Audio By Carbonatix
Here's a quote atrributed to Mr. Prince Amoabeng during an interview with Accra-based radio station, Starr FM last month.
Although Founder and CEO of the bank, Prince Kofi Amoabeng says he is a Christian who believed in God, the concept of the afterlife was difficult for him to accept.
He said: “I believe in God, I believe there is a creator; if you don’t like, call it nature but for me as a Christian, it’s God. “I don’t believe in the afterlife, I believe that you have to do what is right and that your heaven and earth is here, I don’t think there is anything anywhere.”
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The great need to reply Mr. Prince Kofi Amoabeng is not personal. A more personal way to address unbelief is the private tool of persistent prayer.
This is a general commentary rooted in a greater deficiency so endemic with my generation – We have been labeled as the cohort that exercises little thinking before choosing – and rightly so.
We are fashionistas - slain by the latest trend just as the mentally deranged often collect castaway clothes while they move along.
The invention of a blender simplified the laborious process of preparing soup. But it unfortunately also simplified the laborious process of painstaking thinking.
So just as we shop at the West Hills Mall only to eventually buy yoghurt, this generation also ‘shops’ the internet for ideas only to buy ones such as Mr. Amoabeng has endorsed..
There will be a blind acceptance simply motivated by perhaps the label – Opinion made by former UT bank CEO. This generation conceivably fails to appreciate the fact that the existence of heaven and hell is not part of any MBA course or training on entrepreneurship.
And so this response is specifically to the batch that tragically struggles to see the difference between being too open-minded and being too empty-headed and sometimes being too open-legged.
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“I don’t believe in the afterlife, I believe that you have to do what is right and that your heaven and earth is here, I don’t think there is anything anywhere.”'-Kofi Amoabeng.

A proud man and a humble man are both modest, G.K Chesterton suggests. The difference is where their modesty is found.
A humble man is modest in his ambitions but ambitious in his convictions; a proud man is modest in his convictions but ambitious in his desires and goals.
So a humble man will say it is difficult to lose a pot belly in three months (modest ambition) but he is convinced it is possible (ambitious convictions) and so he works hard to make it happen.
A proud man says it’s easy to lose that belly in nine days (ambitious aim) so he buys some unconvincing drugs with that quick promise and gulps down the phony cure into many sorrowful complications.
So proud men are lazy men – quick to say things like heaven and hell are not real but lazy-- or at best -- modest in their attempt to find out if it’s true.
This Prince Amoabeng view is an example of a lazy view. It is like a lazy vote for a cause when real action is needed to fight a menace like slavery.
Of course, Amoabeng’s business empire is the work of a humble and hardworking businessman but nonetheless his views of religion are proud, lethargic and slothful.
So Mr. Kofi Amoabeng and Christendom cannot agree on heaven and hell but we can at least agree on the existence of a prison and an asylum –a prison for men who no longer hear the sound of their conscience and an asylum for men who no longer hear the sound of their reason.
For him, we can agree on the existence of a court, the home of human judges but not on heaven, the home of the eternal judge.
What Kofi Amoabeng is saying is that, we can agree that an unproductive staff at UT bank ought to feel the pain of slothful conduct but an unbelieving soul ought not suffer any consequence of unproductive beliefs.
We can agree that dry twigs can be gathered to make a night fire at a boys’ scout camp meeting but dry, dark souls cannot be gathered to make an eternal bomb fire.
So you see what Prince Amoabeng is doing? He is trying to deny an obvious belief in the existence of eternal judgement. He is trying to deny the sun its light. He will soon find out that though we can’t stare at the sun, it is with the sun that we see everything else.
It is the blinding power of the sun that allows us to stare at that gorgeous lady long enough to write a poem about love.

