Christianity is a Problem to Bougainville: Drives People off the Plot

Leonard Fong Roka

Christianity is an impediment to any form of human development, apart from spiritual, in society in this day and age. From the simple exaggerated Bible based teachings, it creates senseless fear of the spiritual world in the mindset of our economically struggling population and island that results in the problem of free riders.

 

I was born and brought up in a hardcore Catholic family. All my life was nothing secular but religion and its ways. Reflecting back, it is obvious I’d lost so many opportunities that would have made me someone with positive contributions in society much earlier. This was if my parents saw the need in bringing me up in a balanced life culture—secular and religious.

All my life was a struggle for the unknown good things in Heaven. My father was an auto-mechanic with the gone Bougainville Copper Limited but sadly, in the manner I see the world today, he never bothered to teach me how to dismantle and re-set the injector pump of 3-L diesel Toyota Hilux. That’s how cruel Christianity was to ill equip me to face the real world.

Translating this into nation building, Christianity is a problem so serious into leading the Bougainville people in the wrong direction. I say this because, if you read the Christianity’s principle book, the Bible, it is a great book of contradictions that needs an educated Bougainvillean to read between the lines; not the poor illiterate of society, in order to gain good things.

Getting the whole population of Bougainville educated is our goal to actually realized our ambition for nationhood.

I accept the fact that development comes into society through a man’s understanding and learning of the basics of economics and politics. These are not spiritual aspects of life and the fundamental bases to drive Bougainville forward.

Christianity, thus have to come into play when all loopholes are sealed and the island’s governing machinery is steaming forward. An educated population is the only group who can navigate their way in a beneficial mannerism between secularism and Christianity.

Christianity’s ritual of conversion when introduced to the illiterate people of society has created fanatics across Bougainville. These converts have, with unprecedented power of spirituality, condemned education, money and everything secular has worthy not for the good of the man and the Earth.

And such a contemporary cultural development trend is a sting to positive progress for it is freely, under the eye of the national laws, getting people off-track from national goals of the Bougainville Government.

In late 1999, a bunch of my school mates at Arawa High School quit school because of the Christianity promoted 2000-pull stop of the world! Every afternoon, after school, I saw them preaching the Bible in the public places in town when Bougainville needed them in the classrooms.

Christianity is having people with its slogan, the ‘END TIMES’, in chaos of irresponsibility towards pursuing a path of personal, family, community and national development through education for Bougainville.