily confident of their knowledge. That’s a good deal too convenient.

It’s too convenient, and it produces a very repellent God. It’s odd that the believers aren’t more troubled by this. (Many are, of course. It turns out that even Mother Teresa was. We’ll find out that the Pope has doubts next.) It’s odd that the confident dogmatic believers don’t seem to notice what a teasing, torturing, unpleasant God they have on their hands. A God that is mysterious, yet demands that we believe in it (on pain of eternal torture, in some accounts), is a God that demands incompatible things, which seems like a nasty trick to play on a smaller weaker species.

It all turns on faith. God doesn’t want us to know God exists the way we know the sun exists; God wants us to have “faith.” But why? That’s perverse. It’s commonplace, because it gets rehearsed so often, but it’s perverse. That doesn’t fly in human relations, and it’s not obvious why it should fly in any other relations. A kind friend or sibling or parent or benefactor doesn’t hide from you from before your birth until after your death and still expect you to feel love and trust and gratitude. Why should God?

As a test of faith, comes the pat answer. Well God shouldn’t be testing our faith. If it wants to test something it should be testing our ability to detect frauds and cheats and liars – not our gormless credulity and docility and willingness to be conned. God should know the difference between good qualities and bad ones, and not be encouraging the latter at the expense of the former.

But then (we are told) “faith” would be too easy; in fact, it would be compelled, and that won’t do. Faith is a kind of heroic discipline, like yoga or playing the violin. Faith has to overcome resistance, or it doesn’t count. If God just comes right out and tells us, beyond possibility of doubt, that God exists, that’s an unworthy shortcut, like a sprinter taking steroids. No, we have to earn faith by our own efforts, which means by believing God exists despite all the evidence indicating it doesn’t and the complete lack of evidence indicating it does.

In other words, God wants us to veto all our best reasoning faculties and methods of inquiry, and to believe in God for no real reason. God wants us not to do what we do in all the rest of life when we really do want to find something out – where the food is, when the storm is going to hit, whether the water is safe to drink, what medication to take for our illness – and simply decide God exists, like tossing a coin.

I refuse. I refuse to consider a God “good” that expects us to ignore our own best judgment and reasoning faculties. That’s a deal-breaker. That’s nothing but a nasty trick. This God is supposed to have made us, after all, so it made us with these reasoning faculties, which, when functioning properly, can detect mistakes and obvious lies – so what business would it have expecting us to contradict all that for no good reason? As a test? None. It would have no business doing that.

A God that permanently hides, and gives us no real evidence of its existence – yet considers it a virtue to have faith that it does exist despite the lack of evidence – is a God that’s just plain cheating, and I want nothing to do with it. It has no right to blame us for not believing it exists, given the evidence and our reasoning capacities, so if it did exist and did blame us, it would be a nasty piece of work. Fortunately, I don’t worry about that much, because I don’t think it does exist.

This article appears in 50 Voices of Disbelief, edited by Russell Blackford and Udo Schüklenk, Wiley-Blackwell 2009, and is re-published here by permission.

Had William Hazlitt written his essay “On Persons with One Idea” today, he would surely have found room for the field of postcolonial studies. It is a field with only one idea: namely, that imperialism and racism are such dominant features of modern life, and had such a foundational role in the construction of our present society, that they inform every aspect of our ideas, culture, and history. Postcolonialism is, in theory, anti-hierarchical and anti-oppressive. But because it has only one idea, it can easily become oppressive in practice, and to quite a large extent. To show that this is true within the context of one postcolonial scholar’s book, The Intimate Enemy by Ashis Nandy, is the purpose of this essay.

Ashis Nandy might seem an unlikely candidate for such an accusation. He is a political activist and a major commentator on contemporary affairs, known for his championing of nonviolence and tolerance. One of Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals, he has written about communal violence, particularly Hindu-Muslim riots and the emotionally charged landscape of nationalism. He is no friend to the Hindu right, which he has accused of being itself a product of British colonialism. All varieties of chauvinism are subjected to fierce criticism at Nandy’s hands, and he is a member of numerous human rights and civil liberties groups.

