When people talk about voodoo, juju, charms, illuminati, or even selling of souls to the devil, I find it all so very amusing. Can someone sell his/her soul to the Devil for money? How does a person who has sold his/her soul look, any difference with the ones who have kept their soul? “I believe in Jesus as our Lord and Saviour”, I just don’t accept that in a popularity contest these days, even for the fact that the Devil is gaining an upper hand. If on every corner I can find a church, I would expect that so much goodness will follow us all the days of our lives. Yet, the Devil is on overdrive and overtime in Nigeria. I have gotten a revelation of the Devils hide out and guess what; he is living amongst us after all. Isn’t that how someone in Sokoto can cause the accident of someone in Owerri, by the way who is employed when bad people divert your blessings to somewhere else. Isn’t it the Devil? Well, some say that we are all a bunch of very fetish thinking kinda’ people, how true is that. We see what we see from where we stand. “I saw a picture of Charlyboy lying in a coffin and at another time with a huge python snake wrapped around his neck, can we call him the Devil or his agent?” The order day, I heard some intellectual pedestrians arguing and dissing Obama calling him the antichrist just for supporting gay rights and passing into law an identity code on all American citizens in order to access health care.The Devil serves a purpose though. That purpose is control, control of the flock capitalizing on their fear, yes the fear factor. This is far more evident in religious institution than any place else in existence. The concept of an evil entity or entities who are trying to cause people to do bad things is a concept that is so overrated, a concept probably as old as human history. Perhaps it began when someone wronged someone and needed a scapegoat, someone to blame their sin on. The popular phase use to be, “the Devil made me do it”. The Devil making someone do something has become a major excuse, especially in religion. Nobody can make you do anything you don’t want to do. There is free will, and therefore, choice. We always have choice.The way we credit the devil is actually making him more popular than God (No disrespect to God meant). If we pay attention to God like we pay attention to the devil, maybe things would have been a little better. Sincerely if we would ask ourselves, is the devil actually the cause of most mishaps, most wickedness that we actually use our own hands to plot and orchestrate? Most times I feel sorry for the devil because we accuse him for everything, even the ones he has no idea about. You kill your brother and use him for rituals; if you are caught you say it’s the devil. You drink and drive, involve in an accident and die, your relative say “it’s the devil or a witch who is a devils agent killed our son.” How about the part where we say drinking and driving is wrong and reckless.
We all have a mind, a mind to decipher what’s good from what’s bad, if we then decide to do evil, is it right to put the blame on someone else? Like I said above, nobody can make us do what we don’t want to do; therefore we have freewill and right to choice. If we make a choice to do evil, what brings the devil into that, he didn’t compel us to do it. Don’t get me wrong, I know the devil exist; I agree he exists but see carefully, humans who do evil are the devil. Note there is just a ‘d’ difference between evil and devil. We should rather be careful the way we preach the devil’s name, else our children will get accustomed to it than the higher Supreme Being. We should teach our children the truth, that they would become the devil if they are perpetrators of evil. Our major problem is that we preach more and talk more evil than we do good.
I sometime heard that in Akwaibom or Calabar, little children are accused of being witches. They are dragged for so called deliverances and sometimes tortured to death until the government began to intervene at some point. Torturing these innocent children is what is called evil. How do you know a witch if you are not one?
If one has in-depth knowledge of what happens around, then we would understand that there is no one particular person that is tagged the devil. The devil is ‘human’; those humans who have vowed to do evil. The social media has become painstakingly boring and annoying because all you see most of the time are the acts of evil that we humans take out on each other. We Nigerians have a bad way of focusing on the negative such that the positive begins to seem like and illusion.
We should preach good, good to our children, so that what is left is not completely lost. When you constantly do something before a child, it gradually becomes a norm. It becomes what he continually feeds on and that becomes a part of him. Our children should know that if they concentrate more on doing good, then evil would phase out, maybe eventually. If we cultivate the habit of always shifting blames, the hope of growth would be completely lost. If things go wrong in your life, stand up and take responsibility for it, don’t look for the next person to lay blames on. We often forget that we are the architect of our own fortune or misfortune. Don’t be the devil.
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