“Chinese officials burn Bibles, destroy crosses and force Christians to renounce their faith amid a massive religious crackdown...”

That was the heading to a news item on the social media; “opera mini”. I read the story and kept my cool. But continuously my ears were assaulted by the words of some religious puritans that stood by me who had also read the story and were furious about it. As if the Bibles and the crosses that were being burnt are their personal properties.

These guys have arrogated to themselves God’s avenging army. If they could fly to China they would fight against the authorities who did that. You can’t imagine the twist on their faces while they were cursing and condemning the actions that had been taken by the Chinese in that regard. 

Initially, I wasn’t bothered about what a sovereign state had to do to protect, preserve and enhance the lives of its citizens. Especially the Chinese, who have lately proven to the world that it’s possible to become a superpower after closing their borders to the rest of the world for 50plus years or so, and sacrificed their comfort and pettiness as a people to pursue scientific and technological knowledge in order to empower themselves economically. 

Here they are today, entering into every nook and cranny of the world with their superior knowledge to do business with other superpowers, and exploit those that know how to pray and worship God even more than those that brought their Holy books to them.  
The Chinese have also over the years strategically positioned themselves in a way that makes them attractive and profitable for the rest of the world to go there and do business.

And the African is sitting here, under the shade of our polarized and indoctrinated minds, propagating pressure on our governments to turn our lives around in four years while praying to God to rain miracles on us from heaven. The same mentality we had when the Portuguese, Spaniards, Dutch and the British and French stepped on our shores. 

The superior knowledge of the Chinese in science and technology has given them the wherewithal to produce goods and services to meet both the taste of the rich, and the unnecessary material demands of the poor and visionless who prefer being slaves to enduring suffering in the interim, in order to establish a firm basis in scientific and technological knowledge for their wellbeing and empowerment. 

How should the African expect to be regarded with this kind of mindset? Until we accept that we are a bunch of stupid people, who truly desire to reclaim our God-given status on this planet, we should forget about rising above the dross in our dustbins. Where any selfishly thinking people will dump their refuse.  

And now everybody is trooping to the Chinese in their country in order to learn their language and make ends meet thru supernormal profits on the importation of their less expensive goods. Yet these Chinese don’t know Jesus, let alone pray in tongues and cast out demons among themselves, or argue about the collection of tithes from their hopelessly poor congregation on tv.
 
And in Ghana for example, while our markets and rooms are now flooded with Chinese goods, they have followed us into our hinterlands with the aid of our shortsighted greedy chiefs and queen mothers and elders and some politicians, to denigrate the fiber of our wellbeing and tradition by contaminating our rivers and degrading our lands and destroying our forests and taking away our gold and dumping chemicals into the very source of what sustained us. 

All these because some few elements among us need money. And even when a political courage has been mustered to place a ban on the degradation of our lands and rivers and forests to restrict Chinese infestation of them, for our own better future, we are threatening to gather votes against such a rare and bold political will. 

Now the question is; what do we do with the money that was able to influence us to care less about the future of our children? If the Chinese had that kind of values standards; where money was all that mattered to them, would they have been able to come this far? And yet they are not a Christian nation as we claim we are. Rather we felt unnecessarily obligated to export Christian values instead of goods and services to their country. What kind of God’s people are we who always make decisions that rather make us good servants instead of good leaders among our peers? 

Christian nation indeed! 

We should rather bow our heads down in shame, for disappointing Jesus the Christ and the Prophet Mohammed (saw) too. 

Why wouldn’t they burn bibles and crosses? Clearly, they see the kind of fruits we bear by being fundamental to our religion, and so they know us. They don’t want to be like us. They don’t want to divide themselves into different sects of religious isms and schisms and fleece their poor people, who can’t bring their minds together in reconciliation after the shredding of their religious texts to pursue a common God. They don’t want to speak in a language they don’t understand. They prefer to demonstrate to God that the brains He gave them were all they needed. They prefer to be spiritual, not religious. And they would now thank God because they are givers to humankind, not receivers and beggars.
  
We are always out there, with our arms stretched, and our knees bent, of course with the Bible and cross in one hand, while the other hand expectantly waits to be giving grants and loans from a people who don’t read the Bible. They used their brains and worked harder to achieve their dreams, and they have paid their taxes instead of tithes and collections and praying in tongues and supplicating for money from God. 

If they had been reading the Bible and carrying the cross and praying all these years as we do, would they have been the superpower that they are today? Whom we run to borrow money from and connive with to exploit us and deprive our children of their better future? A people, that go out of their homes and join forces with foreigners to come and cheat its own people, because of money, through the destruction of their lands rivers forests lakes and even minds—must have been having some convoluted values indeed.

Why should anyone want to emulate the civility and lifestyle of such a people? The basis of our so-called religious values, education, culture and traditions are not worthy of copying at all. Well, we don’t even have any now, we have already sold all of them for glitz and superficial class statuses. Apart from the Blackman, no other people do these to themselves. 

