Aladura

Aladura ("Prayer People") is a Yoruba term for various prophet-healing churches that have developed in west Africa since about 1918.

• Date founded: c.1922-1930
• Place founded: West Nigeria
• Founder: various founders
• Adherents: approx. 1 million

Anglican communities had flourished among the Yoruba between 1895 and 1920, after the arrival of missionaries. The Aladura movement began about 1918 among the younger elite in the well-established Christian community based on dissatisfaction with Western religious forms, European control of the churches, and lack of spiritual power. The were also influenced by literature from the small U.S. divine-healing Faith Tabernacle Church of Philadelphia.

The 1918 world influenza epidemic precipitated the formation of a prayer group of Anglican laymen at Ijebu-Ode, Nigeria; the group emphasized divine healing, prayer protection, and a puritanical moral code. By 1922 divergences from Anglican practice forced the separation of a group that became known as the Faith Tabernacle, with several small congregations.

The main expansion occurred when a prophet-healer, Joseph Babalola (1906–59), became the center of a mass divine-healing movement in 1930. Yoruba religion was rejected, and Pentecostal features that had been suppressed under U.S. influence were restored. Opposition from traditional rulers, government, and mission churches led the movement to request help from the pentecostal Apostolic Church in Britain. Missionaries arrived in 1932, and the Aladura movement spread and consolidated as the Apostolic Church.

But problems arose over the missionaries' use of Western medicines—clearly contrary to doctrines of divine healing—their exclusion of polygamists, and their assertion of full control over the movement. So in 1938–41 the Babalola and (later Sir) Isaac Akinyele formed the Christ Apostolic Church, which by the 1960s had 100,000 members and its own schools and had spread to Ghana. The Apostolic Church continued its connection with its British counterpart; other secessions produced further "apostolic" churches.

The Cherubim and Seraphim society was founded by Moses Orimolade Tunolase, a Yoruba prophet, and Christiana Abiodun Akinsowon, an Anglican woman who had experienced visions and trances. In 1925–26 they formed the society with doctrines of revelation and divine healing replacing traditional charms and medicine. They separated from the Anglican and other churches in 1928. In the same year the founders parted, and further divisions produced more than 10 major and many minor sections, which spread widely in Nigeria and to Benin (formerly Dahomey), Togo, and Ghana.

A smaller movement, the self-help Aiyetoro ("happy city"), was built on piles on a lagoon mudbank east of Lago by a group of persecuted Cherubim and Seraphim in 1947. Men and women lived separately, strict morals were enforced, a radical economic communism and diverse sophisticated business activities resulted in great prosperity for more than 2,000 members, and death was believed to have been conquered. But by the 1970s internal dissension had appeared and the original utopian impetus had faded.

The Church of the Lord (Aladura) is the largest Aladura movement. It was founded by Josiah Olunowo Oshitelu, an Anglican catechist and schoolteacher, whose unusual visions, fastings, and devotions led to his dismissal in 1926. By 1929 he was preaching judgment on idolatry and native charms and medicines, uttering prophecies, and healing through prayer, fasting, and holy water. The Church of the Lord (Aladura), which he founded at Ogere in 1930, spread to north and east Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and beyond Africa—New York City and London—where several other Aladura congregations also meet.

Developments since the 1970s have been replacing the Aladura form with Pentecostal Revivalist movements influenced by American models, such as the Church of God Mission in Benin City, and with "spiritual science" movements. The latter meet similar needs as the Aladura by offering semi-secret knowledge of how to acquire spiritual power, and are modeled on examples outside of Christianity such as Subud and the Rosicrucians, which have been long present in Nigeria.

The Aladura movement continues to grow and includes many small secessions, ephemeral groups, prophets with one or two congregations, and healing practitioners in west Africa, Britain, and the United States.

Aladura practices are a mix of Anglican and African rituals. In the Church of the Lord (Aladura), for example, ministers are given an iron rod about two and a half feet long, looped in a handle at one end, as part of their insignia of office. It symbolizes the powers of the prophet. A prophet touches the objects he consecrates brought by people who come for prayers and healing sessions. Rosaries are used to consecrate water or to pray the psalms. Vestments and gowns are widely used.

Some creative Name boards of US churches!!

The wrong religion

By: Steve
When atheists criticise the more risible aspects of religion or the actions of believers, the faithful often respond with something along the lines of “your point is worthless because that’s not real religion”. Do they have a point? Or are they indulging in a peculiar form of bigotry?

This raises an important question. Who gets to decide what is real religion? More importantly, perhaps, how do we discern which is the real Christianity, which the real Islam?

Islam, of course, has only a handful of variants. The miscellaneous flavours of Christianity, on the other hand, are many and various. Each one of them believes it has exclusive access to the truth.

At this point, one is reminded of the response to Christians usually attributed to Richard Dawkins but espoused by many atheists: that we are all atheists. Christians do not believe in many thousands of gods. Atheists just go one god further. This is rather well presented in this table of Christian and atheist beliefs.

