‘No’ to religious intolerance

But, of course, we have to bear with our journalists, given the reality of our continent. Most of our media houses have to contend with limitations imposed by resources, which force our journalist to be all-rounders, that is, they have to report on all and any field of human activity.
We do not have the luxury of specialisation as is the case overseas. Our journalists have to be as broad as possible in terms of their knowledge base.
This, unfortunately, compromises their depth of knowledge in any one area, so arguments such as the one between Isdore Guvamombe and Jealousy Mawarire do arise from time to time.
I am not a journalist by occupation, unlike the two gentlemen above. The only thing I have by way of advantage over these two guys, I guess, is a wisdom that comes with age, and an occupation in medical science that spanned a whole working life at the University of Zimbabwe and abroad.
In presenting my comments, I will try not to play the support game, or make the awful assumption that because of my seniority in age, I know better than them.
I prefer to say what I believe the two ought to know in living their lives, to give a brief religious history in order to foster religious tolerance among people, hopefully without playing the didactic.
I hope too, that Mawarire will not feel offended by my constant reference to him. My reason for focusing on him more is that I expected him to show more tolerance as a practising Christian, not to tear his opponent apart the way he did, for holding a different point of view.
After all, we go to Church in order to try and book our place in the Kingdom of our Maker, not to look more impressive than the guy next door. That judgment is reserved for God and God only.
The N’anga’s Act
In his effort to correct the perceived shortcomings of Guvamombe regarding eligibility of candidates for registration with the Traditional Medical Practitioners’ Council, Mawarire says the candidate has got to be a spirit medium to qualify. Unfortunately, this is misleading.
There is, in fact, a class of other traditional medical practitioners called herbalists, who are not spirit mediums.
These are people who have acquired healing skills through training, usually as apprentices to master healers, or uncles, fathers and other relatives in a family.
This acquisition of healing skills is very much like the training of doctors in Western medical science. Candidates go through the mill as it were and I was part of that kind of training all my working life.
By this, I do not mean that I know everything there is to know in Western medicine, no. I only know enough to sustain a reasonable argument. It is not possible to know everything about everything.
The major category of traditional medical practitioners is, of course, the spirit mediums, who have acquired their healing powers through the ancestral route, that is, the spirit of an ancestor coming back to the world of the living and possessing a relative, imparting onto him/her  the ability to heal.
The herbs which this category of healer uses, to cure their patients are shown them when they get into a trance, so is the power to tell the cause of sickness.
This is very much akin to spiritual heal-      ing as practised by conventional Church leaders in their domains, i.e. the diagnostic and healing powers come from outside the practitioner and has nothing to do with training.
It is probably because of this similarity that Guvamombe felt that spiritual (miracle) healers like Prophet Makandiwa should be registered by the Traditional Medical Practitioners’ Council.
In my humble view, Guvamombe can be forgiven for thinking that way.
The problem here, as I see it, is that Mawarire, true to missionary teachings, believes that spirit mediums are guided by the devil and are therefore satanic, whereas prophets are guided by the holy spirit, one of the three personas constituting God, the other two being God the Father and God the Son or Jesus Christ.
There is no way the gulf between these two schools can be narrowed, let alone abolished, given the damage that missionaries did to the people of Africa only a century ago.
It remains the mark of difference between Christianity and traditional religions, just as  preached by commissioned missionaries who introduced Christianity in Africa and other Third World countries. 
Some of these missionaries were in the service of colonialists, with a brief to prepare the inhabitants of Africa for colonial domination.
These missionaries had to put more emphasis on those verses of the Bible that encouraged people to be less concerned with worldly wealth, “because greater wealth awaited them in Heaven” if they devoted their lives on earth to God.
Now, the most effective way to kill a whole people is to kill their religion, to take their soul away. They will have nothing to rally around when disaster strikes. So, traditional religion had to be shunned as satanic. 