Their burning of bibles and crosses, if we should think about it deeply, without the emotions of religious fanaticism, is a clear message to us to begin to appreciate the use of our Brains too. It’s the only act that when we engage ourselves with, would please our God so much. Because we would have been making the best use of His most great and complicated creation: the Brain. 

For, not using our brains in order to attain knowledge and understanding of how things work, will inevitably perish us. We have to deliberately cultivate the habit of enduring the discipline required to deny ourselves some comforts and pleasures, and bring God from the sky and make Him worthy of a resident within us instead. This way, we would have respect for each other and ourselves and would abhor stealing and hating and betraying and backstabbing and killing each other for nothing but a delusional sense of well-being. 

They say, once bitten twice shy. And we also say, that, the fools testicle is never stepped on twice. But what do we see? Our testicles have been trampled on in all these years with the intent to pound it, and we are still sitting there, even offering it on marble stones to be crushed into a paste. Without seeing anything wrong with it. All because we worship God better than our oppressors do? 

The British and the French and others have subjected us to such inhuman treatment for all these years. We never learned anything from them except reading the Bible and praying in tongues and getting poorer and poorer and ignorant and hypocrites and sycophants and backbiters and mediocre and wicked and blind and mendicants and killers.

And now here comes the China man. They may not need to colonize us while we slept. Right under the sun, we are offering them ourselves and our future to be hammered into pulp with their sledge yellowhammer on our black anvil. Even though we are superior when it comes to the possession of natural resources, but because we lack the knowledge and understanding of how things work at the subatomic levels, and we are not prepared to sacrifice some comfort and time to develop our brains along that line, we don’t understand why they are burning Bibles and crosses and discouraging Christianity in their country. If we have nothing worthwhile to concern ourselves with, let just recognize that God is more than capable of taking care of His world than we ever can. If we have had half their kind of courage, maybe we wouldn’t be the victims that we are today. 

What reason have we given them to want to follow our religion? Is it the opulence our religious leaders display in counting their blessings and naming them one by one? And infecting us with the belief that God needs our small coins before giving us His blessings? Well, the Chinese have managed to organize and consolidated themselves into a huge country, with over one billion population.

That gives them a numerical advantage only India can rival in terms of market size for economic gains for themselves and even for all. Who says everybody in China speaks mandarin? But they are wise enough to know that lumping themselves into a unified society is far better than remaining in a fragmentation that would only make them vulnerable and fit for conformity and subservience. 

Let us at least try to be truly smart. And its requires stubbornness and sullenness to remain in focus under difficulties and misfortune. Look! The Chinese have made their leader stay in power for life, if not for a long time. What does that tell us? Let’s collect ourselves, and make irrelevant the different languages we speak, and forge a united front in order to extricate ourselves from economic religious and political slavery. 

But here we are; as Africans, fragmented into anglophones and francophones and Arab. Christians and Muslims and tribes and ethnographic whatever, fighting each other with weapons made by them, because we speak different languages that are not ours and pray differently to a God given to us by them when our continent is the richest with the most precious commodities which we could cultivate, develop and trade with. Which invariably could make us the richest people on the planet earth. What should God do for us again? 

And instead of teaming up to exploit such natural resources to our advantage and benefit, here we are, cheating and stealing from ourselves and buying from economies that are already richer while making ours poorer and poorer. We are no more reading our history in our schools. Even as supplementary readership. We are rather actively contributing to making the African irrelevant and inferior on the tapestry of human history. Our tv stations are replete with sensational nonsense from other cultures to steal the minds of our young ones. Telenovelas that portrayed the values and standards of other cultures is what excites us. We don’t admire ourselves anymore, because pettiness, mediocrity, and gross idiosyncrasies have become the hallmark of our society. 

And we say they shouldn’t burn bibles and crosses and pull down churches? Why shouldn’t they? Is it because we think we love Jesus and his cross more than them? Then let's pray for Jesus to give us wisdom, love and the discipline to transform our minds and lives in order not to go begging in the midst of our great natural resources. If they offend God, let God take care of them. 

Our business is not to judge and condemn but to make God proud by using well what He has given us: the brain. Use our brain to set ourselves free from both mental and economic slavery. We are the only ones who can free our own mind and make our lives better. What we need is the courage to endure while in the pursuit of good dreams. And leaders who won’t steal our money to procure their comfort and sensual pleasures at our expense. And followers who would embrace the defined path with patience and strength of tenacity to realize those dreams in the long term. 

Other than that, let’s shut our mouth and watch them burn bibles and crosses while we waited to be their slaves afterwards because we need money. After all, where do we make more money these days other than our places of worship? The church makes more money than our socioeconomic goods and services do for our continent.  

I have no figures to prove it, but before this assertion is challenged, try accounting for all collections and tithes and dues and consultation fees and pastors appreciation and birthday gifts,  etc every day of worship and see. That’s what am talking about!