Ba'al

Professor Richard Dawkins says it better than anyone I know. For the safety of the nation and the well-being of the children it is not sufficient for us to be merely atheists. It is necessary for us to be militant atheists. After all, we are all of us atheists to some extent. When you think of it, all good Christians have nothing but contempt and disdain for any belief in Ba'al, Thor and the Golden Calf. Some of us just choose to go one god further.

      
        I have given the matter a lot of thought. There are said to be three known reasons why intelligent West Indian men went into the ministry. They are the usual ones: sex, money and power. All the good looking women, who were at the same time gullible, were to be found in church dressed in their Sunday best. They knelt down before you, emoting to your every word and gesture. Seducing them was as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. Additionally, with little or no learning, but an ability to talk good, one could make a fortune through a church. Just look at the fat, greasy tel-evangelists we see on the TV every day. And the power came from being in a position to influence people's lives. Jim Jones was one of the most successful at all of these church-centered activities. He was one of the few who came to a sticky end.

         It is different today. Our young men of the 21^st century can go into politics, business and the professions without any restriction at all. Fifty years and more ago, the options for a bright young black man were more limited. Race prejudice excluded them from most of the more reputable outlets for self improvement. There were few other opportunities to better yourself than the church.

         That is one reason why elderly West Indian church leaders still among us seem to have been all scholarship material. We look at them perform and listen to them preach and wonder why they had to waste their brains on such a mindless occupation as preaching superstitious nonsense to their followers.

         It is different with the younger generation of preachers and ministers today, I have to shake my head at how unsophisticated and uneducated many of them are. And, so mindlessly and perversely cruel.

         I have never heard an evolutionist condemn a church-goer to everlasting hell. No palaeontologist to my knowledge has ever cut off anybody's head for not accepting that the dinosaurs were made extinct by an asteroid colliding with the Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago.

         Do you not agree?