A mixture of parents that were a bit too religiously liberal, growing up in a locality that had a Cele almost opposite an Apostolic church, with a Baptist, a Catholic church and a Mosque not up to a five minutes walk away, added to frequent preacher visitors, mostly Jehovah’s witnesses, and uncles and cousins who streamed in and out, always having their own different versions of the concept of God, the cosmos and life itself, all combined to form my system of beliefs.

This was our house in the suburbs of Lagos in my early childhood.
From this kind of childhood, you’d find my self-developed ideas around the concept of the divine are a bit more complex than the ordinary; sometimes I confuse myself even.

I have even been accused of being an atheist in the past.
I remember when we had just moved to Onitsha and in class, the guys were discussing an accident that had occurred the previous evening around the Owerri road axis of Upper Iweka. One of the narrators said the coaster bus somersaulted several times and all the passengers died except one lady who had on a back dress all through.

He said the lady alighted from the wreckage and promptly disappeared.
Hahaha… Such were the tales of those days, don’t mind me.
Anyway, the way my mind used to work then, I thought to myself; what if this “dark angel” was actually an angel sent to wreak that havoc by God himself?

What if God has his own way of depopulating the earth; ways that might not agree with our own human understanding?

And why must we think black clothing is bad anyway?

These were the kind of thoughts that frequently went through my young mind back in those days.

Now the reason I went into this narrative is not so much to show my mind has itself gone throw several changes all these years, but also to show I am more likely to think outside many boxes in any given situation.
It’s the burden that some of us carry. Over analyzing.

When Ebola was upon us, I was among the people who believed it was a bio-weapon released mistakenly or as a test.
With HIV, I have long had an interest in the theory that it was developed in a South African laboratory to deal with the black population, one of the reasons Lesotho is one of the few countries with negative population growth. Maybe not anymore though.

So this COVID-19 virus comes along and my conspiracy theory antenna is up again. I was jolted to the realization that a book I had in my small library, and that I had read about 15 years ago or so, had accurately predicted and even named the disease currently causing the world panic. While Dean Koontz might have predicted this epidemic, I think a book I read just recently is scarier and a bigger pointer to how some minds might be working and how the “gods’ of our planet might one day force the hand of God.

Among the most interesting things I have found, reading Dan Brown’s books is the FACT with which he prefaces his books.

“All artwork, literature, science, and historical references in this book are real”

Dan Brown would then go on to mention organisations and establishments he had used in the book that are real but whose names or acronyms he may have deliberately changed before the work of fiction is now served.
A remarkable style that just pulls you in even if for the tourism the book promises.

In Inferno, Dan Brown weaves a tale of a psycho’s quest to depopulate the world around Dante Alighieri’s poem and Boticheli’s painting inspired by the same poem, Divine Comedy.

The self-acclaimed world saviour was alarmed at the exponential population growth and the grim reality that earth’s resources could not cope much further if we continued.
He, therefore, chose to act himself if the UN wasn’t going to act.

Now, who is to say there are no real psychos who see the accelerating world population and, in their self-righteousness, would want to do something about it?

How do we know these incessant meaningless wars are not ideas of our modern-day Thomas Malthuses?

Who would know if the current most powerful men and women on earth decide to purge the earth, just so their offspring can have a better planet to live on after now?

They have power, money, and science so next is for them to guarantee a better life for their bloodlines.

More importantly, who is to stop them if they decide to?

Human conscience? That’s the first thing that dies when you acquire immense money and power.

If God did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent him… Voltaire, 1777