These views are decent and humane, and Nandy is no friend to injustice. Yet he is very much a member of the postcolonial movement, and it often leads him to support a blinkered traditionalism for no other reason than that it seems to be anti-Western and anti-modern.

His book, The Intimate Enemy, appeared in 1983, at a time when postcolonialism was flourishing and when its arguments must have appeared fresh and controversial, although they have now gone quite stale. In essence, Nandy is making a case against modernity, and against the entire project of secular liberal rationalism, which he sees as more or less inseparable from colonialism, capitalism, and all the aspects of modernization and development he finds objectionable.

Many of Nandy’s concerns about the modern world are quite understandable: it is what he would put in their place that is less clear. Nandy is mostly concerned with bureaucratization and the diminishing of individuality it entails. He is horrified by modern hierarchies of wealth and privilege, by the inequities of modern societies and the gruesome contrast between wealth and poverty which prevails in contemporary India. Most important of all, he recognizes that modern science, modern weaponry, and modern efficiency have made mass murder all the more easy and warfare all the more deadly. All of these criticisms are certainly valid and ought to be taken into consideration. What is less valid is the accusation that liberalism, secularism, or rationalism are responsible for these problems, and the corollary position that the Enlightenment experiment is bankrupt.

Nandy implicates the entire liberal worldview in aiding and abetting imperialism, and therefore sees fit to reject it. Its talk of equality and justice is a despicable lie intended to cover up its secretly hierarchical, patriarchal dimensions. It is an essentially inegalitarian doctrine masquerading as the very opposite, or so Nandy would have us believe. The liberal worldview privileges reason over tradition and superstition. In this sense, therefore, it puts power in the hands of an educated elite or a scientific, Westernized bureaucracy. It also can be used to justify imperialism as a humanitarian attempt to bring justice, knowledge, and scientific modernity to the backward regions of the world. That liberalism does these things is the crux of the postcolonial argument, and Nandy wholeheartedly embraces it.

In responding to this, we will leave aside the bizarre fact that Nandy is himself an active supporter of global liberalism, at least in some limited sense. Liberalism is the founding ideology behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), after all, which Nandy must theoretically support. He is, indeed, a member of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, which is the most well-respected civil rights group in India and has been working for decades to protect democracy, secularism, and human rights, all of which Nandy criticizes stridently in his writings! This contradiction is something Nandy will have to work out for himself. What concerns us here are his arguments.

Nandy has erected a certain number of barriers to any successful refutation of his points: mostly in the form of bizarre evasions. One might like to accuse Nandy of being unfair in his attacks on liberals, of spreading misinformation, but this he admits to at the very beginning! His framework, he claims, explain his “partial, almost cavalier, use of biographical data and the deliberate misuse of some concepts borrowed from psychology…. The aim is to make sense of some of the relevant categories of contemporary knowledge in Indian terms.” (xiii, emphasis added).

Nandy’s own training is as a psychologist, yet here he announces his intention to misuse this training so that Indians might understand his points. It seems difficult to me to imagine anyone not finding this rude and objectionable. Surely the individuals whose biographies are about to be misrepresented have a right to feel angry, but so do all the Indians in the world who would insist that they can tolerate truth and fact, and don’t need to have important concepts in psychology misused for the sake of their understanding. What would Amartya Sen or Romila Thapar say to such a claim?

The above quote may be an instance of surprising honesty on Nandy’s part, but it makes it difficult to engage with his later arguments. One cannot be sure which of them are even accurate or properly documented. It also makes the entire task of criticizing Nandy seem absurd. I live on the other side of the world, after all, and come from a different cultural background than that of Nandy. Does this give me the right to misrepresent his life or his views? Should I rewrite the above to suggest that Nandy does not have reasonable criticisms of modernity but is rather a mindless reactionary? This latter would not be true, but it would make more sense to a Western audience, I have no doubt. On what ground would Nandy object to my doing so?

