Of Uganda’s martyrs and power of spirits

On May 29, a stranger called, introduced himself and asked whether I could arrange for a face to face conversation with him.

I considered that he must have made some effort to get my phone number. He was also very civil, promising to follow the phone call with a detailed e-mail about his work and the proposed conversation. So I obliged.

Mark Schenkel works for De Volksrant, one of the two main daily newspapers in the Netherlands. It is published in Dutch, which I do not speak, but Mr Schenkel is very fluent in English.

We subsequently met at a Kampala coffee shop and talked about religion in Uganda; about Catholicism; about the Pentecostals; about the ‘charismatic’ Catholics and so on; and about the Namugongo martyrs.

In his own time, Schenkel will probably write about these things for his paper.

For my part, listening to many Ugandans on the subject of religion, I am struck by the widespread inability to grasp two simple ideas.
One: that a universe that was not made by God is as believable as a God who was not made by another (higher) creator.

In other words, to hold that the universe was made by a supernatural God, and that God has always existed (without a beginning), is as reasonable (or as ridiculous) as holding that the universe ‘banged’ itself into existence more than 14 billion years ago, before which there were other chaotic or orderly conditions – and even other universes – in a natural infinite continuum (without a beginning).

By the way, to clear a common misconception, the Bible does not cover the great thinkers, mathematicians, poets, architects, dramatists or historians of the major civilisations in pre-Christian and early Christian times.

The Bible is a mythology-clogged narrative of the political, territorial and spiritual journey of (centrally) the Jewish people. Not the Indians. Not the Greeks. Not even the Romans.

To the biblical writers, in their tradition, their unscientific times and distorted knowledge, not to believe in a supernatural God understandably looked stupid.

Two or three thousand years later, in post-Einstein, post-Hawking times, not to believe in a Godless universe is beginning to look stupid.

The second idea that challenges our people is that, big as He sounds, God is in the category of spirits. Just like other spirits, He has no mass, occupies no defined space, is invisible, and so on; a purely imaginary entity that may occur as (and at) a single point, or across (and through) the entire universe.

The supposedly risen Jesus is exactly in the same category.
The supposed souls of Uganda’s martyrs are the same.
Human beings struggle to lock onto all these theo-cultural creations, and they sometimes paint or craft images to focus on and help them give a common reference to their prayers.

Because they do not understand, our Pentecostals have been overworking the radio waves against other Christians, especially the Catholics, for worshipping the martyrs and even their images.

But the Catholics do not really pray to the figurines; they pray to the souls or spirits that transcend the crafted images representing them.

I am a bit cynical about the Namugongo martyrs. As citizens, they were foolhardy. The king had his sovereign power to protect in an age of unrefined human rights.

However, if you believe in the vitality and power of God, Jesus, angels, demons and other spiritual fictions, as the self-righteous Pentecostals do, where is their intellectual authority to dismiss the power of the martyrs said to intercede for the living?

Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.
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