What God is this who revels in pain, blood and tears?

PHOTO | SALATON NJAU A relative of a Westgate terror attack victim prays at a memorial park in Karura forest on October 21, 2013. Seventy trees representing each victim of the attack were planted and a plaque erected in their honour.  NATION MEDIA GROUP

In Summary

• Does the God of Terrorism chortle in his joy whenever he sees blood suddenly spurt out of gaping human wounds?

By Philip Ochieng
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One logical conclusion from the Scholastic definition of God is that he is self-sufficient and self-efficient. As a Seventh Day Adventist, I grew up convinced that, no matter how potent, no entity less than that could be called God.

Yet throughout the history of the three Western theisms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, human beings have acted for God to spill human blood and destroy human property with reckless abandon. Sects and individuals worldwide continue to perpetrate the most heinous crimes in God’s name.

But the question is: How can such cruelty depict God in any rosy light? To my mind, thoughtless brutality can only undermine all attempts to personify God as a merciful and forthcoming avuncular figure. Terrorism always poses a fundamental question about God:

Doesn’t he have any other, more graceful and more inspiriting, method of dealing with infidels than to condemn them to ghastly and indiscriminate slaughter?

If it was God who sent armed terrorists to spray bullets into a Christian congregation in Mombasa the other day, then where, pray, is his sense of judgment?

Didn’t God know that one of the bullets would shatter an innocent boy’s brain and kill worshippers who had absolutely no subjective link with the terrorists’ demand? Abraham once faced Jehovah with just that question when this deity announced a plan to pulverise the valley of Siddim (the Dead Sea basin).

If there was even a single good person in Sodom and Gomorrah – Abraham remonstrated – how could an omni-benevolent deity even think of destroying those cities so indiscriminately? Yet the Jewish Pentateuch is the essence of the Quran’s own theo-graphical thought, including on the vexed question of shariah.

Then, too, Deuteronomy is the guiding light of all such appalling events in Euro-Christian history as the Gnostic hecatomb, the Inquisition, the Albigensian massacre, the Crusades, sectarian intolerance in the two Englands, the Witch-hunts of Spain and Massachusetts, the Khazari Holocaust, the ignominious rampaging of America’s Fundamentalists.

NOT FUTILE

Yet modern Islamic terrorists do not seem to have read in that same biblical tale that Abraham’s remonstrations with the Lord God were not futile. Arrant ignorance of the moral sting in the tail of that story is what makes it futile to argue with the likes of Pat Robertson, Morris Cerullo and others who deploy the “gift of the grab” to commit “televandalism”.

Our epoch’s killers for God raise this fundamental question: If God does not know any gentle and humane method of converting human beings to his cause – and to do it directly without hiring and arming human murderers – then wherein is he divine?

If it is only by unleashing carnivores upon other humans that God can ensure humanity is on the right path, then in what way is he omnipotent, omniscient and omni-loving? Those questions do not imply disrespect for any god. What they call to account is only those who habitually rush into God’s subterfuge to commit horrendous crimes against humanity.

If human welfare and happiness is God’s chief concern, did the bullets in baby Satrine Osinya’s brain and in his mother’s body serve that godly concern? Was the deity caressed by the agony, teeth-gnashing and despair in Mr Osinya senior’s countenance?

Does the God of Terrorism chortle in his joy whenever he sees blood suddenly spurt out of gaping human wounds and profuse tears stream out of their relatives’ eyes? Even as a believer, I thought otherwise. For I had arrived at that stage of religious consciousness that historians call monolatry – absolute respect for other people’s pantheons and beliefs.

Because Nyasaye was just one of 10 thousand names by which the same supreme deity of the universe was known – including Allah, Allthair, Apollo, Astarte, Athene, Baal, Indra, Inanna, Inkosi, Isis, Jehovah, Mola, Ngai, Odin, Odomankoma, Onyame, Osiris, Quetzalcoatl, Usha, Were, Yama and Zeus – a Luo would have worshipped the Buddha whenever in Bihar.

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