To confuse intelligence and dislocate sentiment by
gratuitous fictions, is a short-sighted way of pursuing happiness. This is why it is necessary to call on Christians and Muslims in Nigeria to stop the habitual religious conflict and regard religion as a study that deals with contradictions. There should be no reason for believers to be intolerant of the partialities and contradictions which religion display, bearing in mind that such contradictions are mere poetic interpretation of experience.
If we hope to gain any understanding of these matters, we must begin by taking them out of that heated and fanatical atmosphere in which the Hebrew tradition has enveloped them. It is on record that the Jews had no philosophy, and when their national traditions came to be theoretically explicated and justified, they were made to issue in a puerile scholasticism and rabid intolerance.
The more derivative, unfathomable, and opaque is the prevalent idea of the gods, the harder it is for a rational feeling to establish itself in their regards. Sometimes the most complete historical enlightenment will not suffice to dispel the shadow, which their moral externality casts over the mind. In vain do we discard their fable and the thin proofs of their existence, when in spite of ourselves, we still live in their presence. The question of monotheism, for instance, was a terrible question to the Jews. Idolatry did not consist in worshipping a god who not being ideal, might be unworthy of worship, but rather in recognizing other gods than the one worshipped in Jerusalem. To the Greeks, on the contrary, whose philosophy was enlightened and ingenuous, monotheism and polytheism seemed perfectly innocent and compatible.
To say Allah, God or gods was only to use different expressions for the same influence, now viewed in its abstract unity and correlation with all existence. Therefore, the combination of monotheism with polytheism is no contradiction, but merely an intelligent variation of phrase to indicate various aspects of functions in physical and moral things. The same thing implies to the Holy Trinity as in the Christian theology. In every age the most comprehensive thinkers, have found in the religion of their time and country something they could accept, interpret, and illustrate as religion so as to give it a desired depth and universal application.
Even the heretics and atheists, if they have had profundity, turn out after a while to be forerunners of some new orthodoxy. What they rebel against is a religion alien to their nature; they are atheists only by accident, and relatively to a convention which inwardly offends them, but they yearn mightily, in their own Souls after the religious acceptance of a world interpreted in their own fashion. So it appears in the end that their atheism and loud protestation, were in fact the hastier part of their thought, since what emboldened them to deny the world’s faith was that they were too impatient to understand it.
Indeed, the enlightenment common to young wits and old satirist, who plume themselves on detecting the scientific ineptitude of religion is something which the blindest half see as not nearly enlightened enough because such works, .sometimes point to notorious facts incompatible with religious tenets literally taken by people subscribing to different religious doctrines. However, such works in most cases brings the skeptic face to face with the mystery and pathos of moral existence. They make the world to understand why religion is so profoundly moving and in a sense so profoundly just. Religion has indeed become the most general sanction of virtue and the source, perhaps of the best human happiness.
Nigerians at this stage should be told to tolerate each and every other religion, because it would be pitiful, if mature reflection bred no better conceptions than those which have drifted down the muddy stream of time where tradition and passion have jumbled every thing together. We should try and accept each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it. What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak. In the rare circumstances where a choice is possible, he may, with some difficulty, make an exchange, but even then he is only adopting a new convention which may be more agreeable to his personal temper but which is essentially as arbitrary as old.
The attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in particular. When religion is taken as a virtue sanction, contradictions and controversies will lose all their bitterness which has constituted platform for undesirable religious conflicts as occasionally experienced in Nigeria. Leaders of religion should therefore, consider each doctrine simply as representing a moral plane of which the followers have so devised or adopted to express and inspire spiritual sentiment more generously. Above all, let’s try to accommodate one another as to profess the goodness in life particularly at this period of sober reflections when the Muslims are celebrating the “Ramadan fast” which is the fourth pillar of Islam … in accordance with the teachings of the Holy Quran.
Concluded.

Tonye Fuayefika, a public affairs analyst, writes from Port Harcourt.

Tonye Fuayefika