Another evasion on Nandy’s part appears later on in the preface, when he declares that “a purely professional critique of this book will not do. If you do not like it [I am, I’m afraid, very much in that camp] you will have to fight it the way one fights myths: by building or resurrecting more convincing myths. However, even myths have their biases.” (xiv).

Perhaps I am being dense, but I have a great deal of trouble understanding what Nandy could possibly mean when he says that even myths have biases. If I plan to construct a series of falsifications in order to attack Nandy’s book, which he seems to be suggesting I do, how could such an account be anything but biased? Had Nandy said that even facts can be biased, that would be a remarkable assertion, but to say that it is possible for lies to be biased is almost a tautology.

At any rate, I prefer to attempt a non-mythological critique of Nandy that engages seriously with his arguments, even if he does not regard such a critique as possible. This is because Nandy’s criticism of liberalism is now so widespread in academia and has formed the backbone of postcolonial scholarship. Those of us who would like to see a more liberal, tolerant world, in which people are not subjected to irrational cruelties and injustices, therefore need to be able to respond to it.

First of all, it must be said that some liberals, namely James Mill, but also John Stuart Mill and the other utilitarians, were supportive of imperialism, and that liberal theories of progress lent a certain credence to imperial designs. However, Western imperialism preceded liberalism by a long while, and such liberalism actually provided the first voice of opposition to it. In fact, imperialism is incompatible with liberal, universalist principles, if one truly takes them seriously. Montaigne, a proto-liberal if there ever was one, was driven to a profound hatred of cruelty and injustice by the deeds of the Spanish in America. The Conquistadors were not motivated by the principles of liberal humanitarian intervention, meanwhile, but by God and king. If any ideologies justified imperialism, they were belligerent, proselytizing religion and the chauvinism of monarchs. It was both religious intolerance and absolute monarchy, meanwhile, that the Enlightenment went about debunking, and that liberalism has always opposed.

Liberalism presupposes that all human beings are endowed with reason and conscience: this is on the first page of the UDHR, which Nandy supposedly defends. People may come from different backgrounds and may embrace different identities, yet they all may be approached on a basic level as reasonable creatures capable of treating one another decently and humanely. From this extends all of liberalism, right down to democracy. If one takes this seriously, as I said, imperialism is unthinkable. After all, imperialism is inherently undemocratic and authoritarian, and is based upon the assumption of unalterable differences between cultures which can only be overcome through force: Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations is the perfect example of how illiberal anti-universalism plays into the hands of militarists and chauvinists.

Universalism may make power-motivated imperialism illegitimate because it insists on the equal dignity and rights of all people. Yet, what are we to do when other societies commit grave injustices? Montesquieu’s The Persian Letters is a classic of liberalism. It is revolutionary in its criticisms of European societies and traditions, but also in its implicit assertion that both East and West can be criticized from the standpoint of reason and conscience. France may be heavily assaulted in the book, but the narrative’s true personal drama revolves around the Persian Usbek, and his relations with his numerous wives. The brutalities of the Persian system of government and of Islamic gender roles are criticized just as harshly as European societies in the book.

Even this early work of liberalism expresses the essence of the universalist outlook. We have a moral stake in all of the injustices of the world; we are just as implicated in those of other societies as we are in our own, and we must intervene to protect the victims from cruelty and injustice. This intervention must not come from Western ethnocentrism, but from a pan-civilizational awareness of shared humanity.

Certainly authoritarian imperialism and various realpolitick schemes which masquerade as humanitarianism are impositions, and involve regarding members of other societies as less than human. This, in turn, often results in grave human rights abuses (we may regard the massive civilian causalities of the Iraq war as a recent example), which are the very things liberals are attempting to avoid. If one were to truly approach global intervention with humanitarian goals in mind, however, such things could be avoided. The imperialistic tendencies of the Mills and of other 19th century liberals were a distortion of liberal values that could have been avoided: all these writers had to do was look to their liberal anti-imperialist master, Jeremy Bentham!

