The Dilemma of Belief
I came on Facebook the other day to express my frustration over the fact that a number of Nigerians believe that a woman can be pregnant for a period lasting between 2 years and 25 years and still give birth to a live infant, or that a human could vomit a live goat. It seemed completely ridiculous that any sane person could hold such beliefs. But I kid you not, there are actually Nigerian humans who use Facebook and smart phones and hold these beliefs with delusional ferocity.
After expressing my shock and frustration, I took some time to reflect on these things. Those who hold these beliefs did not start holding them spontaneously. It took years of uncritical reading of books of myth, taken as the literal and infallible truth. Once you can believe that a snake and a donkey once talked, that a man once lived to be 900 years old, that another man lived for three days in the belly of a whale and a four day old rotten corpse was raised from the dead, you are just a few steps away from believing that 25 year old pregnancies leading to live births are real and that humans can vomit live goats. It’s an easy leap. I watched with amusement when Christians who take the words of the Bible as the literal truth were feeling superior to their brethren of the pregnancy-and-live goat fellowship. There is very little difference between them, really. They are just on two adjacent points on the same spectrum.
Is it possible to cure the pregnancy and goat people of their ridiculous beliefs? I am not holding my breath at all. Integrated science failed. Biology failed. And for some, university education and medical school failed. Let us not even begin the debate on how these subjects were taught within the highly religious and superstitious Nigerian educational environment, ably reinforced by the multimillion naira Nollywood movie industry. Let us focus for a second on the Christian believer. If you ask him to relinquish his ridiculous belief in 25 year old pregnancy and humans vomiting live goats, you would have to ask him to also give up his belief in cars running without petrol or miraculous cure of metastatic breast cancers after mere prayers.
Even further, you must ask him to give up his belief that a 90 year old woman gave birth to a live infant. At this point, not only would you be asking a Christian to give up what makes up the core of her Christian faith, you would also be depriving a childless Christian woman of a myth, Sarah’s story of miraculous child birth at 90 and the accompanying psychological relief and hope that it brings. This is exactly why we invented myth in the first instance.
But the ultimate dilemma is this: once Sarah is allowed to give birth to a child at 90, then Jonah must live in the belly of a fish for three days, Lazarus must be raised from the dead after the decay process had commenced, a car would run without petrol, a pregnancy would then last 2 to 25 years and a man would vomit a live goat. That is how the faith chain works.
