எல்லா பெந்த கொஸ்தே பாஸ்டர்களும் பிராடுகள்

உகாண்டாவின் பெந்தகொஸ்தே பாஸ்டர்கள் அடிக்கும் கூத்தை பற்றிய கடுமையான விமர்சனக்கட்டுரை

நன்றி மானிட்டர். உகாண்டா

I say, all Pentecostal pastors are frauds
July 22 - 28, 2007
Alan Tacca


For the seventh of July, 2007, Pastor Martin Sempa of Makerere Community Church (and other Pentecostal pastors) organised a package of celebrations, which they called 777 Mega-Fest. Hosted at Makerere's main sports ground, the 26-hour marathon event was scheduled to start at 5pm on July 6. According to a July 6 Daily Monitor preview, Pastor Sempa believed the repetitive seven marked a day of wonder and special significance in God's prophetic calendar.

In the West, where ignorance, faddish superstition and consumerism sometimes form an odd montage against a backdrop of advanced civilisation, thousands of people paid attention to 777, and many couples got married on the day.

The Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) of course had their roots in ancient Middle Eastern and Asian paganism. When God - part super Pharaoh and part super magician - was young, His creators did not extricate Him from their long-standing preoccupation with numbers: 3, 7 and 12 making frequent appearances.

Human civilisation has made huge strides in mathematics, astronomy and cosmology since biblical times. For anyone who has attempted to internalise the sheer scale of the universe, it must be blinkered idleness to seriously link any particular calendric coincidence to some overarching divine agenda dedicated to human affairs.

That approach belongs to the same dustbin as the dubious "science" of astrology.
Pastor Sempa knows that he is being fraudulent when he leads the semi-literate young undergraduates who form the bulk of his congregation to a binge of special prayers and worship to mark 777, describing it as the day symbolising 2007, "a year of God's unprecedented blessings." Comparing this period of spiritual abundance to El Nino rains, Sempa throws in the inevitable clincher: "If the farmers knew about this season, they would plant much and harvest much."

Is it a spiritual sowing? Maybe. Is it a material sowing? That cannot be ruled out. In any trade, a subtle practitioner learns to disguise his motives. But my central target is not even pastoral profiteering; it is the very heart - the doctrinal underpinnings - of the Pentecostal ethos.

Pastor Sempa and other "good" pastors (including Ronald Kayanja!) have been quick to distance themselves from the "frauds" accused of sodomy, extortion and overt manipulation, but none of them has renounced the dubiously simplistic notion that they are specially empowered (anointed) intercessors, standing between ordinary humans and the spirit world; that through them the will and the power of God are casually accessible.

They have not renounced their return to a grotesque paganism that masquerades as born-again. Yeboah Jr. would (presumably) manipulate his followers with a 12-volt electric shock machine. Because the process is overtly mechanical, Yeboah's type is readily recognised as a fraud.

Sempa, Kayanja and others regularly manipulate their followers with weird performances and 120-decibel psychedelic sounds. Because the effects on their victims are expressed in hidden brain cell activity, the frauds generally pass as innocent. And in this market place, the "good" pastors must now be eyeing the deserters from the other camp.

But the pastors are tapping into a ready-made reservoir. In many homes, not only is a religious upbringing flaunted as a moral upbringing, but also a non-religious upbringing is fallaciously projected as a non-moral upbringing. In infant schools, where barely literate instructors parrot religious hogwash to millions of kids, the general view is that those lessons are useful; or, at any rate, that they are harmless because they are elementary!
Higher up, religious education tends to be convictional and denominational, instead of being comparative and critical. During their holidays, the teenagers are lured to mass mind control crusades, where politicians and pastors see them as herds of future voters and tithe hostages.

At various colleges, where they would expand their knowledge and develop their critical powers, they find an education regime that teaches them to become "mechanics." When will the pastors face an authentic educated class that instructs them that they are all frauds?

altacca@yahoo.com