My Improbable Journey from Religion to Humanism

The quest for truth and meaning has propelled my journey, my improbable journey from religion to ethical humanism. I am a first-generation humanist. My parents were born into a traditional religious setting, but later embraced Christianity. My father told me that he became a Catholic because that was the only way he could get a formal education. That was the same for my mother. My parents brought me up as a Catholic. We prayed in the morning and at night, before and after meals. As a child, I liked very short prayers; I disliked saying prayers like the rosary because I found them to be long and monotonous.

While in primary school, I became an altar boy and started assisting priests at the church. As a child, I enjoyed helping priests during mass, baptisms, weddings and funerals. On one occasion, I assisted a priest during the funeral service of the father of a prominent politician in my community. Everything was going as planned until the point of internment. As the priest was about to lower the body into the grave, the politician shouted, “Stop, stop, we want to perform a ceremony here.” A ceremony here? Everyone, including the priest, was confused. The politician repeatedly urged the priest to discontinue the service and leave.

The priest obliged and quietly left. I followed him. Growing up, many people merely identified as Catholics or Christians, as Muslims, as the case may be. They practiced a mix of Christianity/Islam and traditional religion. As a child, this melange of faith confused me. It was difficult for me to know which faith was true and which one was false. Many who identified as Christians during the day practiced traditional religion at night. Christians preached against traditional and Islamic beliefs. Muslims did not recognize traditional religion as a form of religion; they recognized only the religion of the book, Christianity, but as an inferior religion to Islam. At the age of 12, my mother enrolled me in a Catholic seminary where I trained to be a priest. The priestly training deepened my knowledge and understanding of Christianity and other faiths. It was an opportunity to reflect on the claims and contradictions of various beliefs, traditions and superstitions that prevailed in my community and country. After high school, I studied philosophy at the Catholic seminary. My philosophical program exposed me to different schools of thought, including humanism. We studied arguments for and against the existence of god by Augustine, Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, and Bertrand Russell. The argument for the existence of god seemed very childish and absurd. Arguments against the existence of god were sound and persuasive. I spent a few months studying theology before I resigned from the training. I also taught in a minor seminary for two years. I did some evangelical work, preaching in communities and converting people from traditional religion to the catholic faith.

On one occasion, a priest was busy and asked me to conduct the funeral of a young man who died in a motor accident. I was 19 years old. I was nervous because, apart from what was on the ritual text, I did not know how to console grieving families. I merely repeated what clerics used to say on such occasions to people at the funeral. When I was about to leave, I said to the family, “Please, take heart, that is how god willed it.” I thought I said something consoling. But in response, one woman burst into tears, asking me: “Brother, how could this be the will of god? Is it that god does not know that my brother is the only son?”

I was short of words. I did not know what else to say. I was staring at her because she was correct. God, if there was anything like that, it should have spared this only son.

I could feel her pain and the inadequacy of the condolence message. Experiences like this occasioned a crisis of faith. The more I advanced in the training, the more I thought deeply about the idea of god, the religious cosmology, the teachings of Christian faith, and other religions. The more I became disillusioned. It gradually dawned on me that all religions were forms of make-believe, different versions and replicas of the same superstition. The whole notion of god barely made any sense, except as a ‘placeholder’ for fear and ignorance. After my philosophical training, it became increasingly difficult for me to continue the priestly training, to identify as religious, as a Christian, or as a believer in any deity. I had issues with religion at two levels. At the cognitive and practical/existential levels.

At the cognitive level, I was shocked that religions made me believe in falsehoods and in things that are not true. Religious truth-claims were in multiple versions. Religion made people intellectually dishonest; faith made them lie to themselves and to others. I found religious teaching cognitively challenging. For instance, religious cosmologies were confusing and contradictory. Christianity and other religions taught people to believe that there was a place called heaven or hell populated by superhuman entities, from nowhere. They taught that people could impersonate deities and turn water into wine merely by uttering words. And that people could resurrect from the dead or ascend into ‘heaven.’ Pentecostal Christians uttered meaningless syllables, gibberish, and called it heavenly language. During Masses, priests claimed that wafers and wine turned into the body and blood of Jesus. Just imagine that. And after uttering some words, they would step back, bow, and kneel before wafers and wine. Sometimes they held up the wafer and addressed it as ‘father’.

Muslims claimed that their Quran, a book written by human beings who copied from earlier texts, was a direct revelation from their god, Allah, through the angel Gabriel to their prophet. Muslims used their life savings to travel to Saudi Arabia to throw stones at a rock. They included well-educated people: professors, bureaucrats and technocrats. They believed that the performance of this ritual would fast-track their admission into paradise (jannah), where 72 virgins had been kept waiting for their eternal pleasure. I visited traditional religious shrines and saw priests and people worshipping in dirty, smelly and filthy environments, talking to stones, cowries, carved objects and bones of dead animals and humans as if they were communicating with superhuman agents. They faked divine encounters and dramatized piety, fear and reverence. Religions presented and promoted their sometimes erroneous and absurd claims as dogmas that nobody should question or challenge. Even when these claims were questionable and doubtful. Religions regarded believing without evidence as virtuous, and as something to be proud of, and to be emulated. Hardwired against intellectual and moral progress, religions predisposed children and youths to extremism and bigotry.