What is important to realize, however, is that imperialism is not the only evil in the world, even though it is a serious one. The failure to see this rather elementary fact characterizes a great deal of postcolonial scholarship. One must avoid imperialism, but one must not be so desperately fearful of intervening in other countries that one seals off the victims of cruelty within their respective nations and refuses to promise aid.

Nandy criticizes “Western universalism” and suggests replacing it with an “alternative universalism” based on traditional Indic concepts. What he fails to understand is that “Western universalism” is a contradiction in terms, as is “alternative universalism.” Universalism is simply universalism: it cannot be associated with a particular culture. Liberals use whatever traditions and sources are available to defend universalism, whether Western, Indian, or something else entirely. Certainly Amartya Sen, in his defenses of liberalism, refers not only to Western Enlightenment figures, but to the Buddha, various South Asian traditions, deliberative politics in Africa, and so forth. If Nandy were truly committed to universalism, he would make an argument similar to that of Sen. But instead, he attacks all those who have espoused universalist values and openly defends traditional, pre-modern societies. His alternative universalism is really, therefore, only a glorified particularism. It may legitimately attack the evils of modernity, yet it has nothing to say about the horrors of the pre-modern world, the caste system, traditional gender roles, or the superstition and narrow-mindedness of small communities.

But if one embraces this particularism, then why should one attack imperialism? Nandy criticizes egalitarian ideologies, the ideals of democracy and human rights, etc. as mere hierarchies and oppressions in disguise. In this he follows the lead of Foucault and similar postmodern thinkers, who find in liberal institutions little more than disguised bureaucratic power relations. But how does one know that such hierarchies are reprehensible if equality is not a goal? If egalitarian ideologies, democracy, and self-government are not legitimate ideals, why should it be the case, as Nandy maintains, that imperialism is so wrong? Along with the postcolonial theorists, he begins with the unexplained premise that imperialism is the greatest evil in human history, then proceeds to insist that the ideologies which might provide a grounds for attacking it—namely, the equal rights and dignity of all people and the value of self-determination—are themselves imperialistic! If equality, human rights, and democracy are not actually valuable goals, then Nandy should proceed to applaud imperialism, authoritarianism, and the triumph of might over right. Foucault at least was honest enough to pursue these ideas to their horrible conclusion, eventually backing the Ayatollah Khomeini and his reactionary movement. This is the end result of the assumption that equality and democracy can somehow be implicated in inegalitarian, undemocratic abuses.

Within The Intimate Enemy, there are many bizarre interpretations and discredited assertions, just as Nandy promised there would be. To take only one blatant example, here is his brief discussion of the 19th century social reformer Rammohan Roy: “Rammohan had introduced into the culture of India’s expanding middle class… the ideas of organized religion, a sacred text, monotheism, and, above all, a patriarchal godhead. Simultaneously, he had… [suggested] a new definition of masculinity, based on a demystification of womanhood and on the shifting of the locus of magicality from everyday femininity to a transcendent male principle.” (22) It may take one more time than it is worth to decipher that sentence, yet once one does so, one realizes the full extent of Nandy’s misrepresentation.

I know less about Roy than many, I am sure, and I would not doubt that there are legitimate criticisms to level against him. However, he was a decent person who was seeking to abolish the practice of sati, which involved the ritual self-immolation of a woman after her husband died, and to guarantee women some basic inheritance rights. While I’m sure he did not go far enough in his proto-feminism, he did attempt to guarantee a few basic human rights for Indian women. Yet according to Nandy, Roy was imposing a “masculine” worldview on a society which respected the “mystical” side of femininity. What this mystical side is is unclear, but Nandy seems to assume that rationality and critical thinking are distinctly male—I know many a feminist who would beg to differ!—while irrationality, tradition, and “magicality” are all female. Therefore a society in which women are subjected to irrational injustice and cruelty is deemed “feminine” while a post-Roy society in which women have a small degree of power and agency is a male imposition, by Nandy’s account. Would he declare Afghanistan under the Taliban to be a “feminine” society? Certainly femininity was properly “mystified” there, since women were so successfully sealed off from the rest of society!

