This man has given us reason to prod all our belief systems

What you need to know:

  • Of course all miracle workers are charlatans because the world is yet to see a miracle. There are 100-year-old prizes for proof of the paranormal that lie uncollected, and no one is willing to attempt to reproduce a miracle in laboratory conditions.
  • While church members were not necessarily wealthy, the message of many preachers was unashamedly about victory, success, and achievement, with health and finance prominent.”

It was disappointing to watch the supposed expose into the shenanigans of Prophet Doctor Kanyari. It was plucking low hanging fruits.

When you shoot into an open goal, you should not expect applause. There was nothing new, nothing to see. The trick does not improve every time we see it.

Of course all miracle workers are charlatans because the world is yet to see a miracle. There are 100-year-old prizes for proof of the paranormal that lie uncollected, and no one is willing to attempt to reproduce a miracle in laboratory conditions.

Miracles, it seems, only belong in the distant past where they wowed the credulous. The closer you get to the present, the less visible the footprint of the supernatural becomes. Today, the exploits of the supernatural have shrunk to increasingly discreditable margins and the divine is all but invisible.

Marjoe Gortner, the self-confessed Pentecostal fraudster, won an Oscar in the 1970s for his documentary, where he explained how miracles were faked. He also used potassium permanganate and a host of other chemical accoutrements to dupe his congregants.

Marjoe showed just how easy it was to get people into an excited state and get them to fall over in ecstatic spasms of faux possession. You just need to put a person in a group where everyone is acting up and they will, like sheep (that is why they are called a flock), play along. It is all based on the power of suggestion and the whole racket is performed by greedy psychopaths.

WHY PENTOCOATALS LOVE KENYA

Daniel Branch, in the book Kenya Between Hope and Despair, diagnoses why Pentecostalism stuck its tentacles deep into the country: “Having abandoned hope that Moi’s regime or the World Bank could provide the means for prosperity, many Kenyans turned instead to Pentecostalism…. Pentecostal churches were also founded at an astonishing rate in rural areas, and religious broadcasting took up a good deal of the newly liberalised radio and television spectrums.

While church members were not necessarily wealthy, the message of many preachers was unashamedly about victory, success, and achievement, with health and finance prominent.”

Even if you are somehow satisfied that a certain god exists, why should you follow him? It doesn’t immediately follow that proof of existence is a call to your servitude. There have been several thousand deities worshipped since the adoption of writing and all presumably want your time and money. Why settle for a particular one?

Also, if the being you happen to fancy is omnipotent, why would he need your money? Isn’t that a contradiction?

A man claiming to be an agent of a supernatural being must, at a minimum, be able to produce a supernatural manifestation on short notice.

If the god wants you to follow, then surely a divine manifestation is in order.

It is even easier when you are dealing with an omnipotent being with limitless supernatural power; ask for your own burning bush.

If money skimmed off followers was used for good, then there would be no issue. A friend of mine who is an atheist contributes to a certain church that runs an orphanage that she grew up in. I do not blame her because she has ties to the place.

However, my problem with contributing to churches and their good works is that a lot of that money is used to support a parasitic class of men who are gatekeepers in luxurious lifestyles. Money donated to religions also ends up being used to propagate beliefs that are not only anachronistic in this day and age, but also ridiculous and divisive. Better cut out the middleman and just give directly to charity.

Finally all those making fun of Kanyari’s doctorate by putting it in quotation marks fail to see the point. Anyone can be an “expert” of the non-existent.