At the existential level, I noticed that religion posed a threat to humanity. Faith formations were predicated on contempt for human beings and the environment. They sanctified human and animal sacrifice, destruction of the environment, violence, oppression, and persecution of critics, dissenters, and non-believers, with impunity. Faiths invested legitimacy in apostasy and blasphemy, making them criminal offenses punishable by death through execution or extrajudicial killings. Those accused of insulting the Prophet of Islam or desecrating the Quran were treated without compassion by those who do not believe in all prophets. Alleged blasphemers and desecrators are attacked, beheaded or imprisoned. From time to time, Christians and Muslims clashed; they killed each other in the name of their faith or to appease their gods. Especially in northern Nigeria, Christians were murdered at the slightest provocation, as a result of some assumed violation or desecration of faith sensibilities. And the gods and prophets that millions of Nigerians revered never intervened or tried to stop the conflicts and bloodletting. I felt that prayer was a useless undertaking, a waste of time, and religious devotions were impotent and pointless. I felt that religion, as we knew it, was not deserving of my commitment or service. I thought that people who held a religious worldview needed an ethical or reality check. Instead of spending my life hankering after imaginary gods, the supernatural and other metaphysical woo-woos that I could not fathom, I thought it was better that I served humanity and nature that I could easily relate to.

I left the priestly training in 1994 and founded the Nigerian Humanist Movement, now known as the Humanist Association of Nigeria, in 1996. I founded the humanist society to provide a sense of fellowship to all who yearn to be good without god, dogma or superstition. The humanist society became a rallying point for non-believers in religion and other people who want to live ethically. It had been a platform for non-religious people to meet, connect and socialize. Next year will be 30 years since the association was founded. We have grown from a few members and associates who corresponded through the post and met in person in Ibadan, to thousands who now connect both in person and virtually across the country and beyond. Growing the humanist movement has been a challenge because Nigeria remains a deeply religious society, and religious persecution is pervasive.

Meanwhile, I did not stop at founding the humanist association. I have initiated projects in response to cognitive and existential challenges that religion posed in my region.

On the cognitive side, I started a critical thinking foundation that promotes critical and creative thinking skills in schools, the Critical Thinking Social Empowerment Foundation. Critical thinking is cogent in nourishing the minds and intellects of children and youths. Creative thinking is imperative to human development, progress and flourishing. Operationalized as questionstorm, critical thinking would make children and youths more inquisitive but less disposed to dogmatic, extremist and radical ideologies. The foundation campaigns to introduce critical thinking/philosophy for children as a subject. It organizes training workshops for teachers and encourages the establishment of thought laboratories in schools.

To address the existential threats that religion posed, I started the Advocacy for Alleged Witches with a vision to end witch hunts in Africa by 2030. Witch hunting is wreaking so much havoc in the lives of Africans. Alleged witches are beaten and banished, tortured, lynched or buried alive. At the Advocacy for Alleged Witches, we are working to combat this menace and realize a witch-hunting-free Africa and a witch-hunting-free world.

In the past weeks, we have intervened in a case involving a police officer who accused and inflicted serious injuries on the children for belonging to a witch coven. The police arrested this officer, and the investigation is ongoing. A week ago, I got the report that an alleged witch was buried alive. I am working with my contacts to confirm the report.

Also, in response to another existential threat, I started the Humanist Enabling Life Project (HELP). HELP aims to repair some of the damage caused by religion and superstitions in society. Religion motivates harm and egregious human rights abuses. Humanists should deploy evidence-based care and compassion in response to situations where people motivated by their faith are cruel to others. HELP works to rehabilitate sharia amputees, and other victims of religious persecutions, victims of female genital mutilation and other harmful religious, traditional and cultural practices. In the face of religion’s dark and destructive effects, HELP wants to get Africans to move from believing to becoming god, to delivering hope, goodness and happiness in this life, and realizing heaven on earth.

Meanwhile, the Humanist Manifesto II clearly stated that no deity will save us, that we must save ourselves. So let’s do it. Let’s save ourselves. Let’s make humanism a reality in the lives of humanists and other individuals. In the journey to ethical humanism, I have been inspired not only by Humanist Manifestos, but also by the words of the late American writer, Isaac Asimov: “Never can we sit back and wait for miracles to save us. Miracles don’t happen. Sweat happens. Effort happens. Thought happens. And it is up to us humanists to help—to expend our sweat, our effort, and our thought. Then, there will be hope for the world”.

In the last decades, I have journeyed with hope and optimism. I have exerted efforts, sweat and tears traveling on a path that no one I knew ever traveled. I have endured beating and betrayal, trials and tribulations. I still do not know where this journey will lead or when and how it will end. But I keep moving. I keep toiling day and night, year in year out, striving to foster ethical development, and in the words of Felix Adler, caring enough to make those problems my own and kindling a great light in the world.