Nandy is tempted, thanks to the entire spirit of postcolonialism, to attribute all of the world’s evils to imperialism. And because of this, he ends up tacitly condoning all of the world’s injustices which predate imperialism, such as patriarchy, religious intolerance, and the violence of tradition. Given Nandy’s personal views in his public life, he would no doubt be shocked to be accused of defending such things. But he has in fact fallen victim to the postcolonial trap: he has focused so exclusively on one injustice—imperialism—that he has rendered himself inured to all the other injustices in the world which are also crying out for redress.

“It is not the belief in witchcraft that we are concerned about…..we acknowledge people’s right to hold this belief on the condition that this does not lead to child abuse.” Gary Foxcroft

I get the sense that some of us in the humanist and human rights communities try hard to placate religious people amongst us by insinuating that it is okay to believe in witches and witchcraft, so long as no one gets hurt. While this may be considered reasonable to some it does seem to suggest a certain level of patronisation towards people who hold superstitious beliefs, to the effect that they simply cannot be convinced of the folly of their convictions. Our assumption that others are unable to comprehend certain facts should not preclude us from offering opposing opinion about their beliefs. We are doing many such people a disservice when we choose to keep certain information to ourselves, perhaps because we favour a gradual “softly softly” approach towards eradicating the stigmatisation of innocent people in the name of witchcraft. It is really vital to expand the debate beyond the dangers of belief in witchcraft to the dangers of belief in all forms of superstition, however innocuous they may appear. I say this because I sense that many otherwise highly educated people in Nigeria still harbour some belief in supernatural beings and forces, perhaps linked to their religious or cultural suppositions. I once asked a highly knowledgeable friend of mine whether or not he believed in witches and his answer to me was that “there are good spirits in the world helping people, therefore there must be evil spirits aiming to hurt humans”. Notice his use of deductive logic to grant some form of scientific legitimacy to an otherwise empirically baseless assertion. Such a belief system in more ways than one seems to inoculate those better educated ones from the actions of the believers of a much more toxic strain who are often impoverished and less well educated. The complacency of educated believers in superstition towards the actions of believers of this toxic strain will surely not help in the fight to eradicate abusive child witchcraft practices.

I want to take this point to introduce my hypothesis as to why we believe in witches, and I shall group the reasons for belief in witches into two categories: the first group includes those whose belief in witches arise from poverty and lack of the things which give modern life meaning; while the second group are those “enlightened” people who do not necessarily face the same existential challenges as those in the first group but who believe in witches and other superstitions nevertheless because they are based on scriptural teachings and certain cultural norms.

The title of this paper is framed as a question; however my dear friend Leo Igwe had suggested that it should be titled more like a proposition instead, as in “Why we believe in witches”. While there are many well researched examples to explain why certain humans retain belief in witches and other superstitions, it is not my intention to add to that academic debate. I am much more interested in understanding why it is that belief in witches still persists after it has been proven that the world is round not flat; that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way round; that irregular craters caused by colliding meteors and not an image of an old woman with a pestle and mortar dot the surface of the moon; that lightning is caused by excited electric charges in the atmosphere and not by the iron staff of an iron god; that all living things evolved over hundreds of millions of years and not within a period of six days about 6,000 years ago (I’m sure by now you catch my drift). Why is it that in spite of mankind’s ability to decipher the vast array of conundrums that challenge us through time-tested scientific means, very many people still believe in witches and supernatural beings?

