Tithing Is the Neck of All Miracle-Preaching Pastors—Remove it and Miracle-Preaching Ends
Tithe: a tenth part of someone’s produce or income they give or pay as a tax to the church.
Most Nigerians make less than ₦3,000 per day, run household deficits, are underfed, and have no access to clean water, power supply, education, or decent infrastructure.
Conclusion: Most Nigerians live in poverty.
Audits and accounting must be compulsory for every institution that collects taxes. You can use tithe and tax interchangeably because their intended purposes are similar. If a church can operate a tax collection system, it should face the same scrutiny that corporations and governments undergo. No one should receive taxes (tithes) without disclosing their intended use. Most importantly, no individual or non-governmental organisation, whether religious or the most positively impacting charity, should be able to collect taxes (tithes). Churches, especially the ones in Nigeria, operate like licensed, fraudulent organisations.
For decades, a man, supposedly benevolent, kind, and good, has been taking from poor people 10% of their earnings. He has a net worth of over ₦100 billion. Of Nigeria’s 232 million people, less than 5 million have ₦10 million in their bank account. Pastor Adeboye is unemployed, having never truly worked after a brief stint as a math professor; he has contributed nothing to Nigeria. Despite his lack of employment, Pastor Adeboye has disrupted, misled, and squandered the future and fortune of millions of Nigerians throughout his career as a miracle preaching pastor, effectively making him a fraudster.
Pastor Adeboye is worth over ₦100 billion, all given to him by his majority poor flock.
Ten per cent of millions of Nigerians have ended up tax-free in the bank accounts of Pastor Adeboye’s church foundation. Did he transfer them to God or use them here on earth to facilitate his life and family? Obviously, the latter is true. Then what kind of God would request this of poor people who are struggling to feed themselves and their families?
God has got to be heartless or fictional. If there were an omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient God, it would not put millions of poor Nigerians through such agony. In the sixty-four years that indigenous Nigerians have ruled Nigeria, poverty, hardship, hunger, diseases, and endless damaging crises have befallen the country. With all the prayers, not a single thing has changed in Nigeria—thus, God has got to be imaginary or fictional.
“Insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.” Albert Einstein. Nigerians have been delusional forever. You have tried praying and giving 10% to your miracle-preaching fraudster pastors, but nothing has improved or changed in your life. Isn’t it time to try something else? Do you think hope without aspiration is a hangar to stand on? Religion has done more harm to Nigerians than APC and PDP combined. If Nigerians were as involved in polity and governance as they are in religion, politicians such as Tinubu and others would not have exploited us for so long.
We are 99% religious and 100% dishonest, criminal-minded, treacherous, and one of the least transparent societies the world has ever seen. Don’t you see the irony? Religion has not improved the lives of Nigerians by an iota. It has created divisions between Muslims and Christians, as well as between Christians. Christian denominations are growing throughout the country faster than we produce scientists, physicians, inventors, factories, educational institutions, and IT specialists combined several times over.
Religion is a man-made mediaeval ignorance that was used to explain the complexities at the time. It has run its course. We have and know better today. Most things have been explained, and religious propaganda has been debunked, including most miracles, if not all. Every time we have succeeded, it has been through science—human endeavour. Every time we preach religion and God on a massive scale, we do so with tools invented through science and other human abilities, devoid of religion and God. We are the God we look forward to meeting in an isolated heaven that defies the laws of gravity and the reality that underpins our existence.
God is imaginary; religion is a man-made response to the complexity of the universe. Christianity and Islam underpin that delusion.
By Ikechukwu ORJI
