Gud förändrar människor!

Stefan Gustafsson skrev om denna artikel i The Times. Som vanligt är det Stefan skriver om otroligt bra så jag bara måste kopiera in artikeln här också. Läs och ta lärdom:

As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God

Missionaries, not aid money, are the solution to Africa's biggest problem - the crushing passivity of the people's mindset

Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it's Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.


It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.


I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.


But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.


First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.

At 24, travelling by land across the continent reinforced this impression. From Algiers to Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, then right through the Congo to Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya, four student friends and I drove our old Land Rover to Nairobi.


We slept under the stars, so it was important as we reached the more populated and lawless parts of the sub-Sahara that every day we find somewhere safe by nightfall. Often near a mission.


Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers - in some ways less so - but more open.


This time in Malawi it was the same. I met no missionaries. You do not encounter missionaries in the lobbies of expensive hotels discussing development strategy documents, as you do with the big NGOs. But instead I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. "Privately" because the charity is entirely secular and I never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service.


It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man's place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.


There's long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in our own culture: "theirs" and therefore best for "them"; authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours.


I don't follow this. 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.



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Kommentera! =)

Kommentarer
Postat av: teggan

Jag tänker att jag är för slö för att läsa den långa texten ;) haha!

Kraaam

2009-01-09 @ 23:25:28
URL: http://teggan.blogg.se/
Postat av: Craxyknas

Hehe, det är din förlust, den är jättebra ;-)

Kram!

2009-01-10 @ 02:25:22
Postat av: Andreas T.

Jag tänker att det står på engelska puuh vad jobbigt! Du får översätta Crazyknas (blir en bra övning för dig haha). (Lite engelska kan jag väl som alla andra, men visst måste jag anstränga mig lite mer när det står på ett annat språk tror jag).

2009-02-05 @ 20:57:42
Postat av: Craxyknas

Andreas T: Haha! Kan jag läsa på engelska kan du också. Och om du inte kan det verkar det som att det är du som behöver öva... ;-)

2009-02-05 @ 22:24:02
Postat av: Anders Branderud

Många människor som tillhör de olika världsreligioner har funnit vila/tillräckligt med vila för att bli övertygade att de hittade rätt religion. Så bara för att någon har funnit vila/har frid, implicerar inte att de har funnit rätt. Människor som konverterar till alla religioner säger att de blir förändrade och ändrar livsstil, så inte heller det är ett argument.



Skaparen vill att alla människor ska vända sig om till Honom och göra Hans vilja.



Frågan är hur man gör för att upprätthålla en relation med Skaparen; hur man ska leva för att kunna relatera till en Perfekt Skapare.

(Människor gör det som strider emot Skaparens vilja. En perfekt Skapare som förenas med det som är imperfekt, skulle göra Honom imperfekt, vilket är en logisk omöjlighet.)



Ribi Yehoshua ha-Mashiakh (Messias) från Nasaret undervisade (hans undervisning finns på hemsidan www.netzarim.co.il) i Netzarim Hebreiska Matityahu 5:17-20 (som senare förvrängdes till ”Matteusevangeliet”):

”Tro inte att jag har kommit för att rota upp Torah eller Neviim (profeterna), men snarare har jag kommit för att försona dem men den muntliga lagen av êmêt (sanning). Skulle himlarna och hâ-ârêtz (syftar till Israel) byta platser; fortsättningsvis ska inte ens ett yod (en hebreisk bokstav) och inte heller en qeren (en hebreisk symbol; ungefär lika liten som ett י) av den muntliga lagen från Môshêh (Moses) på något sätt byta plats; tills det kommer bli så att allting är helt och fullt ratificerat (synonym: stadfäst) och utfört icke-selektivt. För vem som än tar bort en muntlig lag från Torah, eller undervisar någon annan att göra så, kommer av de i himmelriket att kallas ”borttagen”. Både han som bevarar och han som undervisar dem skall kallas Ribi [en judisk ledare som hade rabbinsk ordination av Raban Jalmliyeil, en prominent judisk ledare] i himmelriket. För jag säger er att om inte er tzedâqâh [leva rätt enligt Torahn] överstiger den som sôphrim, och [troligen ”Herodianka”] rabbinska-Perushim [fariséer], finns det inte någon möjlighet att ni kommer att komma in i himmelriket!”



Således är det väldigt tydligt att Ribi Yehoshua ha-Mashiakh (Messias) undervisade att man ska göra sitt bästa att hålla hela Torah – alla direktiven i Torah (”Moseböckerna”) (inklusive att inte äta fläsk och skaldjur; och inte arbeta på Shabat; och många fler direktiv.).



Vidare är det tydligt att Ribi Yehoshua undervisade att det är ett krav att en person att han/hon ska göra sitt bästa att följa direktiven i Torah för att Skaparen i Hans nåd ska förlåta honom/henne för hans/hennes tillkortakommande i det att han/hon gör sitt bästa att praktisera Torahn, inklusive mitzwot (direktiven) icke-selektivt. Detta var enligt Ribi Yehoshua (Messias) ett krav för att komma in i himmelriket, och det implicerar även att det är ett krav för att upprätthålla en relation med den Perfekte Skaparen.



Ta hand om fattiga människor är bra; men att de samtidigt undervisar en religion som strider emot vad Messias undervisade -- det är inte bra.



Anders Branderud

2010-07-22 @ 20:36:43
URL: http://www.netzarim.co.il

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