But Amoabeng wants to go through life without relying on the sun. He prefers an electric bulb of his own thoughts to shine his path through life.
Yet it is impossible to push out the sun. The night tried it and failed; for the moon needs the sun to watch over the night. Mr. Prince Amoabeng is pushing himself into a dark cell where there is no light, a dark cell of his mind where in solitary confinement he sets himself up as his own God.
Heaven and Hell is a destination. But because he does not believe in the destination, he also does not believe in the journey or the point of even taking the journey in the first place.
What does that leave him? It leaves him with a belief in himself, a belief which my favourite author and philosopher G.K Chesterton suggested is - the motto of inmates in asylums.
In his own mystical egoism, Mr. Amoabeng believes in the God of himself.
The alternative to a view that accepts God but denies heaven is that he really believes in a God who cannot punish or reward or summon anyone to his court. With all due respect, Mr. Amoabeng believes God must be a cripple or worse, a homeless cripple.
In his speculative logic, an unbelieving man is on a mission to cut God out of the picture and finds he just collapsed the entire universe -- just like a child playfully pulls a small plug at home and suddenly finds the whole house is plunged in darkness. The kitchen fridge stops, the fan stops, the TV goes off, home becomes boring – man is in his own ‘dumsor.’
This tug to remove God’s grip over the mind of man will only succeed in the unintended consequences of removing the head off the man too, the philosopher, Chesterton has pointed out.
Christians will reject Mr. Amoabeng’s claim because he shows he is bad at being a Christian and atheists will reject him because he shows he is bad at being an atheist. And it is for the obvious reason that no Christian accepts God and denies him his heaven and every atheist denies God altogether which Amoabeng says he does not do.
But if Amoabeng is not good at both, at least he is good at being his own god -the only living being to exist. They start virtually every sentence with ‘I think’.
This attack on the existence of heaven and hell is an old grenade in the hands of new suicide bombers. If the new suicide bombers asked the old terrorists what happened after the self-destruction, they would drop the grenade.

This old attack on religion won’t destroy divinity, it will destroy humanity. Indeed it will even destroy our confidence in the alphabets.
Heaven and Hell is a matter of faith but Prince Amoabeng attacks faith. His kind wants us to stick exclusively to reason and materials.
But reason needs faith to be reasonable otherwise why should any alphabet be a correct alphabet. What is so 'b' about 'b'?
Why should the phrase ‘his attitude put me off ’ mean what is means - that he dampened my interest?
What is so off putting about the word put off? Why should put off be actually put off? Why not put in? or put by? Or why can’t put off also mean put by or put through?
Put off is actually a word of faith before it becomes a word of reason. By faith and later by accepted convention, any other use of ‘put off’ apart from the ascribed meaning is wrong.
All the words Prince Amoabeng uttered to describe his unbelief needed faith. Amoabeng needed faith in the alphabets to talk about his unbelief in English sentences.
Prince Amoabeng does not really need evidence of Heaven and Hell. He needs to be eager for an answer. What needs to be addressed is the mood behind his unbelief not the mumblings inside his words.
And quickly, nobody goes to heaven because of what you do here on earth. Even people here on earth hardly and very rarely accept a mad man’s gesture to join him eat his beans stew. It is because a mad man's goodness or good motive has several question marks and justifiable fears.
A mad man needs to be cured of insanity before his goodness can be of any real value to his neighbours.
People go to heaven because they believe in Jesus Christ. Not because they do anything good. Of course, good work will be rewarded in heaven. But before you go, you need Jesus to put in a good word for you.
And that good word is simply – This one surrendered to me his sinful status and accepted me as his Lord and personal savior – so let him come in. It is after this, that a man he comes in that his works are assesed. That is how a thief entered in after hanging on a cross.
In the words of C.S Lewis, Jesus Christ did not come to make bad people good. He came to make dead people live.
And if Mr. Prince Kofi Amoabeng would take a joke, I would say, you would not know the difference between good deeds and dead people if you spend all your time at board meetings, behind spreadsheets and with private secretaries.

PS: G.K Chesterton's book, Orthodoxy provides a detailed argument on the unassailability of a belief in God
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