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Matthew Parris: As An Atheist, I Truly Believe Africa Needs God


glintofpewter

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concluding paragraphs

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Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

 

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

 

And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.

 

 

http://richarddawkins.net/articles/3502-matthew-parris-as-an-atheist-i-truly-believe-africa-needs-god

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I am not sure that Christianity has done much good there. Missionaries have gone in and tried to change African societies into a Western model with Western ideas, religious and otherwise. We have imposed ideas like private property, individualism, national boundaries (often artificial), monoculture, etc.

 

But, if Africa must exist in a globalized world comprised of nation states with free-market capitalism, what they need more than anything, IMO, is education.

 

George

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