As an aside there is something I find very hard to fathom about people who harbour beliefs in witches: if witches are so powerful, why do they seem to bother themselves only with small fry like the downtrodden in Akwa Ibom state and across many other impoverished areas across Nigeria and the developing world? Wouldn’t it be a lot more profitable to attack those who pose a far greater threat than some poor farmer in Eket? What comes to mind immediately is the prospect of harnessing witchcraft to help find Osama Bin Laden, the most wanted man in the world. There is literally a fortune of over $100 million to make! And just in case you think witchcraft only works for evil purposes, why shouldn’t Osama instead seek to use witchcraft to infect the backside of George W. Bush, his sworn enemy, with the bites of a thousand fleas? That surely would sound like the evil act of a most vile person from the point of view of the vast majority of dyed-in-the-wool bible-toting conservative Americans. I really don’t understand the pleasure witches get from causing misery to already miserable souls. But I think I have a hunch as to why this is so.

There was a time in Europe between 700 AD and 1200 AD when it was actually a crime to believe in witches, because according to the bible, Jesus had defeated all evil and so there were no supernatural forces left on earth to bother mankind. But by 1300 AD the belief in witches had begun to flourish and led to the infamous witch hunts that saw hundreds of thousands of people murdered after being accused of witchcraft. It is also instructive that this period in Europe coincided with the great plague, which led to mass deaths on a scale never before seen. Humanity had not fully understood the cause of the Bubonic plague from a scientific point of view, and as is typically the nature of humans in the absence of scientific knowledge, there had to something supernatural to blame for all the deaths and suffering. Witches would have been top of the list in their minds as the logical cause of the plague, and so began the bloodletting, which only ended after over 300 years, around the 18th century, which was also the beginning of the period of Enlightenment, when rationalism and empiricism gained ground as means through which we gain understanding of our world. In summary I’m trying to suggest, without sounding too banal, that belief in witches and other superstitions flourishes during very difficult times, times when humanity seems overwhelmed by perils of the natural world which we live in, and I cannot imagine a time more perilous than the present time in which we find ourselves in Nigeria: very high and worsening levels of infant mortality; endemic pauperism with the vast majority of Nigerians living below the poverty line; some of the highest levels in the world of preventable and curable infectious diseases such as Malaria, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, polio and so on. There are few countries on earth with a more challenging environment than we have in Nigeria. It is in this most challenging environment that many impoverished people turn to morally derelict pastors for hope of a solution to their numerous problems. I have a Rule and Exception precept which I apply to analysing and explaining problems; applying it to the problem at hand, I prefer to accept that it is the rule that most people, when offered a chance to chose between modern, effective science-based healthcare and the village pastor, will chose the former over the later. It is the exception not the rule that people living in a society where the hazards of Hobbesian life are absent still hold on strongly to superstitious beliefs.

So we proceed to flesh out the answer to our question: why do we believe in witches? For the first group, i.e. those who turn to low life village pastors, I hypothesize that they believe in witches because they have no other option. In the absence of a system which guarantees access to decent modern healthcare to all and provides a safety net for those who are indigent, people often turn to supernaturalism for comfort and hope. And if ever the belief in witches and the harm it causes were to be eradicated, the surest means of achieving this would be to solve the underlying reason for its existence. We are baffled that such practices thrive only because few of us know and have taken advantage of an alternative which works more efficiently and effectively without causing pain and suffering to others. Those who still hang on to such beliefs do so simply because they know of no other solution or are unable to access such solutions even if they were aware of their existence. We can have hundreds of conferences and awareness programmes every year, and we may achieve some success, at least in the short run. But the problem will continue to fester so long as people who believe these things continue to face a hazardous existence that is life for many on earth today. And the problem will only become a bigger one as the disparities between the haves and have-nots continue to widen. To eradicate the problem of child witchcraft and other abusive forms of superstitious belief, we must create societies which care for their citizens by providing a meaningful and worthwhile existence.

Superstitious beliefs have a real capacity to spread as suffering and anguish becomes more commonplace. There is every reason to believe that the particular brand of witchcraft/Christian evangelical lunacy ravaging Akwa Ibom and Cross River states originated from the Central African region comprising several countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo (former Zaire), a nation ravaged by war and disease for nearly all of its 50 years of independence and a fertile ground for the flourishing of thoughts about evil spirits and witches and other supernatural beings.

