Eric Terfa Ula-Lisa, Believe whatever you want. I am a Christian and believe similarly as you. It is your right and prerogative. Other people, including atheists, have their own opinions and beliefs. Find a church or the appropriate venue to peddle and profess those beliefs. Beliefs and mere opinions are not admissible as factual in academic discourse, period. I can believe if I want that lizards are capable of giving birth to humans. I will probably find an audience somewhere that is receptive to it, and I have the right to that opinion. But I would be laughed off the stage in a serious academic culture were I to try to pass it off in a lecture as factual. Piety and belief have their place. Academic rigor and analysis have their place as well.
Eric Terfa Ula-Lisa but how can we proceed when there is no verifiable, empirical basis to do so? If I come to your church, the Christian that I am will take your word for your "empirical experience with witches." But in my terrain of academics, how can you convince me except by merely inviting me to accept your word for it. Academia has its rules and that is not how it works. The gentleman in question is a professor and was giving an academic lecture to an academic audience. And yes, as an academic theory or argument, the quote deserves nothing but ridicule. He should have been laughed off that stage, but I'm sure they clapped for him and praised him. However, if he had expressed those sentiments in a church, I would not have ridiculed him at all.
To the Facebook follower who posted a link to an academic study of witchcraft, I had this to say.
This is a study of witchcraft. Academics have been studying witchcraft and associated beliefs for centuries. But they don't advance them as factual. They maintain a critical distance from the belief system and practice. They don't pass off these unproven and unprovable phenomena, beliefs and practices as "factual." They don't lionize or legitimize the beliefs.
I don't have the energy to even engage this type of academic, but you mentioned opinions, which we all have. He wasn't just expressing an opinion on Facebook or to his friends in a conversation. This is his inaugural professorial lecture, which should be publishable or at least worthy of submission to a journal in his field. Tell me, can this paper be submitted to any journal let alone be considered for publication in a journal in his field? Is it even worthy of an academic debate? Can it provoke academic debate? I am a practicing Christian. I have my beliefs in that regard. But I will not deliver an ACADEMIC lecture at a university, let alone a professorial inaugural, that is basically a rehash of my Christian or theological beliefs. If I desire a forum and platform to propagate a theological theory of spiritual causation, I will look for a religious audience, preferably in my church. I have no problem with people believing what they believe, but religious beliefs or opinions or convictions do not constitute academic theories. He actually says in the excerpt that his witchcraft scenarios are "factual," as actual as the science behind TV transmission and remote control technology. Where is the proof for this? Where is a demonstration of this? In scholarship, you do not make claims or assertions without demonstrating them. I am a little disappointed that you're dignifying a mishmash of traditional African religious and Pentecostal spiritualist explanations as a social scientific theory. The man is a political scientist for crying out loud. I can say a tree can learn a language. I have a right to that opinion but would I not be laughed off the stage and humiliated if I were to go before an audience of academics and express that opinion and posit it as fact?
All peoples have their beliefs, superstitions, metaphysical claims, and cosmologies. The difference is that you don't find their professors of political science delivering academic lectures claiming, without proof, that they are factual.
Scholars study all phenomena, including religious and superstitious beliefs but they maintain a scholarly distance and/or engage critically with them. They don't advance such unproven and unprovable phenomena as "factual" without proof or verifiable methodological demonstration. And stop with excusing poor, inept, and uncritical scholarship with claims of a decolonizing agenda. That's how some Nigerian academics who cannot write simple English sentences will claim that their poor writing skills are a form of rebellion against the white man's colonizing language and that they are trying to Africanize and decolonize African scholarship.
Anyway, perhaps I should not waste energy and time on nonsense and heed the advice of my brother, Professor Adeeko, below.
Adeleke Adeeko Moses Ochonu My friend, please leave witch hunters alone! Why bother to debate people who choose to equate the being of electronic remote devices and the being of beliefs. How can you begin to understand the structure of a moral framework that cedes complete control to forces beyond understanding, an allegedly moral (?) system that accepts as justified the killing of children as witch, a system that fails to question the sexism that restricts witch convictions to women, a system that equalizes belief and proof. Moses, please leave these people alone. How can you talk to them?
