Author: nivtric

Illustration for the first edition of Utopia

Welcome to Utopia

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Utopian dreams

A few centuries ago, nearly everyone lived in abject poverty. Most people had barely enough to survive. In the Middle Ages, 30% of the children died, often of malnutrition or diseases. And so, Thomas Hobbes wrote in 1651 that man’s life was poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It has been that way since time immemorial. Around 1800, Thomas Malthus concluded that humans live in a permanent state of misery. Once we have more food and resources, more children will survive, so that we will always be on the brink of starvation. At the time, only one billion humans were roaming the Earth, searching for a meal.

Two centuries later, a miracle had occurred, and it was unexpected if you had lived in 1800 or before. Today, more than eight billion people live on this planet, and less than one billion live on the brink of starvation. The life expectancy in the poorest countries exceeds that of the Netherlands in 1750, the wealthiest nation before the Industrial Revolution. At first glance, it looks like Paradise. Available food and resources have increased faster than the population. Capitalism and fossil fuels enabled this growth. We now use more resources than the planet can sustainably provide, so an apocalypse is in the air.

In 1516, Thomas More wrote a novel about a fictional island, Utopia. Life in Utopia was good. The Utopians had a six-hour workday and had enough because everyone took only what they needed. Utopia means ‘nowhere,’ but the name resembles eutopia, which means ‘a good place.’ More may have intended the pun. There is more than enough for all of us. So, why can’t we all work a few hours per day, live peaceful lives and have enough? A well-functioning society requires a set of values and a culture to support it.

Utopian dreams aren’t new. According to the Bible, humankind once lived in the Garden of Eden, where people lived simple lives and were happy with what nature provided. Jesus said, ‘Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns. God feeds them.’ There have since then been utopian dreams of peace and sharing. Most utopian dreamers think of a better world while leaving the hard work to others. In reality, utopian societies are not perfect and are oppressive to those who don’t fit in. Usually, their ideologues define the ideal human as hard-working and public-spirited.

Third ways

There have been several attempts to arrive at a synthesis of capitalism and socialism, often called a third way. The challenge of socialism, the antithesis of capitalism, fuelled a lively debate about economic systems in the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. Silvio Gesell, who wrote Barataria, was one of the central figures in this debate, as was Henry George in the United States. Since the Cold War, that debate has narrowed down to a struggle between communism and capitalism, or between individual freedom and enforced collectivism. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the feeling in the West is that capitalism is superior and that there is no alternative.

The Soviets have tried to bring communism into practice. They replaced markets with state planning and repression. Due to the forced collectivisation of farms, millions died of starvation. Millions more ended up in prison labour camps. The end of communism led many people to believe that a better future lay ahead. But many of the economic problems we face today stem from faith in capitalism and the idea that governments can manage its drawbacks. And so, the question remains: is a third way possible? The Chinese have kept innovating and remained determined to make socialism work. It did so by making the Chinese economy more capitalist. However, the state still runs much of it.

The Russians lost faith in the fairy tale of socialism as central planning produced poor outcomes. Still, the Chinese economy has baffled the proponents of the capitalist myth. The Chinese allow the profit motive to exist as long as businesses conform to the Chinese Communist Party’s objectives. State ownership of enterprises further ensures that. The Chinese have demonstrated that you can submit the profit motive to a society’s goals and place large corporations in sovereign wealth funds. But competition still determines the outcome. We are in a rat race that will probably not end well.

The Chinese political economy is more advanced than Western models in that it subordinates the economy to political goals while promoting prosperity for China’s population. In many fields, China has surpassed the West. So if we were to agree on humanity’s goals, political control works better than pure capitalism. Chinese culture contributed to China’s development. Several Asian nations with similar cultures have also successfully modernised their economies. Modernisation is also a cultural shift from reliance on families and communities to markets and states.

The failures of capitalism and socialism come from the fact that both are models of reality, thus simplifications, and that the oversights in both models come with disastrous consequences. We are religious animals who want to believe in fairy tales like capitalism and socialism. The proponents of these systems blame their failures on execution rather than on the systems themselves. To clarify the discussion and address confusion about terminology, it may be helpful to provide definitions of economic systems. Their differences centre around ownership of resources, capital, and labour.


resourcescapitallabour
communismstatestatestate
socialismstatepublicprivate
third way / mixedvariesvariesprivate
capitalismvariesprivateprivate

Under communism, the state owns all there is, including your labour, so you can’t even decide on the job you take. Under socialism, you can choose your occupation, but capital and natural resources are public, thus owned by workers or the state. In mixed economies, ownership of natural resources and capital varies. You may own the ground, but if there is oil underneath, the oil may belong to the state. There may be state-operated corporations, such as railways, alongside private corporations. Under capitalism, everything is private. There may be public services, but there are no public corporations. Few countries give their resources away for free. Governments want a piece of the action.

One crucial oversight is culture. There were substantial differences in living standards in the Soviet Bloc. Czechoslovakia did relatively well. Yugoslavia suffered from high unemployment, but the Slovenian unemployment rate never exceeded 5%, while Macedonia and Kosovo had rates of over 20%. These were extreme differences within a single country and under the same system. Likewise, capitalism also promoted varying results. Latin America remained poor despite having mostly right-wing regimes. Cultures change, and an advantage can turn into a disadvantage. Success breeds complacency, and to stay competitive, you have to regularly ‘reinvent’ yourself.