It’s all about definitions. Every faith sets its own terms. Religions are self-defining. They are not constrained by evidence, by the historical record, not even by the physical laws of the universe or common sense. Every sect gets to define what it regards as ‘Christian’ behaviour.

The Digger mentioned above - who evidently defines himself as a Christian - had a very simple rule for determining what constitutes acceptable Christian behaviour. Give people a Bible and let them point to the section that validates their actions.

Alas, this is simple to the point of being simple-minded. First, which Bible? Various translations have been used at different times to support widely varying behaviour. Second, the Bible, as we all know, is infuriatingly vague and frequently self-contradicting. It is not an homogeneous work but a rather slipshod cobbling together of texts with inconsistent and incompatible philosophies, ethics and narratives. Even the three synoptic gospels can’t get their story straight. So each Christian sect tends to pick carefully those sections most amenable to it.

Third, many Christian faiths insist that the Bible is not to be read literally. Only those fundamentalist sects whose appeal is mainly to the more knuckle-dragging sections of society ask us to take every word as literal truth. The majority of Christians accept some, if not all, sections of the Bible as allegorical or metaphorical. Everything, then, depends on interpretation. And if you want to behave in a certain way, if you want to invoke divine approval for your actions, you are likely to be able to find something in the Bible that you can interpret as supporting your actions. This is why the frequently made assertion that the Bible (and only the Bible) is the bedrock of ethics and morality is so laughable. The Bible can be made to endorse anything (including slavery and genocide).

So let’s look again at where we came in. Some self-defined Christians commit a particular act, in conformance - as they see it - with their beliefs. But it’s an act that those of us in the real world consider heinous or ludicrous, and we say so. Then some other Christian comes along and says, “hey, those guys aren’t real Christians. You’re just using their behaviour as a way of having a cheap shot at all Christians.”

What this person is doing is using their own, necessarily narrow definition of Christianity to condemn the others as “not really Christians”. They are saying, “only my definition is valid” and “these people are not entitled to call themselves Christian”. That’s bigotry.

It is also a cheap trick. Christians can simply keep moving the goalposts, claiming that any action or belief criticised as secularists isn’t ‘Christian’ anyway, so the criticism is obviously an egregious attack on ‘true’ Christians.

I’m not tarring every Christian with this particular brush. There are many who state their beliefs plainly and have the courage to stick to them and take responsibility for them. When someone’s faith leads them into actions that cause harm to others, we have a perfect right to criticise not just the people themselves but the faith that coerced them into irresponsible behaviour. For other Christians simply to wash their hands of this issue by brushing off the miscreants as ‘not really Christian’ is cowardly and dishonest.

Math + religion = Trouble

Actually, since Pythagoras the relationship between men of numbers and the Deity has been more along the lines of love-hate, but it's a rich vein

Ron Csillag
Special to the Star

Which math-phobic among us has not beseeched God for help with another colon-clenching algebra or calculus exam? Had we heeded the words of the German mathematician Leopold Kronecker, perhaps we would have realized we've been talking to the wrong person: "God made the integers; all else is the work of man."

Pythagoras, who gave us his eponymous theorem on right-angled triangles, headed a cult of number worshippers who believed God was a mathematician. "All is number," they would intone.

The 17th-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza echoed the Platonic idea that mathematical law and the harmony of nature are aspects of the divine. Spinoza, too, posited that God's activities in the universe were simply a description of mathematical and physical laws. For that and other heretical views, he was excommunicated by Amsterdam's Jewish community.

German mathematician Georg Cantor's work on infinity and numbers beyond infinity (the mystical "transfinite") was denounced by theologians who saw it as a challenge to God's infiniteness. Cantor's obsession with mathematical infinity and God's transcendence eventually landed him in an insane asylum.

For the Hindu math genius Ramanujan, an uneducated clerk from Madras who wowed early 20th-century Cambridge, an equation "had no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God." Though an agnostic, the prolific Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos imagined a heavenly book in which God has inscribed the most elegant and yet unknown mathematical proofs.

And famously, Albert Einstein said God "does not play dice" with the universe.

What is it with God and mathematics? Even as science and religion have quarrelled for centuries and are only recently exploring ways to kiss and make up, mathematicians have been saying for millennia that no truer expression of the divine can be found than in an ethereally beautiful equation, formula or proof.

Witness, for example, such transcendent numbers as phi (not to be confused with pi), often called the Divine Proportion or the Golden Ratio. At 1.618, it describes the spirals of seashells, pine cones and symmetries found throughout nature. Other mysterious constants like alpha (one-137th) and gamma (0.5772...) pop up in enough odd places to suggest to some that they are an expression of the underlying beauty of mathematics, and to others that someone or something planned it that way.

But does that translate into actual belief?

The New York Times reported recently that mathematicians believe in God at a rate 2 1/2 times that of biologists, quoting a survey of the National Academy of Sciences. Admittedly, that's not saying much: Only 14.6 per cent of mathematicians embraced the God hypothesis, versus 5.5 per cent of biologists (versus some 80 per cent of Canadians who believe in a supreme being).

