Mu Fedjo:

You had, what I thought was, a genuine topic for discussion, which prompted
some of us to get involved in the first place. At the risk of antagonizing
some my friends, who have cautioned me against dabbling in religious
discussions like this, let me say that some of the things you said in your
response to my contribution worries me, and I believe it does others as
well. For instance, in the third part of your response to my contribution,
you stated that I "still believe in God, but not sure the Christian God is
the right one."  The use of the phrase "the right one" is troubling, to say
the least.  Who are we to tell a group of believers of another faith that
their God is not the right one?  In the few years that I have been on this
earth, I have learnt to appreciate everybody and every religion.  For
example, when I lived in Sierra Leone, I frequently visited my village
during December and April.  These are normally times for celebrations of
harvest (Christmas for rice, peanuts and other foodstuffs, and April for
fishing and harvesting of palm fruits), I would participate in the offering
of sacrifice and prayers to the Almighty God (Mahei Ngewoh in my language)
and to the ancestors.   My people in the village do not know about Jesus
Christ, but they know and believed in the  existence of a supernatural being
called God or Ngewoh. I still appreciate the process, especially when they
invoked the names/spirits  of the ancestors. Remember, even Christ said:
"render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God."  The
important thing was that they prayed to God.   As different as their form of
worship may be from mine,  it is not for me, or anyone else, to call their
God or worship the right or wrong one.  It is this kind of fundamentalist
attitude towards other religions that makes the world so unstable today.  A
case in point, there are places in Africa where there are as many Christians
as there are Muslims, yet the latter find it convenient to call other groups
of believers infidels.  The Catholics too think that only a Catholic could
marry another Catholic, and they nurture some form of religious superiority
against other Christians.  This is wrong in the eyes of God, for He said so
in the scriptures: "...What God had made, let no one call unclean.".

Another fundamental problem with your analyses is that you completely fail
to factor in the power of faith.   Faith, according to Ephesians 2:8-10 and
Titus 3:4-5 does not require justification or proof.  We are saved through
faith.  Faith, my brother, is no physical science whereby you need a hard,
concrete, scientific proof; all you need to do is believe.  For us
Christians, the Apostle's Creed, for instance,  is one of the bedrock of our
faith, and as Jesus said in Matt. 17: 20-21 and  13:31-32 in the parable of
the mustard seed, if you have faith, even as small as the mustard seed, you
will move mountains; nothing will be impossible for you.

Finally, do you really, seriously, think that the darkness on the day of
Christ's crucifixion was as a result of an eclipse of the sun, or is this
just an extension of your fertile imagination getting the best of you?

Have a good day.

Ben