China has developed its economic model, a state-run socialist market economy, which now outcompetes the West. Its success depends on the Chinese people’s hard work, discipline, and ingenuity, as well as China’s long-standing tradition of modern bureaucratic government and Confucian ethics, which enable the government to work in the public interest and the people to respect authority. Chinese culture thus helped them to achieve this. China’s economic success resembles that of neighbouring countries with similar cultures, such as Japan and South Korea. The Japanese and South Korean economic successes also involved state planning and the state organising industries.

Free economy

There are other ways of organising the economy besides communism and socialism. These are community economics and religious economics, so economies founded on a moral system. Economic thinking centres around the division of tasks between the market and the state. There is little room for moral systems and communities. Religion can make people pursue other goals in life than maximising economic utility, while communities can produce most of the essentials, as they did in the past. Barataria had an economy with private enterprise and home ownership, but without capitalists, bankers, or merchants. The Baratarians were a community sharing a religion.

Silvio Gesell believed in economic self-interest as a natural and healthy motive for satisfying our needs through productive activity. He aimed for free and fair competition with equal opportunities for all. He proposed the end of legal and inherited privileges, so the most talented and productive, rather than the most privileged, would have the highest incomes without distortion by interest and rent charges. Henry George believed that society gives land its value through public services. George thought that a land tax would benefit the overall economy and could replace other taxes.

After Argentina experienced an economic depression in the 1890s, Gesell found that returns sometimes failed to meet investors’ minimum requirements. It caused investors to put their cash in their pockets, disrupting money flows. It regularly caused economic hardship and unemployment. Gesell proposed a holding fee on currency to keep the money in circulation, as low returns are more attractive than paying the surcharge, which amounts to a negative interest rate. Gesell’s economic system was well known in Germany as the free economy. In Wörgl, the holding fee on money proved a successful recipe to revive the economy during an economic depression.

European Union

European economies are mixtures of capitalism and socialism. Many Brits found the union too socialist and bureaucratic, so they left. The European Union tries to regulate capitalism a bit too much to the taste of many Britons. Overall, Western Europeans live a relatively good life. Well-being is hard to measure, but European societies are among the world’s most agreeable, at least if you believe the rankings. And if every country kills innovation with legislation like the bureaucrats of the European Union, we wouldn’t need to fear artificial intelligence, genetic engineering or other new technologies. But this political-economic model will probably not survive the competition for much longer.

Europe has a collectivist tradition with Christian and socialist roots, as well as worker and consumer protection laws. Europeans live longer than Americans, partly because the European Union has banned unhealthy foods that are available in the United States. At the same time, governments run the healthcare systems, so most healthcare is for the public interest rather than private profit. In Europe, it is harder for corporations to pass business-friendly legislation through bribery of politicians. That is also because Europeans have more faith in the common good than Americans do. Like the invisible hand, our imaginary invisible friend, the common good, has a few magical powers of its own.

Immigrants do much of the hard manual labour in Western Europe, often for low wages, so they help many Europeans lead agreeable lives. They frequently live in poor housing. Others may find Western Europeans lazy, as they work 36 hours per week and have five weeks of holidays each year. Europe is losing the competition, or at least that is what the experts think. Still, the lives of people in Western Europe may be the closest to what life should be in Paradise, except that European energy and resource consumption would be unsustainable if everyone lived like that. The demise of the European Dream shows that competition is the reason why we can’t live in Paradise forever.

Nazi Germany

The Nazis produced an economic miracle during the Great Depression. Their success came from deficit spending for rearmament and from restricting trade with the outside world, so government expenditures boosted the German economy without causing trade deficits. It is similar to Keynesian economics. It worked like the miracle of Wörgl, except that the German government accrued a large debt while the council of Wörgl did not.

Factories were idle, and many people were unemployed, so the scheme didn’t lead to high inflation. Price, wage and rent controls also helped keep inflation in check, but they hurt small farmers. The Nazi economy was a mixture of state planning and capitalism. Germany was rearming and preparing for war, so it was also a war economy. Countries organising for war take similar measures to mobilise their industries for warfare.

Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia was socialist rather than communist. It combined state planning with markets and decentralised decision-making or worker self-management. The Yugoslav economy fared better than that of fully communist countries. Yugoslavia was more open, and living standards were higher. Eventually, Yugoslavia couldn’t compete with more capitalist economies. The oil crisis of the 1970s magnified the economic problems. Foreign debt soared. Generous welfare spending further contributed to Yugoslavia’s financial woes. The case of Yugoslavia highlights the issues that plague utopian economies.

The country implemented austerity measures, such as rationing fuel use and limiting imports of foreign-made consumer goods. Yugoslavia had been able to feed its people until then, but from the 1970s onwards, the country became a net importer of farm products. Yugoslav citizens could travel to the West. Emigration helped the economy by reducing unemployment and bringing in foreign currencies as emigrants returned money home to support their families. The Yugoslav economy collapsed in the 1980s.

Openness to foreign competition contributed to the demise of the Yugoslav economy. Yugoslav consumer products were inferior to foreign products. To compete, businesses laid off workers. The Yugoslav economic system might have worked if every country had operated its economy like so. Yugoslav products would have sufficed had there been no better alternatives. In that case, mass unemployment wouldn’t have materialised, and Yugoslavia could have managed, perhaps with less generous welfare. Utopian economics can only work when the economy encompasses the entire world.

China

The stories of Airbus and Boeing demonstrate that state ownership of large businesses can work better than private ownership. Boeing was the industry leader, but ruined itself by focusing on shareholder value. Reducing quality brought short-term cost savings, boosted the stock price, and generated management bonuses. That seemed all fine until Boeing’s aeroplanes began dropping from the sky. The largest holders of Airbus stock are European states, allowing the corporation to focus on its long-term goals. The state-owned aeroplane industry is one of the few areas where Europe is still at the top.

