Africa

God does not exist!

Every time I go to the supermarket there is a guy selling socks in the parking lot. It’s not always the same guy, but he always says the same thing: “Hello, my friend…” and then elicits handouts with a combination of smiles, hand gestures and appeals to the goodness of god.

Sometimes I give him spare change. Once I gave him a banana, for which he seemed grateful. I’m sorry for his predicament (he’s likely a refugee from a war-torn place), but I try not to let myself become an easy target for people begging for money, either. Maybe this is a holdover from my New York days.

Today we had a brief conversation. It went like this: “Hello, my friend!”

“Hey.”

“Ah, god is good, is he not?”

“No, he’s not. You should thank people who have helped you out, not god.”

“But doesn’t god help you, my friend?”

“He’s never done anything for me.”

“Why don’t you believe in god?” he asked.

“Because he doesn’t exist!” I said gleefully. I made sure to smile, too, so he could be sure that he was speaking to a happy atheist. (Maybe secretly I was hoping he’d take a swipe at me. To his credit, he didn’t.) Then we got in the car and drove off.

Later, I asked my wife if I’d been too hard on the man. She replied that he came from Africa and had seen who knows what horrors before embarking for Europe. He may have lost his family and possessions along the way. He’d probably come from a country where life was hell, and seen things that would make us shudder. My little quip wasn’t going to cause a breakdown in him.

Fair enough. I wasn’t going for that, anyway. I was just expressing mild outrage at the idea of a person who depends upon the kindness of strangers but can’t thank them directly. Instead, he thanks “god” – the same all powerful god, no doubt, who surveys his perpetually war-trashed African homeland with such an approving grin.

You can’t have one without the other, can you?

Pope Condemns Witchcraft

The New York Times reports today that the Pope Benedict XVI was embraced by the people of Angola, in Africa. They further report that the crowd of faithful Angolans wasn’t the least bit fazed by the controversy surrounding the pope’s poo-pooing of condoms as a useful way to fight HIV (and various other STDs, unwanted pregnancy, etc…). Here’s the clincher, at least for me:  

“The only people who use condoms are those with no faith,” said Simba Teresa, a 45-year-old street vendor, trying to wave away the heat with a continuing flap of her hand. She said three of her five children had died as infants, a common story in a country with one of the worst child mortality rates in the world. “Faith is everything,” she said. “You put your life in God’s hands.”

Now, we live in a world where it is no longer able to claim absolute ignorance of certain things, namely that if you want to have sex without risking making babies–and therefore ending up with too darn many of them–you can put on a rubber. Unless you are a Catholic–no, wait…unless you are a Catholic living in an underdeveloped region of the world. Italy, for example, is home to Vatican City and a healthy majority of Italians still identify with being Catholics, but all of them have recourse to condoms (and, more importantly, use them). The ones who don’t aren’t supposed to be doing the nasty anyway.  So this just goes to show that while most mainstream Catholics will pay lip service to the pope, most of them realize he is full of hot medieval air when he says these things.

One thing the NYTimes article did not report that the Italian media did was Benedict’s plea to the Angolans to abandon their old time religion: witchcraft, animism and all, and get with the new. My guess is that he meant the Catholic Church, that big, democratic holy roller-rink of a faith. I, for one, don’t see much difference between the doctrine of transubstantiation and, well, lesser known forms of religious witchcraft.

Pope Benedict XVI, enemy of Africa

Pope Benedict XVI, in a plane on his way to Africa, had this to say about AIDS: ”You can’t resolve it with the distribution of condoms.”  The New York Times reports that there are about 22-million people in sub-Saharan Africa infected with HIV. The story is here.

At times I tell myself this man is joking. He seems to be a caricature of a cartoon of a pope. And then, when he has had his say, he appears genuinely distraught that his statements upset some people. I mean, who can be serious when they tell others to control themselves sexually through abstinence? The popes–who one might suppose have no experience, and therefore no real advice to offer–can’t even control their own men, so what other term is there for this but hypocrisy?