By Belayneh Abate
Dear Religion and Culture Condemning Intellectuals,
It is regrettable to watch and listen intellectuals like you establishing CAUSE and EFFECT relationship between our religions, culture, and the destruction of our country without doing or showing single well-designed research on this topic.
You brag that you have earned Doctor of Philosophy Degrees (PHDs) and have acquired ample experiences working in academia, international institutions, governmental and non-governmental organizations. If you have earned your PHDs through an academic effort, you know that establishing cause and effect relationship requires conducting well-designed researches, and the findings of the researches must be replicated in further studies.
In scientific inquiry, it is a common knowledge that establishing CAUSE-and-EFFECT relationship requires at least establishing strength of association, temporality, plausibility, ruling out other explanations, consistency with exiting knowledge and replication of the claimed findings. Furthermore, establishing causality requires identifying the claimed etiology as necessary and sufficient, necessary but not sufficient, sufficient but not necessary or neither sufficient nor necessary cause.
Unless you deliver these requirements of establishing cause and effect relationship, the null hypothesis shall remain correct and please stop blackmailing our religions and cultures, especially when you know little about the doctrines and canons of these monolithic religions and accompanying cultures and traditions our forefathers and mothers started to practice before majority of the world countries. The null hypothesis reads our well-established religions and well-crafted cultures played fundamental roles in advancing humanity, wisdom, morality and ethics, and establishing a civilized, prosperous and strong nation in Ethiopia before most of the countries known today were drawn on the maps of the world.
Geological, archeological, anthropological and historical facts piled in the world libraries demonstrate that Ethiopia has been one of the strongest free nations in the world while our forefathers were practicing these monolithic religions more stringently for the last five thousand years. Well-equipped with their religions and cultures, our forefathers defeated many powerful invaders and maintained their sovereignty and religious and cultural identity. Remember also Ethiopia was the breadbasket of Africa for centuries by the time the religiously and culturally trained citizens were the farmers, teachers, economists and planners.
The fact of the matter is the destruction of our country started 50 years ago when brain washed intellectuals who ran away from their religions and cultures started to inundate this ancient nation. Most of the who now consider themselves as intellectuals were funded by the Ethiopian people and sent to the West and the East to learn science and technologies, but they came back stuffing their skulls with borrowed ideologies which are incompatible with our social frameworks. The intellectuals with these borrowed ideologies became too radical and they wanted to change everything including our religions and cultures, which have been the foundations of this historical nation. Any establishment falls when its foundation is demolished.
The intellectuals who returned with these types of wicked borrowed ideologies forgot that most of the effective leaders, administrators and military commanders were religiously and culturally trained citizens when Ethiopia had good standing in the world stages. You can see now through the pupils of your eyes the immortal legacies these leaders and commanders have left from Aksum to Harar and from Lalibela to Gondar and Waldiba, and from Mertule Mariam to Washera and the islands of lake Tana. Can you name a single established historical legacy since you the religion and culture butchering intellectuals appear on the soil of Ethiopia?
You have to remember also the proverb “let an educated person kill me (የተማረ ሰው ይግደለኝ)“ was bestowed to these religiously and culturally trained wise men and women, not to the “modern” intellectuals like you who cannot even express your opinions in your own languages and scripts. In fact, the Ethiopian people have given up on modern intellectuals because wisdom, virtue, ethics and moral have been disappearing with a speed of summer fog since “modern” intellectuals like you replaced the religiously and culturally trained professors, administrators, leaders and commanders.
Like the current Ethiopia, Westen Europe was in turmoil as modern education boomed in the 18th century. During this period, Rousseau wrote in his famous essay: “Since learned men had appeared, honest men were nowhere to be found”. The legendary writer continued “a learned man is a depraved animal; education does not make a man good; it only makes him clever, usually for mischief.” The proof of this claim is everywhere, more abundant in Ethiopia and the rest of Africa in this 21st century.
Any person who wipes out his identity from his brain and replaces it with borrowed baloney is like a tree detached from its roots or a cow-chip floating on the surface of a sea (የባህር ላይ ኩበት) as the Amharic proverb goes. Obviously, a tree without root falls, and the cow-chip on the surface of see moves according to the waves, not according to its will.
To avoid the fate of the uprooted trees and the floating cow-chip, please stick to your roots and uphold the merit of your Doctor of Philosophy degrees. As you may know philosophy is love of wisdom and PHD is a certificate for loving wisdom. Please show us your strong love for wisdom before you insert your fidgeting fingers into our religions and cultures which have been the sources of unparalleled wisdom, virtue, moral and ethics for about 70 centuries. Thank you.
The writer can be reached at abatebelai@yahoo.com
It can also be said that Bolsheviks dominated Ethiopian politics for the past 50 years. The Bolsheviks imitated the Russian revolution of the 1917. They alienated the Ethiopian youth from their culture and tradition and indoctrinated them with their own ideology. They have no policy or leadership experience. They believed in seizing state power through aggressive propaganda campaign to discredit a government and mobilize the great masses to topple it. Once they seize power, they would organize the state and establish a communist system. Over the years, this culture of Bolshevism resulted in the flourishing propaganda enterprises that continue to divide and fragment the fabrics of Ethiopian society. In short, what the author called PHDs are in fact educated Bolsheviks who still do nothing more than employing sophisticated narratives to discredit their opponents (oh , yes, they really fight each other), including any political group that does not agree with them.