An encounter with a House of Yahweh adherent

The world has just ended. Or it is just about to.

This is not another of those sour predictions of the world ending that you hear about every now and then. No. This is just a short review of the recent happenings in the Rift Valley. Nakuru to be precise. Why would somebody predict that the world will end on 12 September 2006? That there will be a nuclear war and that is not the end. This is the post Yahweh.com:

“You need to put this date on your bathroom mirror. You also need to make preparations for the dark days ahead, which will affect every person on earth.... ”

I got to do a bit of an online background check after I read in the paper and in the news that there is a sect, very busy in Njoro, Mauche and Molo areas in Nakuru asking its members to sell their property and prepare for end times.

End times my God.

Members of the sect are right now holed up in some chamber in Njoro, praying away and waiting for the apocalypse to strike. Some have probably shat on their pants; some are grovelling and gnawing in fear, waiting for the final obliteration of our planet. From my frequent online sojourns, the last time this earth was under any sort of obliteration threat was from an asteroid that was 250,000 kilometres away, and that from the same people who downgraded Pluto from planetary status. Never mind.

So why would a sect leader announce that end times are here and throw a region into a panic?

Like Albert Einstein said, science without religion is lame, but religion without science is blind. These religious types just bore me to the core. What would somebody run their mouths on other people’s bizness? So and so is not very nice, watch out. Doing this is wrong in God’s eyes, it is wrong for you to desire what is not yours, oh, please donate and help build God’s ministry we need to grow this church bla bla bra (pun intended).

There was this joke I once read and thought it was a sheer mimicry of religion and a silent neigh in the sunrise of Christianity, but it cracked my sick mind nevertheless. Some kids were apparently asked by their teacher what the stretchiest (is that an English word?) substance in the world was. To her utter amazement, one of the kids raised his hand and answered ‘human skin’. Now, ladies and gentlemen, you are probably as astounded as I am. What? Some of you are probably feeling pain or some sort of itchiness just because some kid said the stretchiest substance on earth is the human skin. “Why?” asked the teacher. “Because I read in the Bible that Jesus tied his ass to a tree and walked five kilometres to Jerusalem.” was the kid's answer. Whew!

Well, I took it that the kid was innocent in a dirty way, but still thought some sick minded guy wrote it just to poke fun at Christiaity. I am a Catholic myself, although I have not seen the inside of a Catholic since my high school chapel in March 1996, before I got suspended for a whole term and chased from the school like I was a rabid rodent. But that is a story for another time. Now, I want to recount one of my religious dig-ins in the past. I didn't understand church very much in my childhood, and I don't really understand it much now, not just church but pretty much religion in general but before anyone start trying to go overboard and blow some crap up around me because their religion said to, let it be known that I probably know two cents more than what anyone knows about religion and history, bows down to or who they are giving ten percent of their earnings to. I was raised Catholic and any time some Bible thumper asks, I say I'm Catholic but, I'm currently in a mild state of confusion when it comes to religion and I presently find myself in between religions, especially with all the negative energy that comes from all of the new churches mushrooming all over Kenya.

There was this time when I was busy with some farming assignment back home (I come from Molo by the way, so this sect has touched a raw nerve), and was looking for some guy to plough my land. As I waited for this guy and his tractor at the roadside in my one-muddy-run-down-street home town in shaggz, a former classmate from old days walked up to me and we started chatting. He told me he’d been okay and was travelling to Nairobi and was waiting for a lift. He asked me to keep him company near the stage with him as he shone his shoes and I obliged, and we walked to a shoe shiner’s stand and he sat down.

All went quiet and we realised we had interrupted some debate, so I asked these guys what was happening? Apparently some old man (let’s call him S) who repaired padlocks next to the shoe shiner had been taking them on, you guessed right, why the House of Yahweh was the church to be, and all other churches were nought in the name of Yahweh. There is no God, only Yahweh, and his son Jesus Christ! I told them to leave him alone; he’d probably taken some busaa that day on his way to work.

