The hullabaloo attending Rev. Dr. Agradaa’s latest gimmick is an uproar in futility. Because we are a people easily deceived to give up our resources for free. Every Sunday or Friday or Saturday, we intentionally gather at a place to be conned and robbed. After all, all the churches and all these religious organizations are purveying fake news and collecting huge sums of money from the people, offering nothing but empty promises of salvation after death. The fundamental truth is that there is no God. There are no spirits, no ghosts, no witches, and no supernatural power anywhere from the beginning of the world till date. There has never been any instance of a single miracle on earth except via magical tricks. All the accusations made of witchcraft are false and intended to trick you out of your money. The stories told of the causes of your misfortune are all fake. The directions given to you to expel evil from your life are all false. It follows also that all those personages that preceded our time and claimed to have performed miracles and wonders are all liars. Those who were martyred for the cause of God died in vain. Those who sacrificed animals and human beings by fire acted in vain. And all those that spent money and time in the worship of God received no dividends and were indeed engaged in acts of waste and folly and futility. There is no God. So the very foundation of every religion is per se fake and has nothing to offer anybody. Any worship of God at any time is an exercise in irrationality, unsupported by any proper reasoning or logic. Nobody on earth or in the skies and in the seas has any supernatural power to perform anything beyond the usual scientific tricks, and none of these so-called ministers of God can assert any force of the spirit or perform any miracles or wonders without recourse to magical tricks. Nobody possesses any spiritual power which another does not possess. But there is something called chicanery or magic with which another can easily cheat you and rob you. Those tricks are dime a dozen on earth, and there are some that are so complex that nobody can explain them except the confidence tricksters themselves. The only thing which could have made religion attractive or useful is the moral code. But this ethical aspect of the religious establishment has never existed or has become a footnote and an appendix since the early days of the ministry of Christ. The edict of Christ to love our neighbors and to take care of their needs or to help the widows and the orphans has all long been obliterated from the core of religion and has long been substituted with the cold-blooded and wicked and depraved and exploitative behavior by the religious leadership. For three hundred years of its existence after the death of Christ, the church was the butt of martyrdom, and thousands were exposed to wild beasts to be devoured, or even crucified like Christ. After three hundred years of suffering persecution, and under the auspices of Constantine, around 250 BC, the church got an upper hand and this time burned and tortured those who they characterized as heretics. The church developed a contretemps of torture and established an inquisition to hunt and hound its detractors. It imposed a thousand years of dark ages on human civilization and led the world in superstition and spurious persecution. The church doesn’t have any history of having done anything right at any time: The schools and hospitals and so-called charity organizations it established were all akin to the mafia establishments set up to advance its own interest and to further its deceptions. It has never acted in anybody’s interest except its own, and at the very center of its methods is still the depraved heart with which it continues to fleece its members. As we speak, the religious establishments are hoarding over twenty percent of the national treasury in its vaults, and have abandoned the masses to live in perpetual deprivation and extreme poverty. As some religious leaders have made abundantly clear to their members, the church’s funds are not to be used to help its members. One famous church leader even said that the tithes paid by members will continue to be utilized the way the leadership deems fit and that those who disagree with the leadership could leave the church: “You did not come here to seek profit from the Christ. You have already inherited all the gains you could get by his blood,” he intoned to much applause by the sheepish congregation. As Pastor Otabil resentfully declared, “Foolish born again Christians……….” The church has no discernible function within society. Indeed, no religious establishment does except to create an avenue for the exploitation of the masses by those who are too lazy to work any honest job. The church promises prosperity and well-being to its followers if they pay tithes and offerings, only to leave them in their poverty to blame the government for their hardship. Within the church itself, Olive oil and even water and some fruits are sold for a fortune with the fake promises that these things will turn the members’ fortunes around. It appears to me that the more the congregation is deceived, the more they troop to church to be deceived. So exactly what is the distinction between what Agradaa is doing and what these pastors and ministers have been doing since the beginning of time? Agradaa tells patent lies in a rather crude form that she will double the money for those who come to give her their money. This has been her modus operandi from the very beginning, and so those who go to her should know what she does. In a not-too-subtle way, the ministers of God are also daily calling on their members to pay up in order to reap some reward somewhere in heaven. People are also aware that these promises are not fulfilled, and that by the wealth of these religious leaders, they are supporting a fancy lifestyle right here on earth while they are told to wait their turn for the enjoyment of these same fancy lifestyles after their deaths. So both Agradaa and the ministers of god are in the same boat, purveying charlatanic advertisement because all of these people know very well that none of those promises they make in church and the benefits they purvey will accrue anywhere for anybody except themselves. They are patently and shamelessly ripping off the masses, all by false pretenses and claiming that they have been anointed by God to receive money on his behalf. So why should anybody arrest Agradaa for false pretenses when false pretenses is the only method in vogue by these ministers of God to fleece the masses of our people? Unless we are so manifestly clueless, we should indeed smell the pepper. We live in a country that is entombed by the religious charade and will certainly be destroyed on account thereof. Instead of building factories and inventing things, we are fixated on building huge temples for a non-existent God in which human parasites and saprophytes manipulate the minds of our people and openly rip them off without any repercussions. We have created a patently parasitic class of prophets and pastors whose stock in trade is to prey on the people, and we have given them tax incentives and other privileges to become efficient in their work of exploitation. It is not as if we will not figure them out if we were to apply a modicum of commonsense…But no, we must cease thinking and surrender ourselves to mass manipulation without any compunction. The extent of our devotion to God has been to impose humiliation and self-abnegation on ourselves as our article of faith in God. Self-immolation, as promoted by medieval Catholicism, has become our stock in trade, and our most enlightened people are caught up in crass superstition and vain metaphysics such that they must be trashed and deceived in order to feel holy and to achieve salvation. These people believe in spewing trash in their worship, engaging in juju practice, ritual murder for money, beating older people accused of witchcraft, and behaving in ignorant ways that expose the futility of their formal education and life’s experience: The more educated the typical Ghanaian, the more stupid s/he tends to behave, sitting before these illiterate ministers to seek so-called spiritual directions as to how to run their lives. And so what is exactly unique about what Agradaa has done to deserve any punishment? She is just following the paths charted by the pioneers of religion. She has cheated and continues to cheat people out of their money since the inception of her shrine and Jesus' ministry. And so is every one of these goons lying daily under the aegis of a God to fleece the masses. If Agradaa goes down, all of them should go down, or else we are merely engaged in a Sisyphean task of no consequence.