Traditional Soviet-style communism yielded subpar economic results, but the Chinese continued to innovate. The Chinese socialist market economy (SME) has private, public and state-owned enterprises (SOEs). China is not capitalist, as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) retains control over the country’s direction. It is a command state-market economy like Nazi Germany was. Unlike Nazi Germany, which aimed for maximum self-reliance, the Chinese economy integrated into the global economy. It depends on exports, like those of other Asian Tigers such as Japan and South Korea. China’s advantages include a massive market, which enables it to achieve economies of scale, the world’s longest tradition of rationally administered states, and a culture shared with some other East Asian countries that enabled the Chinese to develop quickly.

The ideological vision behind China’s market reforms was that China was underdeveloped and that a fully developed socialist planned economy would emerge once the market economy fulfilled its historical role, as Marx prophesied. The CCP claims it has incorporated a market economy into the Chinese socialist system. The CCP leadership looks at its project through an ideological lens. Proponents of capitalism might argue that China is more capitalist than the West, given its success. Had China failed, the same people would have blamed it on socialism. Others call it state capitalism, as the SOEs that comprise a large share of the economy operate like private-sector firms and retain their profits rather than returning them to the government. On economic organisation, the West can learn from China.

China eliminated extreme poverty, which declined from over 90% in 1980 to less than 1% today. It also became the world’s leading manufacturing economy and the world’s leading producer of unnecessary items that end up in our landfills. Despite its leadership in renewable energy and electric cars, China has also become the world’s leading polluter and carbon dioxide emitter. China’s status as a manufacturer and exporter distorts the picture. By importing from China, other economies appear less polluting. Those who have visited China long and often enough to have an informed picture agree on the following:

  • China is ahead of the West in several crucial fields. Its economy is more efficient. The West, as it operates now, is losing the competition.
  • Cities are clean, and violent crime levels are low. There is intensive surveillance, which we in the West consider intrusive.
  • There is a lot of corruption. Unlike in many other countries, Chinese corruption promotes economic growth by bribing people to get things done.
  • China is a dictatorship, but citizens have options to criticise and influence the government. If you aren’t a troublemaker, you are relatively free.
  • China represses dissenters and has put millions of people in internment camps to re-educate them and turn them into Chinese citizens.

Chinese corporations align with the Communist Party’s societal goals. There is a profit motive, but profit is secondary. The government can provide support through subsidies. In that sense, the Chinese economy looks like that of the Soviet Union. This model achieves acceptable living standards. At present, China outcompetes the United States and Europe in many fields. If our society’s goals are sustainability and happiness, this economic model can help align corporations with public policies.

State control and ownership of businesses, as in China’s, can be a viable way to pursue political goals such as protecting the environment and reducing poverty. Business objectives, such as profit, can become secondary to political goals, provided that corporations receive support when needed. With state ownership, it becomes feasible to ban products or subsidise others without harming or favouring private entrepreneurs. What China has demonstrated is that a politically steered economy can be competitive and achieve acceptable living standards. And so, we should have confidence that a political economy grounded in moral values can achieve acceptable living standards.

Getting to Denmark

In 1997, my wife and I visited a town in Venezuela. The shops there had armed guards. Shopkeepers believed that they needed these security measures. Not surprisingly, I didn’t feel safe there. If you need guns to protect yourself, something is wrong with society. Perhaps criminals had free rein, and you could not trust the police. Starting a business in Venezuela seemed unwise. I have also been to Denmark. The difference is astounding. Venezuela is an extreme case, and so is Denmark. In the 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index, Denmark ranked first, with the lowest level of corruption in the world. Venezuela was at the bottom. Compared to the rest of the world, Denmark is a Paradise.

Poverty, inequality, and the absence of the rule of law go hand in hand. Without a rule of law, you and your property are unsafe, and building a flourishing society becomes impossible. Some societies are more agreeable than others. Economists understand the rule of law as secure property rights, but it is more important that citizens feel safe and can conduct their affairs in peace. High-quality societies don’t come easy. It is tough to have a capable government, the rule of law, and accountability to the citizens simultaneously. One measure the Danes took to preserve their society was limiting migration, but it would be better if all societies were as agreeable as Denmark’s.

That is possible. Denmark became the way it is because of its unique history. The Danes turned from raping and pillaging Vikings into the peaceful nation it is today. Cultures can change dramatically. Danish history includes the Protestant Reformation. The German sociologist Max Weber argued that the Protestant ethic contributed to the rise of modern capitalism. This ethic includes education, hard work, thrift, and moral uprightness. And that affects attitudes towards graft. The ethic was most present in North-West Europe. Formerly Protestant countries are the least corrupt. But every country can achieve the same. Singapore, Uruguay and Japan are also among the least corrupt countries.

So, what is life in a high-trust society? Everyone is a good citizen. The government is clean. No one misuses state benefits. There is no crime. You feel safe on the streets. You can trust the police. The rules apply to everyone equally. A government can’t create a good society. It merely reflects society. A government can’t enforce laws when its citizens don’t believe in and don’t live by them. Denmark is a cohesive society. People feel connected to each other and share the same values. Becoming a global society like Denmark is an unlikely future for humanity, and getting to Denmark is a utopian dream. Unless, of course, unless a miracle happens. Only religion can move mountains.

Latest revision: 6 December 2025

Featured image: Illustration for the first edition of Utopia by Thomas More.