Let me in typical fashion digress to bring you another one of my interesting anecdotes. The manager of a very popular market in Abuja once told the story of how incidences of “penis snatching” were becoming a really pressing concern for him and his staff at the market. On a particular day an accused “penis snatcher” was about to be given “jungle justice” by a crowd of concerned market citizens when the market management staff and police intervened. In order to placate the crowd baying for blood, it was agreed that the “hapless” victim would be taken to a local brothel to establish the extent of the loss of use of his member, and if he was determined that he was unable to perform his “normal duties” the suspected penis snatcher would be charged to court (for only God knows what crime!). So off the party went to the brothel where a candidate was found who was willing to contribute her quota towards the advancement of “jungle science” (of course for a fee which was eagerly paid by one of the more lecherous members of the lynch mob who made it all the way to the brothel from the market: even candidates in conventional science tests receive some kind of reward!). Midway through the testing exercise the police called out to our victim and asked whether all was well, to which in the heat of passion he inadvertently muttered in a somewhat blissful tone “it is working but not as good as it was before!” Suffice it to say that the person who made his scientific endowment felt like he had been had; here was a man who barely a few minutes ago had called upon the heavens and the earth to his rescue now caught up in the throes of passion with a prostitute! The police had the decency to wait and let him finish and then someone finally suggested a proper examination at a hospital after which it was established beyond doubt that our victim was suffering from a lifelong case of micropenis, a medical term for a small penis caused by a range of factors including inadequate growth hormones. Our “victim” ended up in court himself!

Now the above story although highly comical has some relevance because it illustrates the power of a simple test to change the perception of once ignorant people. Nobody in that lynch mob up until then had ever made any attempt to establish the veracity of the claim of the supposed victims. The crude but effective test had the effect of making such people sceptical about such claims, so that they were less likely to act on impulse when next they heard a cry for help from a supposed victim of “penis snatching”. The market management now used this crude test time and again until the message got around: if you scream for help about the loss of your private part, rest assured that you will have to undergo some test to verify your claim. This led to a dramatic decline in cases of missing private parts, to the point where the market for several years running has recorded zero incidences. Perhaps those of us fighting this child witchcraft scourge could develop some equally crude test to verify the claims of the diabolical pastors carrying out these nefarious activities. Perhaps if they are exposed and shamed in public it could help to curb their activities and make their prospective victims more sceptical about their claims.

My other main concern, as I stated earlier in the paper, is with the group of believers in witchcraft who are neither impoverished nor illiterate but who hold on to their beliefs because of their scriptural relevance or due to their local customs. If a survey of educated people in Nigeria is taken on this issue I fear that the study will show that the vast majority of educated Nigerians, possible in the region of 90%, hold unto some superstitious belief. And yet these same people are exposed to all the modern conveniences of life: electricity (whenever it’s available of course), mobile phones, cars, the internet, television and so on and so forth. I also noted earlier that holding such beliefs creates a sense of complacency in the minds of educated people and blunts the sense of outrage which you would naturally expect that they would express over the proliferation of the child witchcraft saga. However some individuals will go beyond just giving tacit approval to the activities of the characters in this tragedy but will explicitly support their despicable actions. Below is an excerpt of a comment posted on the Sahara Reporters website in response to a story about the ransacking of the CRARN house in Calabar earlier in the year. I tried for the sake of brevity to edit portions of the comment but almost all of it was too juicy to let go!

