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Consequences, punishments and rewards
It is Robert Ingersoll who wrote, “In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments, there are consequences.” One of the best known of nature’s consequences is the law of the harvest. As we sow so shall we reap. For some reason we as people are more willing to accept this law as it applies to plants and animals than to human nature. We spend time trying to beat the system rather than succeed within it.
Too often we hope for good health without following the lifestyle that can bring it. We pray for prosperity but practise poor money management. We envy great talent but forget the years of training that developed it.
Perhaps we don’t believe that natural laws operate in human affairs. It is easy to become cynical today when we see and read of people breaking laws apparently with impunity, laws which most of mankind have held as natural and needed for civilised society.
But, as Jacques Maritain wrote, “All this proves nothing against natural law any more than a mistake in addition proves anything against arithmetic.”
Natural and divinely enunciated laws do exist, and as Cecil B. DeMille said, “We cannot break the Ten Commandments, we can only break ourselves against them.”
Perhaps nowhere is the law of cause and effect more misunderstood and misapplied than in our pursuit of happiness. So often we forget that happiness is not a cause, it is an effect, the result of selfless service to others.
And the unhappiest people are those who demand that the world give them power and pleasure. They may temporarily satisfy their self-centred needs, but the natural law decrees that they will thus corrode their character and lose the very happiness they seek.
The peacemakers and the pure in heart, however, may be buffeted by the world, but if they endure it well, they will develop godlike characteristics which will bring them love and joy in this life and happiness in the eternities yet to come.
Sometimes the question is asked: Just how effective is the threat of punishment in keeping men from doing things they shouldn’t do? To this, we must frankly answer that often the mere threat of punishment doesn’t seem to be very effective—perhaps because so many men are apparently willing to gamble on the chance of avoiding punishment for their errors.
In contemplating some misdeed, they often weigh the supposed pleasures against the possible penalties, and then they weigh the chances of escaping the penalties and act accordingly. Especially would it seem that punishments which are postponed to a remote hereafter are often not very effective in causing men to give up the error of their ways.
Heaven sometimes seems so far away and what seems far away may hold little fear for the present. But quite apart from the prospect of remote punishment, it would be well to consider the absolute certainty of immediate punishment.
If we do something we shouldn’t do, even if no one else knows it, the gnawing accusation inside is one form of immediate and unavoidable punishment. The accusation of others is only intermittent, but our own inward accusation can be constant. There may be those who we may think have done some misdeed or participated in some malpractice without punishment, but if we think so, it is only because we don’t know what goes on inside them.
There is no misdeed which does not exact its own penalty. There is no kind of malpractice, the consequences of which are reserved wholly for the hereafter. We may gamble on outsmarting the law; we may gamble on the seeming remoteness of heaven and the hereafter; we may gamble on the leniency of men and the mercy of God, but there is nothing more certain in this world than the certainty that every thought and act of our lives has its impact upon us, whether it is known to others or not, and anyone who gambles against this fact has already lost his gamble.
By Samuel Enos Eghan
Email: samueleghan@gmail.com
One of the issues we have been grappling with as a nation is corruption, and it has had such a devastating effect on our national development. I have been convinced that until morality becomes the foundation upon which our governance system is built, we can never go forward as a nation.
Our traditional practices, which have shaped our cultural beliefs, have always espoused values that have kept us along the straight and the narrow and have preserved our societies since ancient times.
These are values that frown on negative habits like stealing, cheating, greediness, selfishness, etc. Our grandparents have told us stories of societies where stealing was regarded as so shameful that offenders, when caught, have on a number of instances committed suicide.
In fact, my mother told me of a story where a man who was living in the same village as her mother (my grandmother), after having been caught stealing a neighbour’s cockerel, out of shame committed suicide on a mango tree. Those were the days that shameful acts were an abomination.
Tegare worship, a traditional spiritual worship during which the spirit possesses the Tegare Priest and begins to reveal secrets, was one of the means by which the society upheld African values in the days of my grandmother and the early childhood days of my mother.
Those were the days when the fear of being killed by Tegare prevented people from engaging in anti-social vices. These days, people sleeping with other people’s wives are not uncommon.
These wrongful behaviour was not countenanced at all by Tegare. One was likely going to lose his life on days that Tegare operates, and so unhealthy habits like coveting your neighbour’s wife was a taboo.
Stealing of other people’s farm produce, for instance, could mean certain death or incapacitation of the whole or part of the body in the full glare of everybody. People realised that there were consequences for wrongdoing, and this went a long way to motivate the society to adhere to right values.
Imagine a President being sworn into office and whoever administers the oath says, “Please say this after me: I, Mr. …., do solemnly swear by God, the spirits of my ancestors and the spirits ruling in Ghana, that should I engage in corrupt acts, may I and my family become crippled, may madness become entrenched in my family, may incurable sicknesses and diseases be my portion and that of my family, both immediate and extended.”
Can you imagine a situation where a few weeks afterwards the President goes to engage in corrupt acts and we hear of his sudden demise or incapacitation and confessing that he engaged in corrupt acts before passing or before the incapacitation—and the effect it will have on his successor? I believe we have to critically examine this option to curb corruption.
My grandmother gave me an eyewitness account of one such encounter where a woman died instantly after the Tegare Priest had revealed a wrong attitude she had displayed during the performance on one of the days scheduled for Tegare spirit manifestation.
According to her story, the Priest, after he had been possessed by the spirit, declared that for what the woman had done, he would not forgive her and that he would kill. Instantly, according to my grandmother, the lady fell down suddenly and she died—just like what happened to Ananias and his wife Sapphira in Acts Chapter 5.
NB: ‘CHANGE KOTOKA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT TO KOFI BAAKO
By Laud Kissi-Mensah
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BY ROBERT EKOW GRIMMOND-THOMPSON