1. Leviathan. Thomas Hobbes (1651).

Dazu wheel of reincarnation

Death: The Final Frontier

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At the end of our lives, we will boldly go where billions have gone before, which is the afterlife, of which we know very little. Quite a few have ventured into the no-man’s land between life and death and returned to report on what they found there. One group has had a near-death experience (NDE). Often, they saw a bright light at the end of a tunnel and experienced a sense of absolute peace. Another group travelled outside their own body while hearing doctors discussing what to do. These are out-of-body experiences (OBE). Some argue that this is evidence of an afterlife. Scientists are unconvinced. NDEs and OBEs could be hallucinations of a dying brain lacking oxygen. Some psychologists claim people believe in an afterlife to cope with their fear of dying.

People who have had an OBE claimed they were fully aware of it. Their memories were vivid. Is this a hallucination of a dying brain? Those who have gone through the experience differ. Scientists claim our consciousness is just the result of chemical processes in our brains. Pills can cure depression or psychosis. A slight change in brain chemistry can turn a rational and intelligent person into a raving lunatic or a serial killer. A brain injury from a car or bike accident can change a person’s personality. Research suggests that brain chemistry may induce OBEs. Still, that doesn’t explain the evidence suggestive of reincarnation.

A psychiatrist named Ian Stevenson has researched thousands of cases. He began in 1960, when he learned of a child in Sri Lanka who claimed to remember a previous life. He questioned the child, his parents and the people the child named as his parents in his former life. Stevenson worked through thousands of similar cases, conducting interviews with the people involved. In many cases, no one close to these children knew about the deceased person, the child claimed to have been in a previous life. It is possible to plant fake memories in someone’s brain. However, there was no evidence to suggest that it had happened, as these memories were spontaneous.

The YouTube film below shows five reincarnation stories:

Stevenson’s work generated criticism, but his integrity remains beyond doubt. He carefully collected the data and investigated the possibility of fraud. Stevenson even hired a sceptic to verify his methods and conclusions. This person claimed that in only 11 of the 1,111 cases he checked, there had been no contact between the families of the deceased and the child before the interview.1 When the investigators arrived, the evidence was contaminated. The exchange between the families could have altered the account. But there is irony in those numbers, 11 of the 1,111, which was lost on the sceptic. This kind of contact is difficult to avoid in real-life situations. Parents want to check their child’s story and will thus contact the relatives of the deceased before going public.

Why are there only a few thousand credible reincarnation cases on record? Why aren’t billions of people remembering previous lives? If we do reincarnate, one might expect this to be the case. And why do most cases occur in areas where people believe in reincarnation? And why is there so much evidence that our consciousness is a result of chemical processes inside the body? Reincarnation evidence could be a practical joke of our creators. We like to believe there is life after death. Why not play into that? In a simulation, you don’t have a soul, but your consciousness exists in computer memory. Someone else can inherit your memories and even your personality after you pass away. Minds are chemical processes inside the body in the real world. In this world, it only appears like so.

Latest revision: 19 July 2025

Featured image: Relief from the Dazu Rock Carvings in China outlining the Buddhist cycle of reincarnation. User Calton (2004). Wikimedia Commons.

1. Edwards 1992, pp. 13–14; Edwards 1996, p. 275; McClelland 2010, p. 144.

Lucretia Garfield. Library Of Congres

The Identity of God

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We live inside a virtual reality created by an advanced civilisation to entertain an individual we call God. Like it or not, it is why we exist. That civilisation probably is humanoid, which means that God is like us, with human imaginations and desires. What is also worth noting, and what can hurt your ego, is that all that happens goes according to a script, so that thinking of us as mere worms would be a delusion of grandeur. Think of it. Real worms decide for themselves how they grovel and when. And we don’t. Welcome to the Theatre of the Absurd. We are mere actors in a play, and no one thinks. We follow the script, and there is no exit, no life outside, like in the film The Matrix. The road to enlightenment starts with the acceptance of our complete insignificance.

So what about René Descartes, that world-famous fellow who once said, ‘I think, therefore I exist.’ Was he wrong? As the reasoning above painfully lays out, he starts with a debatable assumption: ‘I think.’ He then arrives at a logical conclusion: ‘Therefore, I exist.’ That made him stamp a realness certificate on his person. But logic in fantasy land is just basing conclusions on imagined assumptions. At least the logic is infallible. So, did Descartes think? Not really. Even then, he might still have had an existence. That is also dubious, however, because God imagined us. You can ask yourself: Do Spike and Suzy exist? They are comic characters created by Willy Vandersteen, who no longer exists, if he had ever done so, because he has stopped breathing. If you go down that road, everything you imagine exists. I just imagined a unicorn. Do unicorns now exist?

That is the question of being. Philosophers discuss such questions. Scientists agree that merely thinking of a unicorn doesn’t make it real. Saying ‘be’ doesn’t generate a bee. You can give such a command to a computer, and you get a simulation of a bee. Now you get how God could have created this world in six days. It might as well have been six seconds. So, if God exists, we don’t, and we are imaginations like unicorns. Countless non-existent minds have wasted their time and energy on the question, ‘Does God exist?’ Indeed, the gods we imagine also don’t exist because we imagine them, and that includes the God of Abraham. There is only God who exists in reality.

If we exist to entertain an individual from an advanced civilisation, God must be a person who, unlike us, might be real. Yes, God might be yet another virtual reality character in a simulation layer above us, but that is beyond our possibilities to find out. And let’s not waste our time on questions we can’t answer. So, who is this person, God? That we cannot know. Still, we might uncover something, at least. If we are here to entertain God, what is the fun of standing on the sidelines? Why not take part yourself? If God plays roles and becomes one of us, we might identify some of those individuals. The starting point for the inquiry is Jesus. No one had ever felt a closer relationship with God than he, so there is a good chance he knew God as a person.

