The BN Village - View Single Post - The Afrocentric Atheist...Can it Exist???

Shemsi en Tehuti · (#28 (**permalink**))

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Watcher

Take a baby. A new born, new to the world, eyes still unfocussed baby.

He doesn't believe in a damn thing. Not Judaism, Buddism, Unicorns or faries. He isn't monotheist or polytheist. He can't even control his ass let alone decide his concept of the world. The baby is an atheist.

1) YOU have to indoctrinate a baby into a particular religion or set of beliefs. Everything a child learns comes from adults. That that they question, they do so only because adults question or do not take seriously. They follow your lead. Hence so many initiation rites for all organised religions based around babys. You label and begin the brainwashing process on a child before it can even decide for itself.

I would say your argument is compelling, if not for the fact that a baby has very little reasoning capability. I agree that it is the social constructs of the adults culturizing the child that determines most of the core precepts they believe. However, leaving religion alone, all groups of humanity has at one time questioned where we have come from and have reasoned it through in one way or another. At some point when that child comes to an age of reason, he or she will question its origin, and from the traditional African perspective that origin is "God".

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Watcher

Given that there is nobody to pray to, no groups to indoctrinate one, no holy books to quote as unquestioned faith, no missionaries in African history, no mystique or languages to take on, no names to wash yours away with etc etc.... only a decision that an individual makes about a specific thing; how can it be a credo contray to Afrocentrism when it isn't even a credo to begin with?

As always, quite insightful. Reading your words alone, you make a great amount of sense. How can the nonbelief of any credo go against the particular credo of Afrocentrism? It doesn't, and this is not what I meant to impart if that is what you took away from my post. My personal thoughts are that in order to be an atheist, one has to adopt an Indo-European definition of "God" over the classical African concept of God having Oneness with Nature and the Universe.

A parallel example of this would be to re-define the concept of gravity. Instead of professing the intrinsic "pull" amongst all matter in the Universe, this "pull" is reclassified as the "will of God". Just as it is obvious that physical matter is "pulled" towards each other, it is just as obvious that humanity had to have an origin. In my opinion, the atheist would be equivalent to the person stating that "gravity doesn't exist" due to the faulty definition of gravity, instead of interrogating the fundamental precepts governing their mode of thinking in the first place.