Akpan Akpan, whoever you are, you always seem to be very explosive in certain published documents. You are from Akwa Ibom and it is therefore surprising that you are writing ignorantly. Are you saying that there is nothing like witchcraft? Then you are saying the writings of the Bible are lies and every man must be a liar, for God alone to be true, so you are a liar. My wish for you, note ,not my prayers, because since you are obviously in denial, I wonder who you will pray to; my wish, is that you show kindness to a child, who has been given witchcraft by your darling mother, or father, or grandparents, and then you sleep at night and you are whipped in your sleep and if you are strong spirited, you see all the people who did it to you, and when you wake up, that child opens its mouth to confess that you were attacked because you were Christian enough to pray with them the night of the attack, and then starts spilling so much, including mentioning your lovely mother, and so many others you have helped, including telling you of the plans they have made to end your life…Akpan and all you so called human rights activist who are probably neck deep in one cult or society practising wickedness, which I call a different type of witchcraft; that white reporter, in whose country, parents give hard drugs to their children and also belong to one fraternity (sic) or the other….is that a subtle name for their own cult???..will you sit back and let the date come and you are no more there to say it was all a lie? or will you go and find a solution? That is left for you all, like I said, that is my wish for you.

It may sound like fantasy to every reader, but it happened to me and my family. Suffice it is to say (sic), leave the things of the spirit to the “Spirit “, remember the Bible says suffer not a witch to live. Why do you not go and conduct a private investigation on those allegations first, before resorting to castigations? Well if our Lord Jesus Christ was called names, how much less shall servants of God be called? Those “innocent children as you refer to them as are EVIL (emphasis not mine). Why would a parent carry a child for months and then abandon them, or believe what only one pastor has said???, hell no,..its after so many confirmations that stringent measures are usually taken. They are not tortured to confess but through prayers, they start talking by themselves. I am not a pastor or a prophetess, but a woman who has been befallen with these circumstances. That bill that was passed by the Governor of Akwa Ibom portrays the desecrated society we live in without the fear of God. If not why give witchcraft a legal ground to operate?

I can deduce a few things that should immediately be apparent to anyone who cares to observe. First, the writer is educated to at least secondary school level judging by her writing skill and use of language. Second, this individual doesn’t seem to be a highly indigent person, because she at least has access to the Internet. Finally, this person is a Christian who by all indications takes the bible for its literal meaning. So we can say with some level of confidence that she snugly fits into our second category of believers, that is those who are educated and not poor and who base their belief in superstition on scriptural injunction. I can almost imagine some Christians in our midst visibly squirming at the idea that this person represents what they stand for. But let’s try not to dwell too much on that. Instead let us focus on challenging her assertion on the basis of what the bible says.

I will borrow my friend’s system of logic to analysis the issue: “there is a voice coming out of that object, therefore there must be someone or something with supernatural powers (possibly evil) inside that object”.

Those of us who rely on the “infallible” words of a book written over 2000 years ago will agree with me that if we were to somehow transport a cell phone back in time to that period, people alive then would most likely make the above assertion, at which anyone living in our time would very rightly scoff with an amused sense of bewilderment. And so it is that we accept that such people with very limited understanding of the natural world should provide us with guidance on how to live our lives 2000 years later, in the age of paracetamol and cars and newspapers and the Internet. We live in a world where we have developed all of the above stated items not by some magical act known by only a few, but by careful and measured control of the physical and natural forces that exist in our world. If malaria could be blamed on witchcraft 2000 years ago we can safely say today that we know that the natural cause of malaria is the plasmodium parasite and so we don’t need to accept that it is caused by supernatural forces beyond our understanding, nor do we have to rely on any magical prayer possessed only by the “Lord’s appointed” prophet or prophetess to drive out the evil spirit of sickness from our bodies. All we need do is go to the local pharmacy and buy a few pills.

In conclusion, what I am simply trying to say is that the solution to tackling the child witchcraft scourge should be two pronged: first try to get educated people to think more critically about some of their belief systems, and second endeavour to create a better life (with the use of everyday science-based tools available) for the vast majority of Nigerians who are under the spell of the diabolical scam artists or child witchcraft because they have no one or nothing else to turn to.

Mr Okechukwu, a humanist, lives in Abuja. Hean be contacted at ik_okey@yahoo.com.