FAREWELL RELIGIONS

The Year 2073

Another event that marked the late sixties and early seventies was the Global Treaty on Secularism which prohibited the practice of any religion throughout the world.

How did that happen?

A bit like a slap that we didn't really see coming. After all, we weren't doing anything wrong, were we? Obviously, we must have, unless the real reason was hidden under women's bodies like too often in the history of patriarchal and wealthy societies. After the Great Disasters, the colonisation by AI, and then the liberation of rich countries, the position of women in their societies had become influential and prominent, which made some traditionalist men in power very uncomfortable. The latter took a very dim view of femininity and its vision of things. Women no longer felt ashamed to carry coloured babies for themselves or for others. They had been the first to bear witness to the downfall of wealthy nations without frowning; they had dressed the wounds left by their own pride before getting up to busy themselves contributing to the world which was changing at top speed. Their restorative force and their creativity didn't show simply through the procreation of new-borns, but also through their involvement in the important institutions of society, including religions.

Women had turned into the guides, leaders and muses of a weary world. As Mother Nature continued to smash the heads of the powerful men face down, she encouraged women to put their clothes back on, throw anti-wrinkle products in the bin, and remake the world to a fairer image, more real, and balanced. Their approach, more inclusive, gentler, and in harmony with the new world forming around them, didn't please the powerful men who were struggling to return to their own glorification. Ah! How much they missed the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century! They were almighty then, above all and everyone.

For me who had only practised religion out of family habits, I took the news quite well perhaps even better than the exile on Mars of the big multinationals. For the last centuries, God hadn't brought much to his believers in a world where the money of those who had a lot of it gave them easy access to paradise on Earth. On the other hand, for Charlene and Ousmane who each practised their religion with fervour, the new law deprived them of their direct connection with their community, for one the Christian faith, for the other the Muslim faith, as well as everything each community believed in. They would henceforth be doomed to practise alone, isolated, trapped between the four walls of their room in total fear and shame, their existential questions remaining suspended between Heaven and Earth, unable to reach God's office. Organising religious or spiritual gatherings had become punishable by fines or imprisonment.

Even if the disconnect that Charlene and Ousmane experienced didn't affect me personally, it made me realise how much my childhood with Alegria had forever imbued my experience of what human life constituted: an expression of life among many others. She had connected me to nature around me as if she was plugging an appliance into an electrical outlet; as if nature, and not my parents had conceived me. Except that I didn't consist of the device, I was only the energy flowing through it via this connection.

I had rediscovered this same original connection between me and a sense of wholeness in Africa. We weren't more important on Earth because we were human, but rather because we were aware of what we were: alive, mortal, and powerless in the face of wholeness. Despite our accumulated knowledge and wisdom, we remained only one element among many others, also living in the whole. Our connection with all the other elements of this whole depends only on us. I guess this is probably also why black people in Africa and the Diaspora feel music, all music, deep within themselves. The vibration of sounds, rhythms, voices, connects us to what is most spiritual in us as human beings. We are a simple and unique manifestation of life among many others in a vast whole, mere instruments in the great orchestral performance of the whole.