The Gospels tell us that Jesus called God ‘Father’. They suggest a close personal relationship, so Jesus thought of himself as the Son of God. There is something off about Jesus’ Father as He can give birth (John 1:12-13). All four official Gospels imply that Jesus was the bridegroom (Mark 2:19-20, Matthew 9:15, Luke 5:34-35, John 3:27-30), but don’t mention the bride, which is also quite mysterious. The Church tells us that Jesus married the Church. Now, the Church didn’t exist when Jesus lived, so a historian would call it an anachronism. It is like saying that the Roman Emperor Caesar took an aeroplane to Egypt to spend his holidays with Cleopatra. That is impossible because there were no aeroplanes 2,000 years ago. The Gospels don’t say Jesus married the Church. The Church didn’t exist yet, and Jesus wasn’t planning to found it either. So, why would the Church lie about Jesus’ marriage? Are we not allowed to know the truth?

You can smell a rat here. And it is a huge and smelly one. Christians claim that God is love. Jews and Muslims don’t. Do they not worship the same deity? Is there something missing that Jesus’ inner circle knew about? And is it the identity of the Bride? That is indeed the case. The Bride of Christ was God in the person of Mary Magdalene. She was one of God’s avatars. She made Jesus believe he was Adam reincarnated and that She was Eve reincarnated, that Eve didn’t come from Adam’s rib but that Eve gave birth to Adam, and that they were an eternal couple living from the beginning of Creation until the End of Times. That is why Jesus believed he was the Son of God.

Simon Peter said to Jesus, ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.’ (Matthew 16:16) This phrase appears in the Jewish Bible (Deuteronomy 5:26, Jeremiah 10:10, Psalm 42:2), but Simon Peter’s use of it is noteworthy. In Deuteronomy, the living God refers to God’s active presence on Earth, meaning that God is not some mythical figure, of which we only have tales, nor some lifeless statue, but someone present in our midst. In Moses’ time, it was a pillar of fire. With the Bride gone, these words have lost their meaning, which led some later Christians to believe that Jesus was God.

Jesus was God’s son because Adam was. Hence, Adam is the Son of God (Luke 3:38), Jesus is the Firstborn of all Creation (Colossians 1:15), and Jesus gave us the right to become children of God who are born of God (John 1:12-13). As Adam, he was the father and God the Mother of humankind. The Jewish scriptures about the fantasy character, Yahweh, also known as the God of Abraham, don’t mention that. And so, Paul, who took these scriptures as seriously as a Pharisee, perhaps because he was a former Pharisee, made God male in his theology and persuaded the early Church to do the same. He succeeded because his work made it possible to unite the early Church. Muhammad also married God in the person of Khadijah bint Khuwaylid. Unlike Jesus, he didn’t know.

Those who take offence at God in the person of Eve marrying Her son Adam, but accept that God allowed millions of people to be slaughtered in wars or die of terrible diseases, or even chose to do so, have a problem with their priorities. And by the way, you are not in a position to judge God. In any case, the story of Eve and Adam is a myth. Eve never took Her son as Her husband, as Eve and Adam never existed. It is only what Mary Magdalene made Jesus believe. So, you can rest assured that nothing of that kind ever happened, except for the millions of people that God let die due to wars and diseases. A possible excuse for doing so is that it makes the simulation more realistic. Apart from that, everything being peachy all the time doesn’t make for a good story.

Jesus and Muhammad have lived. The accounts of their lives may be inaccurate because they date from decades after they died, but the early history of the Israelites in the Jewish Bible – the Jews call it Tanakh – is a fantasy. Archaeological evidence doesn’t support it. Moses never brought the Israelites from Egypt into the Promised Land. The story still has a historical origin. Around the time Moses allegedly lived, the Egyptians who governed Canaan went home, thereby liberating Israel from Egyptian oppression. Later on, the account in the Bible often has a closer relationship to historical events.

That leaves us with a question: how did God meddle with the Jewish nation and their religion? Historians have discovered that the Canaanites gradually formed tribes and, later, petty kingdoms after the Egyptians had departed, in what the Jewish Bible refers to as the Era of the Judges. Local leaders organised warfare and settled disputes. They were the judges. The Jewish Bible says they had nationwide authority, but that is incorrect.

The oldest source of the entire Jewish Bible is the Song of Deborah. Historians believe the song dates back to shortly after the Egyptians left. It likely didn’t pop up out of nowhere. Deborah brought victory to a tribe that later became part of the Jewish nation. Deborah attributed that victory to Yahweh, who, as a son of the Canaanite supreme deity El, would otherwise have remained an obscure, inferior deity. In this way, Deborah initiated the Yahweh cult, which today has four billion followers. The historical genesis of the Bible is not Creation but Deborah. She is the Mother of Israel and likely the earliest historical figure in the Jewish Bible, the founder of the Jewish nation, and an avatar of God.

The God of Abraham, known as Yahweh, the Father, and Allah, thus is a veil behind which the owner of this universe has operated so far. She only revealed Herself to Jesus. It made Jesus a unique prophet who came to see himself as the eternally living Son of God. No evidence suggests that Jesus was Adam, but God made him think he was. God, as Mary Magdalene, convinced Jesus that someone had corrupted the story of Eve and Adam. She appealed to rational thinking, as Eve’s creation from Adam’s rib makes less sense than Adam having been Eve’s son. God could have pointed out traces of fraud, such as Eve being the Mother of All the Living. So, what about Adam, who called her like so? Apart from that, Mary Magdalene must have had a very persuasive personality because She made him die on the cross. Jesus thus placed evidence and logic over religious dogmas. He was a true religious revolutionary. Sadly, logical evidence-based religion was a tradition that soon died with him. He was 2,000 years ahead of his time.

