God is quite happy with the churches closed
This Sunday, God and reason seem aligned in complete harmony. For God sometimes reasons badly, or acts arbitrarily, giving room to all sorts of dubious prophets to devise explanations that make Him appear more reasonable.
With our churches still closed, some of the organisations and individuals who own them are desperate.
I have heard about some pastors wearing sackcloth in protest; although the boda boda young man who set himself ablaze at a police station beat them at providing the first Covid-19 martyr.
But, as I have noted, God has recently been thinking very clearly.
First things first: Whichever way it jumped across species, the new virus was created by God. Presumably, He has some use for it.
God should not create things He does not need. Otherwise there would be too much redundancy in the universe.
So God has this virus, and He already has a multi-dimensional printing system in living organisms to replicate it.
Naturally, the virus cannot be unleashed into human populations without God’s authority, unless – God forbid – there are forces in the universe that are more powerful than Him.
It is up to humans to figure out why God has acted as He has, partly by observing the results He has achieved on specific issues.
The New Testament passage narrating how Jesus got furious with the money-changers in the temple is not popular at all in our prosperity gospel churches. They never cite it.
Instead, they approvingly read stories of Abraham and Solomon’s acquisitiveness in the Old Testament.
God has observed and drawn a clear conclusion from this selective interest: His book, The Bible, is considered relevant when it glorifies the accumulation of wealth, and it is considered irrelevant when it denounces the desecration of places of worship by turning them into dens of merchants.
Again, God has observed how compromised our priests are. Powerful politicians almost literally hold our bishops by the neck in their fists. They can shake or toss the bishops any-which-way they want.
When President Museveni said of us, Ugandans, that the love of money would kill us (through Covid-19), he should have had at the very fore of his mind a picture of the souls of the ‘men of God’.
Some have no Godly souls left. They are shells full of greed and hypocrisy.
Also, ordinarily, the men of God might have been leading champions in the struggle against the excesses perpetrated by our rulers, but they are skulking at the tail.
Indeed, they are virtually in cahoots with the oppressors. But if they have the rulers they apparently desired, they should be happy.
The heroic voices pleading for God’s people and for social justice in general are in NGOs, in the media and in some political camps. Those voices are neither in the churches nor in the mosques.
God sees clearly what has been (and is) happening. This time He is reasoning with the clarity of a philosopher-God, and He is saying: “I am not like the ancient Egyptian Pharaohs who craved being worshiped 24/7. You can go to hell by pretending to want to worship me, when in fact you just want to make money from my people.”
To prove His word, He has kept the country relatively safe (from Covid-19) when the churches are closed, as long as food markets and Kikuubo are open for people to get their staples and other necessities, but He has not ruled out the possibility of mass death (from Covid-19) if the churches are also opened.
Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.
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