--Question:
Is the professor expressing a belief system or affirming a belief system? If expressing a belief system, there is nothing new in what he has said. If he is affirming it, can you and I deny him of his faith? Pentecostalists tend to believe in magic and witchcraft. There is a clue in one sentence:
"In these two instances, one is seen as science, and the other is seen as magic."
Suppose the professor is a practicing Muslim who is observing the Ramadan and he talks about Allah and the rewards of heaven, is this not similar to his ideas on Nigerian religion?
And what about he a Christian, do we accept his faith-derived statement? A fundamentalist Christian can win the Nobel Prize in medicine.
I am not sure that one can win the argument in many parts of Africa that it is possible to disconnect this kind of belief from the work they do. In many Nollywood movies, the medical doctors tell their patients to forget about modern medicine and see the "native doctor". The campuses are littered with sacrifices, and when I was at Ife, one was put in my office.
There must be an examination of his essays and books to conclude on the degree to which his faith as affected his findings. Human beings can "fragment" one part of the brain to write the most brilliant essay today and another part can see witches the next day.
The assumption that human beings are rational all the time is actually not correct. Indeed, they are not, in the secularist understanding of faith.
In any case, I hope the professor is reading this so that he can teach Moses a lesson by breaking his two legs!!!
TF
From: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of moses <meochonu@gmail.com>
Reply-To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Sunday, May 5, 2019 at 4:56 PM
To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria is Doomed and Her Academics are Culpable
This message is from an external sender. Learn more about why this matters.
I am reading Professor Ebenezer Obadare's brilliant new book, Pentecostal Republic: Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria (Zed Books, 2018), and I came across the quote below, one of those he advances as touchstones for his central argument.
It is not lifted from a sermon or a facebook post. It is not extracted from a theological or hermeneutical document.
On the contrary, ladies and gentlemen of Facebook Nigeriana, it is an excerpt from the inaugural professorial lecture of a certain Professor Osisioma B.C Nwolise, a Professor of Political Science (a social science that teaches logic, empirical proof, rigor, verifiability, and rational analysis) at the University of Ibadan.
This is the most important lecture of his academic career, delivered in a university to an academic audience. And yet if I did not know its context I would have surmised that this was a sermon delivered in one of the parishes of my home church, the Redeemed Christian Church of God.
Here is an academic lending his professorial weight to the Nigerian pastime of spiritualizing sociopolitical, security, and economic problems--our culture of conflating piety and politics, or neglecting political action for pietistic escapism.
We try to pray away our problems when we should be acting against them. Now, our professors who should know better are uncritically legitimizing and trying to intellectualize this culture of fatalistic spiritualization of secular, practical problems.
Farooq Kperogi is right; our problem is not just leadership but also a national scourge of illiteracy (literal and figurative) and irrationality. How can a country whose professors profess such nonsense make progress or solve its problems?
And how can a people challenge their oppressors and tormentors in power when even their professors subscribe to such drivel, such spiritual causality for everything, including election rigging, bad governance and incompetent leadership?
Read and weep for what remains of the diminishing country called Nigeria.
"When we want to watch our television, we switch it on with our remote control by pressing a button. Then we can stay in Ibadan and watch a football match being played in Athens, Sydney or Paris. In the same way, a witch stays in her house in Lokoja or any other town, stirs water in a pot, or conjurs(sic) a mirror, and can monitor any targeted person or object in London, Athens, or Sydney. In these two instances, one is seen as science, and the other is seen as magic. A witch can also stay in South Africa or the United Kingdom and break the leg of an effigy spiritually programmed to represent a person domiciled in the United States, and the person's leg will break mysteriously there. The scientist or intellectualist may not see or accept these as real based on his training, but they happen daily and are factual. There are spirits attached to walls, plants, leaves, found in bushes, on people's clothes, etc.; and there are roving spirits that move about especially between 12 noon and 2.00 pm, and at night. Some of these spirits are benevolent, while others are malevolent. It is the malevolent spirits that constitute threats to humans. They can project sickness into people's bodies, change people's star or destiny, or change the sex of a baby in the womb, remove the baby completely or turn it into a stone, or tortoise, snail, horse, snake, or a disabled [person]. If it were possible to carve out a block of the air for spiritual analysis, we can find several arrows, and many other dangerous pollutants, spiritual weapons of mass destruction flying in various directions 24 hours of the day."
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
No comments:
Post a Comment