What Mawarire is doing is actually reinforcing the teachings of commissioned missionaries. This is sad, coming as it does at a time when most people are awakening to the damage that was done to us a century ago by these missionaries.
My advice to both Mawarire and Guvamombe is to try and hold back a little where a belief system is concerned.
After all, all belief systems are equally true, equally false and equally useful, which is why governments the world over tolerate them. It’s all about the mind game guys, believe me, as hard to fathom as it may sound.
The colonial missionaries wanted colonised peoples to focus on the after-life, not on this earth, to make way for the unlimited exploitation of our resources by foreign agents.
I have got to hope that Mawarire understands this, for the sake of God. The missionaries said you cannot not have riches and Kingdom of Heaven at the same time, the likely source of this particular assertion being Jesus’ saying that it is harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than for a camel to go through the hole of a sewing needle.
I have a problem here Mawarire, because we have prophets in Africa and elsewhere who have become multimillionaires through churches, prophets like Nigerians TB Joshua  and Pastor Chris.
Are we to assume that such men of God now believe that some of Jesus’ teachings were a bluff? Or has the Church revised the interpretation of the scripture?
I personally think that Christianity needs to clean its house before denigrating traditional religion.
I don’t know the position in other countries, but in Zimbabwe, churches are registered as welfare organisations under the law, not as companies.
But money, I mean real money, changes hands in churches. In my book, that is business, not welfare. Jesus himself was angry with money changers at the temple and remonstrated with the temple authorities for sanctioning the practice.
Mawarire accuses Guvamombe of making opinion-driven assertions in his writing, but  he himself indulged in same in his attempt to “correct” and “school” him in matters of faith, to use his words.
I detected a bit of intolerance on his part. Look, if you assert that Jesus’ followers were likely to be under 20 years of age, except for Jesus himself and Simon Peter, on the basis that, except for Simon Peter, they were single when they joined Jesus’ ministry, and that only Jesus and Simon Peter were required to pay church taxes, which were only applicable to adults, I can equally use a similar argument to refute that, using, say, what happened to Stephen, one of the disciples of Jesus and the first recorded Christian martyr.
Stephen could not have met his death through stoning, because Jewish law did not permit the stoning of juveniles, so he must have been above 20. This can sound equally sensible. So many permutations are possible in such a scenario.
Another example is that of the brother of Simon Peter, Andrew. He was recruited by Jesus at the Sea of Galilee, together with the senior brother, when they went out fishing, to become “fishers of men instead”.
I can sensibly argue that if Andrew was a kid under 20, he would not have been allowed to accompany his brother out to sea. It was just not conceivable for Jewish elders to sent kids out to sea on such dangerous waters. So, a great deal of care is needed in hazarding the ages of Jesus’ disciples. One can never be authoritative about it, is what I am saying.
Reading through Mawarire’s article, one gets the impression that he is a brilliant reader of the Bible, but not a scholar of it.
If he wants to be a convincing Christian, a Christian who defends Christianity from a factual point of view, he has got to also read the history of the Bible, its origin, the changes that occurred to it before canonisation, and the nationalities of its authors.
He needs  to remember that what people read in any book, the Bible included, are  sides of the author.
You just cannot run away from that human element in literary works. I know this because books have been my life.
To encourage Christians like Mawarire to adopt a more tolerant approach to religious issues, let me be free to give a short insight into the reality of the book of life, the Bible. The New Testament as we have it today is not the full story of the life of Jesus, the central figure in Christianity.
I will speak here as a lay historian, not as a Christian, lest I am condemned for heresy by my friend Mawarire.
I will start with something that may be familiar with any Christian. The Bible tells us that Jesus was born to a carpenter called Joseph, and his betrothed wife Mary, through the power of the Holy Spirit and was born in the image of man.
Nothing is known of Jesus as an infant, except that he was born in a manger in Bethlehem, until when he was about 12 years old, when he briefly escaped from his earthly parents to spent time with Jewish elders in a synagogue, arguing intelligently with them, the Bible says.