The old man belligerently asked me what church I belonged to, and I said I was a Catholic. One of the guys standing around chuckled, he probably sensed trouble. I asked the old man what church he belonged to. He responded that he was a Christian, which is rather like being asked where you live, and you respond Africa, and you are right here! So I decided to narrow it down. I figured I'd start with the largest branch, so I asked him if he was Catholic or Protestant.

That set off his short fuse right there, and he wiggled in his seat, that old and wiry old man. He scolded me stammeringly for using the label "Protestant" (in his words an unholy phrase uttered by the Pope to demean innocent people) and told me that Catholics worshiped of the Virgin Mary, not Jesus Christ or Yahweh. I tried to keep from smiling as I pointed out the giant crucifixes that adorn virtually every Catholic Church, as well as the image of Jesus Christ that hangs over most alters in said churches. And the references to God in the Bible and scriptures, sermons and other writings of the Catholic Church.

S enlightened me, informing me that they were all part of an elaborate cover up to turn people from the one true faith, and trick them into being thrown into the boiling lake of fire to burn for eternity. How about that? Here I was just trying to defend my church, despite all those child abuse accusations cropping up around the world when it turns out that we apparently have some kind of hellish fetish too. This communal barbeque would be achieved, S claimed, through worship of the false idol, the Virgin Mary.

Upon hearing those words, I felt as though I had been awakened from a sound slumber in the deepest darkness and suddenly thrust wide awake into shining bright light. Yes, I felt tired, annoyed, and I wanted to go back to bed, not even to wait for the ploughing guy and his tractor. I asked S why Jesus Christ would be so pissed off about us being nice to his mother. He muttered something about idolatry, and then went back to bashing Catholics. He explained to me how Catholics had written their own Bible which was based solely on lies. S taught me that the Catholics had used that false power gathered with their unholy Bible to scare people into obedience. Using this power, Catholics had been behind every atrocity and major war for the last thousand years. With a cry of cynic passion, S informed me that the Catholic Church was the sole cause of the Nazi holocaust.

I was a little confused by this statement. I suggested that maybe S was thinking of something else, surely not the Holocaust! S assured me he meant the Holocaust. According to him, the Catholic Church paid Hitler to begin the war, while they (the Catholic Church) secretly seized Jews and killed them. Now the reason I was confused here, is because there appeared to be a few holes in this story. It can be argued that in the past the Catholic Church may have been responsible for some of the anti-Semitism that built up before the 2^nd World War, but the actions of Catholics during the war itself seemed to be pretty reasonable. I told S that the Pope in power at the time maintained a stance of neutrality mostly to avoid military retaliation from Italy and Germany. Other high ranking members of the Catholic clergy did openly protest, however. It's also a well known fact that Catholics hid Jews during the holocaust period. Fortunately, S was able to denounce these apparent falsehoods. The Catholic Church got control of every single history book on the face of the planet, and rewrote them all.

At this point my head was starting to hurt (it being filled anew with words of divine truth and all) so I decided to go back to my original question. What religion did he belong to? S once again insisted that he was Christian. I pointed out that there were many different branches: Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Anglicans, and Jehovah's Witnesses, to name a few. S interrupted me with a hearty "Those stupid Lutherans". Apparently they worship the Virgin Mary, too. Calming down a little bit, S told me that since I was a Catholic, I was a liar, claiming I was defending the cruellest, most bloodthirsty, most sadistic cult on the face of the planet. I asked him what church he attended then, if he was a Christian. He responded that he was a member of the House of Yahweh sect, and did not attend any church though, they went to a shrine. I asked him where exactly it was; I was from around there and did not know where it was. He said that for now, they worshipped at an open field about five kilometres away, but that was for a short while, they will build a better shrine (he avoided the use of the word Church by the way) for Yahweh.

My friends’ shoes were done and they glittered like the back of a dung-beetle. Seeing no point in pushing further with that elderly lunatic and his sordid religious beliefs, I told him we were enlightened, and took our leave and went forth to spread the word.