Bono "Focus on the Family" program

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And what about the others who helping the poor?

You also didn't answer my first question. What are you doing to help those in need?

And let's not forget that most Africans are anti-gay anyway, so the homophobia that is preached doesn't matter to them. Should we ignore the entire continent then?



"What are you doing to help those in need?" ---- Buying stuff from Edun. Not lying about God to people, or making they regurgitate hate in exchange for "help."

The evangelicals went in as missionaries offering "help." Part of the deal was to get the food & water, you had to be indoctrinated into their version of Christianity. Africans were not walking around murdering gay people before the white hateful Christians came in. The homophobia was imported from America. Hate is not a natural mind-set. You have to be groomed and spoon fed it.

Listen closely to the fundies here in America. They were able to go into Africa and create that climate, and that's what they want to have here in America. If you genuinely believe in a God that would make humans capable of love, then declare that love a "sin," you're really on the wrong path spiritually.


So Focus on the Family? They don't respect MY family. That's a problem. Any other message they may have is irrelevant when they're focusing on harming my family. To create a climate where people are at risk of being murdered is not the work of God.
 
From colonialism to ‘kill the gays’: The surprisingly recent roots of homophobia in Africa

This is a breif rundown on some of the roots of homophobia in Africa. First it cites the legacy of colonialism in the Victorian era, then a crisis of masculinity around Africans feeling disempowered and emasculated by Western domination. Then there's this:

"More recently, there’s another trend that appears to be worsening homophobia in the sub-Saharan: the influx of evangelical and pentecostal preachers, often from the United States, which has spurred an increasingly competitive contest for African worshipers. Dionne says that these religious figures, much like political leaders before them, sometimes get peoples’ attention by leveraging preexisting homophobia, perhaps worsening it in the process. But, once again, outsiders are doing their part. As the Post’s Raghavan wrote, conservative American Christian groups “send missions and help fund local churches that share their brand of Christianity. Sermons and seminars by American evangelist preachers are staples on local television and radio networks across the continent.” Often, these sermons play up the supposed threat of homosexuality to Africa’s culture and its children. As in the case of Uganda, which has spent years debating a “kill the gays” bill to punish homosexuality with death, ever-harsher political rhetoric and social attitudes can follow."
 
I thought it was common sense that those evangelists are only in it for the money?

Help africans just for the sake of helping a human being? Ha ha ha.

I KNOW those ppl. I can't believe some of you are so damn naive.
 
Uh, does this look like it came straight from Paternalism City to anyone else?

I'm going to guess that any atheist's view of religion -- whether it's tribal African spirituality or American Christianity -- is going to be paternalistic in some fashion. Cultures with strong spiritual influences will thus always be viewed with some measure of condescension by those who do not recognize such influences as valid. There is no doubt that tribal influences that are socio-economic, cultural and religious have driven deep rifts into African culture (see Sudan). What is interesting is that, for at least this writer and avowed atheist with actual experience on the ground, religion can be seen as a healer, not just a divider.
 
It's not because religion is paternalistic, it's because these paragraphs are.



I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the “big man” and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.

Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.

How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds - at the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? “Because it's there,” he said.

To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation - that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.





In other words, Africans are incapable of managing their business without a Westernized worldview, religious or otherwise. That last sentence is pretty straightforward: without Christianity Africa is at the mercy of the witch doctor and the machete? That's paternalism.
 
In other words, Africans are incapable of managing their business without a Westernized worldview, religious or otherwise. That last sentence is pretty straightforward: without Christianity Africa is at the mercy of the witch doctor and the machete? That's paternalism.

No, I think that's pragmatism. From a pragmatic standpoint, you're dealing with a culture that is still rooted deeply in tribal spirituality, whose people are still murdering each other along deeply divided lines. Capitalists have been moving in over the past -- what -- fifty years, all seeking to exploit the continent's natural resources -- oil in Sudan, diamonds in the Congo. But capitalism alone will not solve Africa's problems.

I note you selectively pull his last sentence apart. The picture he's painting is far more stark. This author seems to make the convincing point that, without connecting to the spirituality that is core to the African experience (and, one could argue, the human experience) and using that as a motivator for change, the continent will be left at the mercy of the capitalists, oil executives, and others seeking to exploit the continent solely for financial gain, and worse -- exploiting cultural and racial tensions in the name of the almighty dollar. (Capitalists being at times remarkably clueless about the cultures they're trying to get money from.) As a result, the next genocide could, conceivably and entirely inadvertently, be brought to you by Nike.
 
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