When Joseph and Mary finally located him, they remonstrated with him as any parents would do and took him home. Here is the first paradox of Jesus’ life: Nothing is heard of him until the age of 30, a gap of some 18 years.
The Bible is very silent on this fact. When he reappears on the scene, he is 30 years old and starts his ministry at that age. His ministry lasts for only three years, three very eventful and fateful years I may add, before he is crucified at the age of 33. 
The work he put in, in those three years, has kept the world going for centuries now.  This is very remarkable, especially as history tells us that there had been another man who went by the same name of Jesus Christ some 100 years before the Nazarine arrived on the scene, who also taught righteousness and stood for the cause of the downtrodden just like the Nazarine did, but when he died, his gospel died with him.
It is remarkable, I must repeat, that the gospel of the Nazarine has endured to this day. What most people may not know is how this feat has been achieved. That is a secret that even the Pope will not tell you, please believe me.
Before I proceed, I would like to state that there is  no question of atheism  here, on my part. God does exist and we have plenty of evidence for this, least of which is creation itself.
When we see a car, a plough, a pair of shoes etc, we know that there is a manufacturer of these items somewhere, even if we have not seen him.
By the same token, if we seen creatures around us, we have to accept that there is a Creator somewhere, and history has given a name to that Creator, that of God.
What the creatures of God differ on is how mankind should pay homage to Him. Should we approach him directly like Judaism does?   Or should we approach Him through the office of his begotten son Jesus as taught by Apostle Paul, the father of Christianity.
Spirit mediums are a vital link in traditional religion.
They link the living to their dead, and through the dead to God. There is one church that I salute in this regard, the original church, the Catholic Church, which has recognised this.
When Catholic priests conduct requiem masses, i.e. burial services for deceased members, they recognise the role of traditional spiritualism. An important line from one of their burial rites songs reads: “Imi madzitateguru ake akafa, hoyuyi mwana wenyu uyu, endayi naye kuna Mwari.”
The Catholic Church knows that both the path of traditional religion and that of Christianity lead to the same God and there is nothing Satanic about that.
Furthermore, there are no religious miracles to be found in the Catholic Church, and indeed in the other time-tested churches I know.
It is possible that Mawarire knows the Holy Bible more than any of these churches, but I rather doubt it.
If in the church that Mawarire attends people are saved by the grace of God invoked by prophets, this is good news indeed, and let this good work speak for itself and invite more people to be saved in that church.
There is no need for Mawarire to pour scorn on those religions where miracles do not happen. I can safely make one statement here for him.
Dead Christians have been going to Heaven well before Mawarire’s church came into being, despite the absence of miracles in their churches. In my view, Mawarire is simply driven by religious intolerance, the same intolerance that brought the canonisation that made  the Bible a closed shop.
There are many people who are happy to let Prophet Makandiwa guide them to Heaven, and this is brilliant stuff.
In the same vein, there are also many people who are happy to let spirit  mediums guide them to the same Heaven. What is  needed is religious tolerance, not the scorning of other religions.
It is definitely a good practice to respect the choice of others. After all, there is no religion that guarantees entry into Heaven. The bigger church is in a person’s heart.
The same Jesus that Mawarire and his fellow churchmates worship paid tribute to a great Chinese, Confucius, who lived a thousand years before Christ.
History shows that Confucius was the originator of the golden rule, i.e. “Do unto others as you would wish others to do unto you”, and Jesus repeated this teaching during his ministry. That is greatness. Yes, there are occasions when the element of forgiveness lapses in human beings.
It happens even to the most well intentioned of us.
It even happened to Jesus himself, during the Last Supper in Jerusalem. He told his disciples.
“One of you is going to betray me tonight. But I will have you know that that person is going to wish he was never born.”
That coming from the Son of God was quite frightening. But we have to remember that Jesus was born in the mould of a human being and lived the life of a human being, even though he was divine.
His intention at the Last Supper, in my humble view, was to show the kind of imperfection that we all have as human beings, including Mawarire.