That God is a Mother who can appear as an ordinary woman is not that far-fetched. The leader of the Church Ministry of Mother of All Creation cult claimed she was God and that God had had 534 lives, including Jesus, Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, and Marilyn Monroe. The latter three guesses might be spot-on, but her claim of having been Jesus proves she made it all up. Mary Magdalene, however, may not only have claimed it, but also succeeded in convincing Jesus of it, and then let him start a world religion that now has over two billion followers. We have yet to see the leader of the Church Ministry of Mother of All Creation cult pull that off.

Jesus’ inner circle knew that God had wedded Jesus, but the Gospels don’t mention this crucial factoid that everyone would have wanted to know. Scholars didn’t ask themselves why there were no surviving eyewitness accounts. Isn’t that suspicious? Here is your answer. And why did the early leaders of the Church do it? To religious Jews, the idea of God being a woman who married Jesus was alien or even blasphemous. Most early Christians were Jewish followers who had heard of Jesus and his miracles but lacked detailed knowledge of his life and teachings.

Jewish prophets were human, and they expected a human messiah rather than a godlike being. In their view, Jesus was a mere human, so if you read Mark, Matthew or Luke, Jesus appears human, not godlike. And so, the Jews couldn’t handle that God is a woman who can take a human form and marry Jesus. Gentiles had no problem with it. They have tales about female deities and gods having sex with humans. That is why the Gospel of John is so different from the others. It was a controversy that tore the early Church apart.

A compromise, the Christian theology invented by Paul, resolved the conflict. Paul turned Jesus into a godlike Jewish messiah, the eternally living Son of God, the one promised by the Jewish scriptures. It required some imagination and twisting of the facts to reconcile these two irreconcilable viewpoints. Paul’s theology became the Christianity we know today. Try to understand it from God’s perspective. She lives eternally, or at least thousands of years, and uses us to pass Her time. Girls just want to have fun. That brings us to messages in pop music. The song ‘Gimme the Prize’ by Queen has the following lines,

Here I am, I’m the master of your destiny
I am the one, the only one, I am the God of kingdom come
…
Give me your kings, let me squeeze them in my hands
Your puny princes
Your so-called leaders of your land
I’ll eat them whole before I’m done
The battle’s fought, and the game is won

Queen, Gimme the Prize

Queen is the performing artist, so the hidden message is that the God of the coming kingdom is a Queen. The song features threats against the so-called leaders of the world. That looks like an end-of-time scenario. It is a queer pun, and Freddy Mercury was the performing artist. In the video clip of another Queen song, ‘I Want to Break Free,’ Mercury and the band members dressed in women’s clothing. In Western Europe, we found it funny. That was different elsewhere. The song had a lukewarm reception in the United States, a country that has culturally enriched us with websites like godhatesfags.com. Today, the hatred of LGBTQ people by conservative Christians is getting out of hand.

Christians might justify themselves with Bible verses. For instance, Romans 1:24-27 is particularly clear on the matter. However, these were not Jesus’ words but Paul’s. Quite possibly, Jesus wouldn’t have accepted homosexual acts either. Jesus and Paul lived in a tradition that condemned homosexual acts. There is, however, no objective moral reason to condemn homosexuals. And it is a great irony that it was Paul who performed a sex change on God in the scriptures, and turned God from a Mother into a Father. Paul made up quite a few other things as well. And they are now official Church doctrine.

Muslims take blasphemy very seriously. Hurt Muslim feelings have made the headlines. Making cartoons of Muhammad can be your death sentence. But why only Muhammad? He isn’t God. Is he of a higher stature than Moses or Jesus? God made those mockers do what they did. The reward for killing a comedian will not be 72 desperate virgins trying to abuse you. Abrahamic religions have restricted the freedom of women, but Islam more than the others. Like Jesus, Muhammad married God, but unlike Jesus, he didn’t know. He had a loving marriage after his wife, Khadijah bint Khuwaylid, proposed to him. Islam may be a funny religion, but Christianity is even more comical.

Paul’s obfuscation of the relationship between God and Jesus gave Christianity its unique and baffling theology. Drinking Christ’s blood, eating his body, and the resurrection of the dead could be good ingredients for a motion picture called Zombie Apocalypse. Indeed, these rituals and beliefs are odd and could suit a cannibalistic sect. The outlandishness of Christianity begins with the idea that we are all cursed because Eve and Adam sinned. And then came Jesus, who sacrificed himself for our sins, so you can save yourself by following him. It seems outlandish, but Paul’s intervention is the most ingenious part of God’s plan. Humans are the most destructive species that have ever roamed this planet, and we are about to destroy ourselves. Only our ability to believe in fairy tales can unite us and make us perform extraordinary deeds. Thinking we are morally depraved, unworthy of God’s grace and in dire need of a saviour can save us from our collective stupidity.

Latest revision: 8 January 2026

Featured image: Lucretia Garfield

Christ with Mary Magdalene

Who Was Mary Magdalene?

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Who was Mary Magdalene? That question has occupied curious minds throughout the ages. The Gospels allow for confusion. Was Mary Magdalene a repentant prostitute? Inquiring minds want to know. She became a cult figure after the recovery of lost Gospel fragments implying Mary Magdalene and Jesus had an intimate relationship and that She stood above the other Apostles. The official Gospels also contain phrases suggesting Mary Magdalene was the most significant person in Jesus’ life. That made Her an inspiring figure for feminists. She witnessed the crucifixion from the foot of the cross after the male disciples had fled and was the first to see the resurrected Jesus.

