Image from Jordan Anthony.
The picture above is not that of Jesus Christ. It was a painting done less than 400 years ago, in 1632, by an artist named Diego Velázquez. It is an oil on canvas painting measuring 249 cm by 170 cm, currently housed in a Spanish Museum, Museo del Prado, Madrid.
If you were to present the above image to random people, most would identify the man in the drawing as Jesus Christ. The image is so widely accepted among Christians that very few people would question its source. Churches across the world have it hanging on their walls, and people pray facing it, believing it to be a depiction of Jesus Christ.
Similarly, if you were to search for images of Jesus Christ on the internet, you would get multiple of them captioned Jesus Christ. The pictures below are not of Jesus Christ. Rather, they are mere paintings or photographs of movie actors. Why have they been used in church documents, shrine walls, altars, homes, priests’ robes, gospel songs, and so on?
The answer is simple: people have been misled. Who misled them? It depends; religion is contagious. As much as Africans could blame the colonialists, the blame mostly lies with themselves. They chose to believe it even when the lies were obvious. Worse still, they indoctrinated their children without a second thought.
Today, we have priests who understand that they are fooling people. Unfortunately, many others are genuine, and they do not know they are misleading people. All they hope for is that they are right and, indeed, there is a heaven, but when their moment of reckoning comes, and they agree that they have been wrong all the time, it would be the true definition of “being freed from the chains.”
The main problem is that people need something to believe in, and when you take away what they have believed in for so long, you could leave them worse off if you do not give an alternative. Luckily, we have genuine forms of education that masses can believe in and explore happily not to lose the meaning of their lives.
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