Count John Allen Paulos among the non-believers. A mathematician who teaches at Temple University in Philadelphia and who has popularized his subject in bestselling books such as Innumeracy and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, Paulos's latest offering is a slim but explosive volume whose title is self-explanatory: Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up (Hill & Wang).

This newest addition to the neo-atheist field crowded by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and others emboldened by the recent transformation of non-belief from a 97-pound weakling into a he-man, Paulos thankfully employs little math, preferring to see things, as he tells us, in the stark light of "logic and probability."

Deploying "a lightly heretical touch," he dissects a playlist of "golden oldies" that includes the first-cause argument (sometimes tweaked as the cosmological argument, which hinges on the Big Bang), the argument for intelligent design, the ontological argument (crudely, that if we can conceive of God, then God exists), the argument from the anthropic principle (that the universe is "fine-tuned" to allow us to exist), the moral universality argument, and others.

The famous Pascal's wager – that it's in our self-interest to believe in God because we lose nothing in case He does exist – is upended as logically flawed, based on what statisticians call Type I and Type II errors.

Lord knows Paulos isn't the first mathematician to proclaim his lack of religious faith. Cambridge's famous wunderkind G.H. Hardy loudly and proudly adjudged God to be his enemy. To Erdos, God, if He existed, was "the supreme fascist."

Even as Paulos works to refute the classical arguments for God's existence, he does something too few of his mindset do: Chide non-believers for unsportsmanlike conduct.

"It's repellent for atheists or agnostics," he admonishes, "to personally and aggressively question others' faith or pejoratively label it as benighted flapdoodle or something worse. Those who do are rightfully seen as arrogant and overbearing."

That doesn't prevent him from doffing the gloves. The ontological argument is "logical abracadabra.'' The design, or teleological argument, is a "creationist Ponzi scheme'' that "quickly leads to metaphysical bankruptcy.''

Much of theology is "a kind of verbal magic show.'' A claim that a holy book is inerrant because the book itself says so is another logical black hole.

However, math, specifically something called Ramsey theory, which studies the conditions under which order must appear, can account for the illusion of divine order arising from chaos.

Paulos provides a nice counterpoint to theoretical physicist Stephen Unwin's 2003 book The Probability of God, which calculated the likelihood of God's existence at 67 per cent, and to Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne's use of a probability formula known as Bayes' theorem to put the odds of Christ's resurrection at 97 per cent.

Those and other efforts remind one of the story, perhaps apocryphal, of Catherine the Great's request of the German mathematical giant Leonhard Euler to confront atheist French philosopher Denis Diderot with evidence of God. The visiting Euler agreed, and at the meeting, strode forward to proclaim to the innumerate Frenchman: "Sir, (a+bn)/n = x, hence God exists. Reply!"

Diderot was said to be so dumbfounded, he immediately returned to Paris.

To Paulos, the tale is a great example of "how easily nonsense proffered in an earnest and profound manner can browbeat someone into acquiescence."

His arguments notwithstanding, Paulos concedes that there's "no way to conclusively disprove the existence of God."

The reason, he notes, is a consequence of basic logic, but not one "from which theists can take much heart."

As for the problem of good and evil, he defers to fellow atheist, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg: "With or without religion, good people will do good, and evil people will do evil. But for good people to do evil, that takes religion."

Or as Paulos might say, no mathematician has ever deliberately flown planes into buildings.

Religious Tattoos

Religious Tattoos

Vampire Slayer Kit

SYMPTOMS OF RELIGIOUS ADDICTION

• Inability to think, doubt, or question religious information and/or authority
• Black-and-white, good/bad, either/or simplistic thinking: one way or the other
• Shame-based belief that you aren't good enough or you aren't doing it right
• Magical thinking that God will fix you/ do it all, without serious work on your part
• Scrupulosity: rigid obsessive adherence to rules, codes of ethics, or guidelines
• Uncompromising judgmental attitudes: readiness to find fault or evil out there
• Compulsive or obsessive praying, going to church or crusades, quoting scripture
• Unrealistic financial contributions
• Believing that sex is dirty; believing our bodies or physical pleasures are evil
• Compulsive overeating and/or excessive fasting
• Conflict and argumentation with science, medicine, and education
• Progressive detachment from the real work, isolation and breakdown of relationships
• Psychosomatic illness: back pains, sleeplessness, headaches, hypertension
• Manipulating scripture or texts, feeling specially chosen, claiming to receive special messages from God
• Maintaining a religious "high", trance-like state, keeping a happy face (or the belief that one should...)
• Attitude of righteousness or superiority: "we versus the world," including the denial of one's human-ness.
• Confusion, great doubts, mental, physical or emotional breakdown, cries for help

The ultimate temptation of the believer is to assume that his or her way to God is the best or only way for others. The particular Way to God becomes what is adored, not the ineffable and incomprehensible Mystery to which we give the name of God.

In essence we have become addicted to the certainty, sureness or sense of security that our faith provides. It is no longer a living by faith, with hope and growing in unconditional love.