The believers vouch that the Faith is tremendous and powerful. They claim the Faith can do incredible things like raising the dead, healing the sick, making the blind see and the lame walk, besides being the singular panacea for all the world’s ills. In fact they teach that we were all created for the benefit of the Faith. Holy shit! And we believe it.

This is how the Faith becomes a religion that poses as something absolutely essential for humans to survive and for the earth to go around the sun. It is God’s grace that propels the mighty wheel of Time, and without Him, we are nothing but dust from which we are made. Or, at least this is what they exhorted and insisted of the believers who followed them like a flock of meek sheep. Come to the church, and they all rushed to the church. Kneel down, and they all knelt down. Give us your money, and the swelling congregation dug into their pockets.

Then the pandemic came like a blast from the past. And showed us humans that the Faith is powerless, that it is merely blind belief, a big-sounding short name for superstition, and God is merely a character named ‘Lord God’ or some such recorded in multiple languages in a book. And they say the pandemic is God’s punishment.

The streets are now empty and so are the churches and their pews. As if God had abandoned all his agents and their sheep at the mercy of the human governments, the gross material engines of the foul earth! They will tell you, the fabulous heaven is now being blocked by the arms (or the rear) of Satan who has extended his dirty tentacles into the hearts of the philistines who run the earth. But, I will tell you, the Faith is a big hoax – a money spinner and the greatest fraud that has ever been committed on earth.

Now Covid-19 is teaching people the lesson that if they are mature adult humans, they need something more solid than Faith to have real solace, something more tangible to believe in and enable you to stand on firm ground. You need to have more than Faith to grow and advance spiritually, and then you need to reason with what you confront and then experience it personally and realise the truth. This truth is actually what we call reality that holds consistently true in our waking hours.

But dreams like Faith cannot be reality; the benefit is minimal, perhaps only as stories generally told to put kids to sleep or to make them obey. So you have no excuse for not growing up. As starters, come out of your reverie and inculcate a commitment to this life and your immediate surroundings and compassion for others who inhabit this planet. Now it is time to recognise stark reality.

Where fear dwells, Faith exists. Faith vanishes when fear vanishes. The Faith coexists with fear and cannot survive without fear. It is almost as if they are one single coin with two faces. People think they need Faith to assuage their fear, which is why the practitioners of Faith teach and generate an imaginary fear, as if their God could ever stop disease, age and death, the legacy of all who are born under the sun. This Faith is fully made of dissipating smoke. Its existence is ephemeral and imaginary.

The Covid-19 lockdown has shown that the world will go on without the vicarious presence of God in the clergy or in the church and the people can actually live better without them. In fact, the earth and its organisms are showing signs of exuberance if the humans would depart partially or fully. In response, the agents of the Faith can only generate fear, so that you go back to their caves to bow down. They will tell you how merciful their god is, he forgives you for all the goddamn sins that you have managed to commit after you began to walk on two legs. But you should know better that you can go on without them very easily and in a better way. I should know, because I have done it. But you should realise that the clergy who run the engines of Faith cannot go on without you!

The fear they sow is death, as if death is something they alone know all about. Death, like birth, only marks a transition of your everlasting existence. But the priests will tell you the death was made by their God to punish you and only they can save! The real fact is you only die because you are born.

On the other hand, you are the only one who makes it possible for them to go on with the holy shit! And what important business do they have there anyway, other than butchering and consuming flesh and blood, and when you are not self-flagellating and calling yourself a bloody sinner a hundred times?

Nothing good has ever come out of the Faith, but lots of platitudes that sound lovely and soothing for frayed nerves. But you may as well have a spliff or a peg of whisky. And that is the gist of it all, despite all the incense burning, lighting the candles and ringing of bells. You can do all that by yourself, in your home if you like, no big deal! But when the crisis arrives, the Faith sways helplessly in the wind and makes meaningless noises.

The Faith healers and practitioners and all those who howl for a living are all waiting now for doctors and scientists to come up with some medicine for Covid-19, so that they can be back in business. The monetary collections have gone dry for these fishermen of souls who make their buck from individual sorrow and suffering after casting their poisonous nets in the ocean of humanity. They are begging over telephones and sending WhatsApp messages not to forget them and to keep the Sunday donations ready for that fine day somewhere in the future, when the church will reopen once again. Perhaps, Covid-19 is the harbinger of the Second Coming, who knows?

What has become as obvious as daylight is alcohol can beat the Faith face down any day in all classes and categories. The pandemic has shown everywhere on the globe that in the order of essential items for the species, alcohol comes a close second after food, perhaps edging out sex to the third place. For humans and their collective engines such as their governments do not work without alcohol. But the Faith is subordinated to the very last spot in the lockdown relaxations that are occurring everywhere on earth. It actually shouldn’t even be there, had the species made a rational qualification when it came to important things in life and existence.

The only good thing about the Faith is anybody can make precise predictions about it. I can make one, for example. On March 18, 2020, a shaken Pope Francis asked God publicly (carried in most liberal newspapers all around the world) to stop the pandemic. The pandemic began to rage. Precisely two months later the Pope joined Muslim leaders in calling for a “day of prayer, fasting and charity to implore God to help humanity overcome the coronavirus pandemic”.

My prediction is: when an effective remedy is found by atheist scientists and doctors, the same Pope would announce, “God has been magnificent and merciful as always and his Grace has been bestowed on mankind by allowing our scientists to find a suitable remedy for coronavirus.” You need not be a god or prophet to predict this! I’d rather have the coronavirus prevailing on earth than the Kingdom of God!