Daniel's Pit

Introduction In his book, The Secular Age , Charles Taylor, the Canadian philosopher, traced the development of secularism across three significant epochs: impossible not to believe, possible not to believe, impossible to believe. The first stage (impossible not to believe) describes the traditional, pre-modern age where belief in a God was ubiquitous, and it was mostly impossible not to believe in God. In those days, the question was which God or god exists, not whether there was God or a god. In fact, Miles Coverdale coined the word atheist when translating the bible to English in 1534. He had to come up with a word to describe unbelief. But we moved from the pre-modern age to the modern age, where it was now possible not to believe. The French Revolution (and its rationalism) and the mainstreaming of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species began to provide a philosophical foundation for the popularity of unbelief. Soon, an entire economic and political system-communism-was...

Over time I have argued with many who believed that good education is the key to progress, prosperity and the moving forward of Nigeria and Africa as a whole, I do not believe this, but we all agreed on one thing which was “a change in mindset” has to happen for us to progress. Education is good, necessary even and every one should have it, but education helps to maintain prosperity and progress not bring change, what can bring about prosperity and progress in Nigeria are events that would force a change in mindset, events that will leave us all as one with no choice, volition is something that when giving to human rarely brings about unified purpose and the need for good education will not bring about that. Some would argue that the level of poverty in Nigeria should be enough to forced our hands to progress but not all of us are affected by the poverty and sadly those that are not affected are those in charge of our progress, so the need for progress caused by poverty is not strong e...