Luke wrote that Mary Magdalene was one of the women who travelled with Jesus and supported him financially, implying that Mary Magdalene was not only wealthy but also independent, and that no one else decided for Her. We also learn that Jesus had cured these women of illness and demonic possession and that seven demons had troubled Her (Luke 8:1-3). The later-added section at the end of Mark also mentions it, suggesting that it was a falsification of importance, possibly serving to downplay Mary Magdalene’s role. According to the Gospels, Mary Magdalene rose to prominence only after the crucifixion and became a central figure in the events that followed.

If Mary Magdalene was always with Jesus, and there is no mention of their interactions in the Gospels, they were likely either not worth noting or too controversial. According to the Gospels, She did or said nothing of consequence during Jesus’ life. However, once he was dead, Mary Magdalene suddenly played a central role. There has been speculation as to whether Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ wife. Jesus is the bridegroom in every Gospel (Mark 2:19-20, Matthew 9:15, Luke 5:34, John 3:29). Mary Magdalene went out to wash and anoint Jesus’ body after the crucifixion (Mark 16:1). This was the duty of the wife. Christians see Jesus as an eternally living godlike being. A marriage can make him appear human. However, their marriage was not an item of controversy at first, as all the Gospels mention Jesus as the bridegroom.

Recovered Gospel fragments cast a different light on Jesus’ relationship with Mary Magdalene. The Gospel of Philip names Her as Jesus’ companion2 and mentions that Jesus loved Her more than the other disciples and kissed Her often.3 The Gospel of Mary notes that Jesus loved Her more than the other women.4 That is close to saying they were married. If these Gospels reveal things the Church didn’t want us to know, Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ must have been a wedded couple.

In the Jesus Movement, the sect led by Jesus during his lifetime, women were equal to men. This was still the case when Paul wrote his letters, in which he named women as full partners in the Christian movement and mentioned them by name. However, this gradually changed, and the Gospels came to emphasise the role of the male Apostles. The role of women in the Jesus Movement was more prominent than the official Gospels reveal.

One of the recovered Gospels, the Gospel of Mary, portrays Mary Magdalene as the leader of the early Church, surpassing the other Apostles, including Peter, who was often regarded as the leader of the Church. One fragment reads,

Peter said to Mary, ‘Sister, we know that the Savior loved you more than all other women. Tell us the words of the Savior that you remember, the things which you know that we don’t because we haven’t heard them.’ Mary responded, ‘I will teach you about what is hidden from you.’ And she began to speak these words to them.

This Gospel dates from the second century AD and is not as old as the official Gospels. It is a Gnostic Gospel centred around supposed hidden truths and inner spiritual knowledge, but other Gnostic beliefs are absent. One Gnostic belief is that the Jewish God of the material world is evil, as opposed to the good Christian God of the spiritual world. The Platonic view that ideas create reality and that spirit is superior to matter, which you can also find in the Gospel of John, profoundly influenced Gnosticism.

And so, in another belief, Sophia, or wisdom, created all that is. Her fall led to the creation of the material world. She resides within all humans as the divine spark. Christ’s return to redeem humankind is about returning humanity to the spiritual world. If you read between the lines of this latter version, the fall of Eve the Creatrix led to the state of sin in which we live today. The Gnostic Gospels are controversial among scholars because they date from a later period than the official Gospels.

Gnosticism emerged around 100 AD and appears to be related to the enigmatic Gospel of John. The Gnostic movement likely originated from a Christian tradition that held on to the original beliefs and remained outside the mainstream of Pauline Christianity. Scholars now name this tradition the Johannine community. Only the Gospel of John mentions that Christians are born of God. His Gospel is mysterious and secretive about Jesus and his intensely close relationship with God, as are the Gnostics. The confusion and rumours surrounding that relationship fuelled speculation about secret knowledge.

The Gospel of John says that Jesus had an intimate and loving relationship with God. He seemed to have known God personally, believing he had eternal life and existed at the beginning of the world. Christians claim that God is love. So, did God and Jesus kiss and do other things lovers do? God can give birth, so God is not a Father after all.

Mary Magdalene convinced Jesus that She was the reincarnation of Eve and that he was the reincarnation of Adam. She made Jesus believe that Adam was the son of Eve, and that he was the Son of God because Adam was. Adam, being the son of Eve, makes more sense than the rib story. Thus, Mary Magdalene married Jesus after persuading him that he was Her eternal husband from Creation until the End of Times. It explains why Jesus thought he had eternal life, existed from the beginning, and would live until the end. It made Eve the Mother of humanity. Jesus called God Mother rather than Father, so he called his birth mother ‘woman’ rather than ‘mother’ (John 2:4, 19:26).

The Gnostic Gospels are most closely related to the Gospel of John. The Gnostics likely split off from the Johannine community after the scribes had turned God the Mother into God the Father. At that point, editors likely altered the role of Mary Magdalene from God and Jesus’ wife to the Beloved Disciple. The split occurred before the removal of the intimate relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus from the Gospel, so when people still knew that the Beloved Disciple, who later became anonymous, was Mary Magdalene. In that previous version of John, they weren’t married but soulmates nonetheless, and so intimate that it remained problematic in Pauline Christianity, leading to another redaction, and the version of John we have now. And so, the Gnostics reveal something that the official Gospels have omitted.

