The pervasive idea of a personal God who intervenes to make life better for those he chooses is not one that is going away anytime soon, despite everything about life showing it to be a random soulless force that crushes who it will without fear or favour.
But it helps people to sleep at night, so the various iterations of the god hypothesis would stay with us till the time we get rid of our fear of the unknown, which would be never.
A tribe in Malawi, the Mang’anja tribe in Chikwawa village, were reportedly attacked by a swarm of bees that stung a significant number of them, during a ceremony to petition their tribal god for rain.
Malawi’s Nyasa Times reports that the tribe has been facing a prolonged drought, leading to some elders surmising that offering sacrifices to mbona, an ancient rainmaker, would work in getting rain to fall, as it used to work in the past.
However, when about 200 people gathered at the shrine to commence the sacrifice, a swarm of bees descended on them and started stinging them, leading to seven of them being hospitalised.
“We wanted to ask favours from mbona to give us rain, lest we perish. As we were giving the sacrifice, a swarm of bees came and bit most of the people who were there, scattering all of us in different directions for cover,” the village headman told the Times.
Other village elders blamed government’s failure to apply irrigation technologies for leading to the long term drought, and the encroachment of foreign religions like Christianity and Islam for eroding the power of the rain god.
Maybe he was testig their resolve, and they failed miserably.