Atheistic understanding of the book of Revelation in the Bible.

In 1996, I was still a street child wandering on the streets of Mityana Township like a stray dog. I had no one who loved me, life was very rough and no hope of ever making it in life. I ate from dustbins and nothing I could do by then to jump out of that horrible life.

As time went on, I found my way into the hands of someone one I have lost contact now for almost 20 years. He was called Kigozi.  He was working as a turn-boy on a lorries of Mityana businessmen. He was a very kind guy in his 20s who just started his life after years of struggling with life himself. He embraced me with his own arms and took me in his house that he had just rented on the out-skirts of Mityana just like a week earlier. He didn’t have a mattress, he had just a mat and a small grey blanket like that one, that your mum used to cover you when you were just five years. He had a basin for bathing and a 20 litre jerrycan for drawing water from a distance of almost 10 kilometres from that well which was based in the deep valley of Kigoogwa. There was also food and a charcoal stove.

The neighbourhood loved him because every time he went for safaris, he could come back with bunches of matooke, sweet potatoes and he sold this food for a cheaper price compared to the one in the market and this earned him respect within the community.

My first day in Kigozi’s house was warm. It felt livable to bath with a smooth, nice-smelling soap in clean water. I slept soundly and it’s still memorable as if it happened yesterday. In the morning as he was about to leave for work, he woke me up and introduced me to the neighbourhood as his brother. Kigozi was renting a mizigo (single rooms very common in slums of cities in developing centres and sometimes they could accommodate up to 20 or more families). Thus Kigozi was renting on a home that had a string of families that accommodated more than 40 families, all of them from various background. Some were educated and others were not, some came from good families and others not, some had wives and children and others didn’t.

There was electricity too, and this was my first time to sleep in a room with electricity. Kigozi had just inserted a 100-watt bulb and it used to consume much power. I do not know why I did this, but I could sometimes leave that bulb on all day long and it took just few days of doing it when our neighbors noticed and warned me about it, but I unintentionally did it over and over, something that put us on loggerheads within the community. Up to now, I do not know why I always forgot to switch off that bulb, but it forced me to face the music on a daily basis.

After a week at Kigozi’s home, he bought a huge six by six ft mattress. Royal foam brand. I couldn’t imagine how big it was. For the first time, I slept on a mattress. It was warm and soft.  In the morning, it felt like I did sleep in heaven, and I started envisioning a brighter future.

Everything was improving so rapidly. I started earning money by collecting water for the neighbourhood who knew me as Kigozi’s brother. I sold each 20 litre jerrycan of water at 150 UGX and I could collect 30 jerricans a day. Indeed life was sweatie and nothing could stop me from hitting the greater dreams that I had started envisioning.

I came to know many businessmen and women through Kigozi. He introduced me as a brother to almost to everybody he knew would matter to us one day or another. They loved him and they extended that warmth to me too.

Among the many people I met, there was a 60+ year old lady called Ms Mangarita Sserunkuma. She was beautiful and warm and indeed, she lived a happy life.  She was educated and had a good life from childhood until the time I met her. From my observations, it was like she lived all her dreams, She conceived 8 children who all died of AIDS/HIV earlier and this was the only thing that brought sorrow in her life. She was so kind and loving. Her late children left a number of offspring that inspired her to start what we now know as Mityana Orphanage Centre on Namukozi Road, a few metres from Mityana Cathedral.

One of her sons left a stationery shop in the Township and a home in Butega. Mangarita took possession of the shop to be able to support the offspring of her departed son. I befriended her and she welcomed me with open arms. Soon she started giving me casual jobs and employing me as a messenger between her stationery shop and orphanage centre. I became part of her workforce although I wasn’t a salaried employ. Each day, my friendship with her grew and grew strong, in that she introduced me to the house in Butega left by her son. I moved into that house to provide security and also take charge of the gardens. After my daily work in Butega, I could walk that 15 kilometres from Butega to the township of Mityana where I usually ate lunch with Mangarita. With time, after years of working in Mityana and have not earned any of the dreams I had, I chose to swift to Kampala, the capital city of Uganda. I had worked harder in Mityana but life is just that, nothing was really being added on my life apart from living from hand to mouth.

After almost ten years in Kampala, I learnt that Mangarita died in 2010. I felt sad for not having attended her funeral. But that’s life. On 1st May 2012, as I slept, Mangarita came to my vision, I hate calling it a dream but I was half asleep I think. I started talking to her. She was lively as she used to be. We talked about so much more and ended up talking about her son’s property in Butega. In the vision, she was telling me how she has the land title and that she will be happy to sell the property to me. She was warm while talking to me, it was so close to being real. I jumped out of sleep and started asking myself how could this be? Why am I envisioning her in my sleep? What must have initiated this after years of not being close to that property? Why should I even think about this property yet cannot even buy it?

After so many questions, I started searching for answers why, of all people, I envisioned Mangarita. The real answer is that am struggling with accommodation now that my brains downplayed all the days I used to enjoy free housing and this became the source of that vision. My brains thought of good life in free housing.

Does this point us to what could have been with John who is being claimed to have written the book of Revelation? John must have been struggling with life and wanted to escape the challenges. And since he was promised the good things in heaven, every time of the difficulties in life, he envision free good life instead of focusing on solving the real challenges through logical thinking and hard work.

These kinds of visions are very common with religious folks who want free ride in life and fear to face reality. When they go to bed, they end up putting the challenges of the day and focus on imaginations that they reveal to their friends as visions and how their god was talking to them revealing so much more to them than what their reasoning capacity can handle.  Instead of waiting for the promise of Heaven, religious people strive to cheat and enslave others so that they can get rich and enjoy this promised Heaven on earth.  In other words: unregulated capitalism vs socialism.

The fact that Mangarita (who used to accommodate me for free) came in my minds after years of being with no connection proves how tired am getting with struggle and now I just want anything to happen out of nothing--call them (miracles). When we look closely at people with these religious visions, we would be surprised to know how deeply they are struggling, with their lives full of wishful thinking that cannot solve any problem in reality.

I saw Mangarita standing up to go and bring the title of the property to me, and when I woke up, she wasn’t there. I immediately started exploring all my brain corners, why have I visioned her? I have lost so many of my great friends to early death, but why are they not coming in my visions as I sleep? The answer is, they were poor like me by the time they died, so no way they could have influenced my life.  That’s why my brains cannot flashback to them during the tough times.