Mary Magdalene’s sudden appearance as a central figure only after the crucifixion is likely related to this. Removing details regarding the relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ, which has been the outcome of Paul’s efforts to bring Christianity more in line with the Jewish scriptures, alters the plot entirely. So, what remains are some sketchy details. And that is the primary explanation for the current deplorable state of the Gospels, not oral storytelling or embellishments.

There are a few loose ends to tie up. The rib story is a falsification, and Eve was Adam’s mother. That we can infer from the text we still have. But was Eve a goddess? That is not so obvious. According to the account in Genesis, God created Eve and Adam. It doesn’t corroborate what Mary Magdalene made Jesus believe. Eve is the Mother of all the Living, which suits a Mother Goddess. But you must leave the creation myth in Genesis behind and invent another one to make the idea work.

The first verses in the Gospel of John contain such a myth. After some mystical allusions such as ‘in the beginning,’ and ‘there was light,’ and an undercover operation of Jesus during which few recognised him, Christians are born of God. And Jesus gave us the right to become children of God. Eve was God and the Mother of humanity, and Adam, thus Jesus, fathered humanity, and in doing so, he gave us the right to become children of God.

Latest revision: 5 September 2025

Featured image: Christ with Mary Magdalene, West Nave, Kilmore Church, Isle of Mull, made by Stephen Adam. B. Galbraith. Victorian Web.

1. Who was Mary Magdalene? James Carrol (2006). Smithsonian. [link]
2. Gospel of Philip: There were three who always walked with the Lord: Mary, his mother, and her sister, and Magdalene, who was called his companion. His sister, his mother and his companion were each a Mary.
3. Gospel of Philip: And the companion of the saviour was Mary Magdalene. Christ loved Mary more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often. The rest of the disciples were offended by it and expressed disapproval. They said to him, “Why do you love her more than all of us?” The Saviour answered and said to them, “Why do I not love you like her?”
4. Gospel of Mary: Peter said to Mary, “Sister we know that the Saviour loved you more than the rest of woman. Tell us the words of the Saviour which you remember which you know, but we do not, nor have we heard them”. Mary answered and said, “What is hidden from you I will proclaim to you”. And she began to speak to them these words: “I”, she said, “I saw the Lord in a vision and I said to Him, Lord I saw you today in a vision”.

Tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider

Properties Of This Universe

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There is an ongoing debate among self-proclaimed pundits who sell books about whether this universe is a simulation. They argue we can know by examining the universe’s properties. They are wrong. We can never say whether these properties, reflected in the established laws of reality, are real or fake. Even when a property of our universe appears strange or consistent with a simulation, it doesn’t prove that this universe is a simulation. It can be a property of an authentic universe. It is like saying, ‘This object is grey, and elephants are grey, so it probably is an elephant.’ Now, imagine that grey object saying moo. However, people continue to buy their books, so the so-called pundits keep writing them, because of what economists call the law of supply and demand.

That is also why science can’t establish whether we live inside a simulation. Science aims to determine the properties of the universe, as reflected in the laws of reality, also known as natural laws. However, science can’t say whether or not these natural laws are, what you might say, real. Hence, any argument that this universe is a simulation based on its properties is a dead end. In its simplest form, the reasoning goes that this universe must be a simulation because the underlying properties are digital. At the most basic level, everything can be just numbers in computer memory.

How does that work? A digital television screen consists of more than a million tiny coloured dots. Every single spot on the screen has a unique number. Also, every colour has a unique number. And so, spot 268,122 on the screen has colour 187,091. From a distance, you see a person or a mountain. At the underlying level, the screen is just a display of digits. It is possible to store numbers in computer memory so that you can represent an entire universe in this way.

Real universes might also be digital. We don’t know. Being digital is a property, not a cause of existence. Another argument based on quantum physics states that our reality is a sequence of states. Nothing exists or happens between them. Like the dots on a television screen, we can represent these states as numbers. Again, this could mean that our universe exists inside a computer. And also in this case, there is no way of knowing whether this applies to a universe that is not computer-generated.

Quantum entanglement is bizarre. Particles can interact directly with each other regardless of the distance between them. If you come to think about it, then one particle at one end of the universe might interact directly with one at the opposite side, as if there is no distance between them. This phenomenon mocks our idea of distance. Billions of light-years are nothing. Forget about warp-speed space travel. You can be on the other side of the universe in the blink of an eye. It can raise questions about the age of the universe, as estimates of its age are related to its size. However, we don’t know whether this behaviour is also present in a real universe that is billions of years old.

Many believe that intelligent extraterrestrials must exist. So far, there is no material evidence of their presence. UFO encounters occur, and people have seen aliens, but no extraterrestrials have revealed themselves to the general public. The physicist Enrico Fermi once asked, ‘Where is everybody?’ Perhaps humankind is the only advanced civilisation in the entire universe. If we live inside a simulation, there may be no point in simulating other beings on remote planets. That is not the only possibility. Perhaps civilisations tend to die out before becoming advanced. Or maybe we overestimate the probability of advanced civilisations contacting us. And possibly aliens do visit us. After all, people have seen them.

Several types of small particles don’t exist most of the time. They come into being when someone observes them. It is the observer effect. If this universe is a simulation, it would be a waste of memory and processing power to represent them all the time. If this universe is real, these particles might, or even should, always exist even when no one is watching. The argument stems from a misconception. These particles don’t disappear when not being observed. They become waves instead. There is no way of knowing whether this kind of observer effect exists in real universes. And why can we notice this? It shouldn’t be hard to conceal the non-existence of unobserved particles in a simulation.

Latest revision: 24 July 2024

Featured image: Tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. Julian Herzog (2008). Wikimedia Commons.