Daniel's Pit

  Introduction When the Federal Government was considering nationwide lockdowns during the heyday of the COVID-19 pandemic, some of us insisted that the economic and mental consequences of such lockdowns would exceed the supposed benefits. In a Whatsapp group I belong to, one of those who didn’t agree with this view - that the lockdown's economic and mental consequences will exceed any supposed benefits - upbraided Nigerians for not preparing for emergencies. He believed that Nigerians don’t learn how to save for situations like the pandemic. While that discussion was ongoing, it was easy to see the elitism in his argument. How many average Nigerians earn enough income to get by their living expenses, talk less of saving? A whopping 40% of the population lives below the poverty line, according to the NBS . So that upbraiding was by and large inconsiderate. However, it will be naive to think that we don’t have some people who can prepare for emergencies but find themselves u...

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...