29 Jan 2009 |
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Adebowale Oriku London transport – buses, trains – is often awash, busy really, with images and words of advertisement. Now you might be a poetry-reader to notice Poems on the Underground, and a poem-lover to bother perusing the few, often catchy, lines. But you don’t need to be a student of semiotics - signs - to notice the murals bedecking the red London buses. Often promotional adverts of newly released films, West End musicals, pictures captioned with blurbs, taglines and dates of release. Few months ago the London buses were pressed into service when ‘Africa came to London’ with a menagerie of contortionists, fire-eaters, dancers, drummers and sundry performers in wildlife costume. As a subscriber to the New Humanist and a member of the British Humanist Association, I could not but notice the words picked out in tricolour against the side of the red bus, There is probably no God. Now Stop Worrying and Enjoy Yourself. I was pleased to glimpse this legend one afternoon a couple of weeks ago in Oxford Street, London. A chance, even serendipitous, sighting as I had not been to Oxford Street for more than year. I moved out of London almost four years ago but, even when I was living in the city, the commercial anthill that is Oxford Street had never held a draw for me. I had seen the promo picture carrying the words in a newspaper just before the advert went out, but I didn’t imagine I would run into it on the first day it came out. As a humanist, this was like a minor epiphany, the New Year’s intellectual handsel. Weeks before, the queasier and the more restless of the evangelical wing of Christians had objected to the advert running on London buses, as it was thought by this negligible fringe that it would cause offence. The idea was mooted by Ms Ariane Sherine, a member of the British Humanist Association. She thought there was a vacuum to be filled with such an advert. Apart from immigrant groups like Nigerians, Ghanaians et al, the number of Christians is on the wane in the United Kingdom. Broadly speaking, religion has all but been wiped off the sociogeography of the British islands and their indigenous people. Only immigrants from the middle east and the South East Asia complement the wave of African religiosity in Britain with an Islamic variant of Abrahamism. Aside from the highly contentious fact that bishops are still allowed to sit with other unelected peers in the House of Lords, there is a fairly vocal Christian lobby in the UK. It is this sort of groupings and their counterparts in Islam, Judaism and some other religions who often defend the existence of a few ‘faith schools’ in the UK. But in spite of all this, Britain is solidly a secular country, a modern western European nation in which religion has become a historical formality. Few of the British political leaders who have any belief would dare flaunt it in the public – it is simply not an election-winner. ‘We don’t do religion,’ former Prime minister, Tony Blair, once declared via his press secretary. Tony remained a closet Christian until he left office, and even now he is still a skulking rather than spiky High-Churchman. And the incumbent, Gordon Brown, has this diversionary and rather Freudian habit of quoting his clergyman father, he would never talk about his own faith or lack of it. There are however certain Christian noisemakers whose relevance to British life is no more worthy than that of Muslims who fierily protested at the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses or the Danish cartoon of their prophet. Such Christians had also protested at the broadcast of Jerry Springer the Opera, a parodic musical in which a Jesus-figure was infantilised, wearing nappies and so forth. The musical ran its course anyway, in spite of the Christian protesters. These religious busybodies, in this instance curiously unsupported by their Islamic brethren, had again thought it was righteous to protest when Transport for London decided to take on the advert, There is Probably no God. The Christians, again playing martyrs, contended that the advertising campaign was offensive and derogatory to religious people, and that the advert would not meet the standards of substantiation and truthfulness. The British Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) threw out the Christians’ case. The watchdog submitted that the British Humanist Association's campaign - There is Probably no God - did not breach the advertising code or mislead consumers. The ASA council asserted that the advert was an expression of the advertiser's view and that substantiation or lack of it had nothing to do with its message – not forgetting the word probably. The Advertising Standards Agency agrees that the content of the campaign would not gladden the hearts of many believers, but it was unlikely to mislead or to cause serious or widespread offence. And it certainly did not cause an iota of offence. Before the advert was bannered on the side of the buses, discussions on blogs and newspaper columns had even proved that few people really cared whether the advert had gone the whole hog and hollered, There is no God. What had made Ms Sherine to hit upon the idea was what she considered the very haughtiness of religionists who were free to place adverts on and in most places, adverts spieling such clichés of belief and proselytization as ‘Jesus Lives,’ ‘Hell is Real.’ As well as wishing to give voice to atheists and non-believers, Ariane also wanted to provoke debate – and was there a debate! At first, Ariane had thought it would take months for the British Humanists to raise the money to place the advert in January of this year. But within a few hours of the media broaching the issue, thousands of pounds had been raised, people came down with money enthusiastically – with religious zeal, if you will. This had also provided another opportunity for Professor Richard Dawkins, distinguished occupier of the Chair of Public Understanding at Oxford, to weigh in heavily on religion. For decades, Dawkins has been the most eloquent and vigorous exegete of his near-namesake Charles Darwin, the propounder of the Theory of Evolution - the yearlong bicentenary of whose birth was flagged off a couple of days ago. Professor Dawkins is perhaps the most influential antireligionist living today. He does not excuse his tetchiness, his impatience with, even his ridicule of religion and its defenders and practitioners. His last book, The God Delusion, is a piece of deicidal higher criticism in which Dawkins aims a smart, swingeing cosh at God, religion and people who are religious, whom he considers delusional, and in a lot of cases, dim. Having come down with a chunk of the advert fee, the professor could also be depended upon to provide a wordbite during the debate: “This campaign to put alternative slogans on London buses will make people think – and thinking is anathema to religion.” Trust Professor Dawkins to deliver heavyhanded belabouring of religion at a wink. While it was refreshing and salutary to read, just as the words There is Probably no God might not overwhelmingly affect a long-fossilised belief in God, it hardly set me into any sort of rigorous mental callisthenics. For me, it is as likely as not that there is no God. Forget the simplexity of double negative equals positive, the crux-word here is the negative ‘no’. Probability – or probabilism in an analogous sense – is a potent word in philosophy, philology, theology, physics, mathematics and logic. The humanists knew better than to have written God is only a Probability. Now stop Worrying and Enjoy Yourself. This would have given believers in God a foothold, a ledge on which to stand and leap, headfirst, into the deep end of the murky viscid pool of God-argument, an argument no one wins easily – especially God-believers. Of course this advertising campaign had turned the probability fallacy on its head to achieve its end. The conclusion is, just because something could not happen, it could not: Since the likelihood of God’s existence is dubious, his being is therefore dubious, if not nonexistent. Occam’s razor would cut atheists the bigger slack here. But beyond such devil’s advocacy, people in London and Britain, by and large, live their lives without the bugbear of God and his scapegoated fallen factotum, Satan, without the sanctions of religion, the elementary polestar of Wisdom Theology, they enjoy themselves without worrying about what God would think of fellatio or cunnilingus or ‘binge-drinking’ every Friday night. Generally, manmade laws and rules have supplanted the anachronisms of the Ten Commandments and hellfire – by the way, the first Hellfire Club which had rakes, sots, philanderers as members, was established in the 18th century in England. And certainly, fear or love of God has nothing to do with the relative transparency in governance and governing in Britain. Nor was it God who taught them how to queue, how not to drop litter with sublime carefreeness. I have wondered whether such an advert campaign could be launched in our beloved country, Nigeria, I mean in the best of all possible Nigerian worlds. Oh, but I shouldn’t wonder. Aren’t we a very religious country, with a very religious people, godly folks? If the British leaders are timid enough to mumble We don’t do God, Nigerian leaders shout from the housetops about how godly they are. They call on us often to pray for the nation, some of them even take on the role of imam and deacon to lead the prayer from the plush innards of their palaces. They bid us to fast for the betterment of the country. Wasn’t our former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, a born-again Christian? Isn’t the present head of state a devoted Muslim, a Godsend? Aren’t our leaders anointed by God to lord it over us, and that we must accept them no matter what? Don’t we depend on our relationship with God to pass exams, drive cars without fuel, heal the ailing, and prosper? Aren’t we all chaste, honest, morally ramrod-straight, our leaders the paragons of honour? Don’t we fear God so much so that we only enjoy moderately, satisfied with our missionary-position mindset. Aren’t we a nation of virginal female undergraduates, of modest men whose minds are sublimated with godly cares? Don’t we all live spare, spartan lives because of our fear of God? We indeed do God, we overdo God, hyper-do him, we’ve almost done God to death.
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