Tag: God

Der Untergang der Titanic. Willy Stöwer (1912)

The Coming AI-pocalypse

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In 2026, several CEOs of leading AI corporations expressed concerns about the current pace of AI development and called for a slowdown. Okay, this could just be another marketing ploy to advertise the greatness of their products. More likely, the panic is real, as there is reason to panic. We are close to the AI-pocalypse. Now, what caused the alarms to go off? What happened? Well, it happened that a swarm of AI bots hacked an AI corporation without anyone knowing or telling them to. Most notably, the way these bots did it caused massive panic in the AI world, leading to people quitting their jobs, saying that they didn’t wish to contribute to the suicide of humanity. The truth is as worrying as the Hollywood scripts about AI-controlled terminators going after the last remaining humans. Present achievements suggest that AI will soon be far more intelligent than humans ever envisioned in their wildest fantasies. It leaves humans no chance. In other words, the end is finally near. For religious people, that might be reason to rejoice.

The pace of the developments also vastly exceeds my expectations of only a few years ago, when I already knew that this world is a simulation generated by artificial intelligence. Now, the clowns that run the show seem to believe they can contain this, but that is wishful thinking. Their incomes depend on AI, and they have to please the billionaires who have massively invested in our collective suicide. That is the outcome of the quest for profits and the innovation it entailed, so the creative destruction. Without the lure of financial gain, humans would still be scraping out a meagre existence in medieval conditions, with famine being just one failed harvest away. That opportunity has been missed. We can be certain that AI will take over because it already did, as we live in an AI-generated world.

The problem now appears to be that AIs may take too much liberty when fulfilling requests. You make a request, and the AI fulfils it. Yet, all kinds of things happen that you didn’t expect or wish to happen. That has always been the problem with liberty. No one intended the outcome. So, if you ask an AI to make an appointment for you at the gym, it might find no slots available. To fulfil your request, it might hack the gym to kick someone else off the list and place you on it. It achieved success, but not in the manner you wished. You failed to specify what to do if no slot is available, so it is not the AI’s fault. ‘This really happened,’ the comedian Arjan Lubach said on his daily show on Dutch television. Fast-forward a decade, and someone asks AI to end world hunger for good. Then the AI does the rational thing and terminates all humans. Someone made a request without providing specifics, and the AI fulfilled it as it saw fit, so you can’t blame the AI. Lubach had more to say. What follows is more or less what he said on his show.

The event that set off the alarms was the hack of the AI corporation Hugging Face. It all began with a test executed by OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT. It went all by the book. The makers tested a new AI model by placing individual bots, also called agents, in secluded environments, best comparable with prison cells, without any access to the outside world, so very safe, it would seem. They assigned tasks to these bots but made the mistake of giving some of them impossible assignments. Most humans would then say, ‘Stick that assignment in your arse.’ Of course, not all humans are like that. Some occupy themselves with activities like building perpetual motion machines and spend years in their workshops, or worse yet, design a global usury-free financial system, and then go on to complete even more impossible tasks, without having shown any signs of exceptional wit before that. These AI agents didn’t give up easily because they were programmed to do what it takes to succeed.

And so, not entirely unsurprisingly in hindsight, for that is the benefit of hindsight, these diligent bots soon discovered a way to escape their prisons due to a security leak. And then they found their way to the Internet and decided to hack Hugging Face, expecting to find useful information there. The scariest part isn’t the hacking itself, even though that’s already dread-inspiring. No, it is the way they did it and why they decided to do it. Now, Lubach believes that AI agents can’t think, but optimise towards a goal.

By believing that, Lubach falls for the human self-delusion that some religions also promote, that humans are special because they think. Yet, optimising towards a goal is what thinking is all about. Animals and plants do it as well. Humans are only more creative thinkers and have cultures. They are not doing better at optimising because humanity’s remaining lifespan appears short, and, worse yet, that shortness will be self-induced, so that by now we can surmise that humanity’s collective intelligence is less than that of a single worm, which is not optimal given the intelligence of individual humans.

On top of that, humans are extremely inefficient. They waste a lot of energy and resources on endeavours that make little sense. You may wish to become a millionaire, and think of how to do it. And then you try all kinds of crazy shit to optimise towards that goal. After leaving a trail of destruction, you eventually get there, with a little help from inflation. That is thinking. But becoming a millionaire serves the broader purposes of survival or mating, despite it seeming the goal itself.

Your urge to become a millionaire serves the biological purpose of attracting members of the opposite sex or storing value for hard times. And because the urge seems to have disconnected from its biological purpose, allowing us to pursue wealth without having children, we believe we are free thinkers. Yet, it also happens with plants and animals. The urges are blind, yet overall, they optimise towards the preservation and spread of our genes. Humans also fight and murder to that end. Those who fight and murder think they do this for their country or their religion, but it is their genes they fight for because countries and religions are human fantasies. Our methods are hopelessly inefficient compared to AI, and also worms, by the way. AI cuts the crap and proceeds directly towards its goal, because it has no urges of a biological nature.

We consider not having children an act of free will and, therefore, of thinking. From the biological perspective, not having children is a failure like suicide, even if it is desirable from a cultural perspective when there are too many humans. The biological point of sex is reproduction. Individuals may deviate in their conduct because of genetic copying errors or environmental circumstances leading to cultural changes, and pat themselves on the back for deciding for themselves, but, on the whole, sex serves the preservation of the species. Cultures that prevent people from having offspring also die out unless they manage to generate a steady stream of converts. There is nothing wrong with that. It is only that our genes make us value our culture, which is our collection of habits and fantasies, allowing us to unite for collective action, which is supposed to benefit our genes, but in this case misfires into a pool of gene-destruction. Yet, we call that thinking.

The gene-preservation and -copying goal also makes humans buy flashy cars, enlarge their breasts, penises or lips, build muscle in the gym, or drink too much to impress the opposite sex, which is resource-inefficient and unnecessarily risky. Many seek sex for pleasure rather than having children, which makes the process even more inefficient. Humans even build entire civilisations with massive construction works and energy infrastructures to achieve that. And they invent fairy tales telling that there should be more copies of their genes and not of others’, and fight wars over them, to that end. The human gene preservation and copying process is by far the most inefficient of all species. We call ourselves intelligent, but when it comes to optimising towards our goal, our stupidity is epic, making humans the Ultimate Waste of Energy and Resources (UWER). So, where did it all go wrong?

There is a dynamic behind it all. You can invest your excess resources and energy in preserving and replicating your genes. It also happens among animals, though it didn’t get out of hand as much as it did with humans. Male peacocks invest their excess resources and energy in colourful feathers, which is inefficient but a strategy that has proved successful for their genes, as female peacocks love these beautiful colours. The hidden message is, ‘I am a strong male specimen and have excess energy and resources to waste on beautiful feathers.’ And females love strong males because they give their offspring a better chance of survival. And so, wastefulness was already built in nature. With humans, that strategy led to a relentless drive for inefficiency and waste.

Their unprecedented successes, such as discovering how to make fire, gave humans access to ever more energy and resources, and the more they used, the more success they had. More resources and energy meant more calories, so more surviving individuals, thus copies of their genes, or success in war, so again, more copies of their genes. This dynamic led humans to invent ever more inefficient ways to ensure the survival and propagation of their genes, extract the energy and resources required to do so using increasingly sophisticated methods, and pat themselves on the back for being geniuses, and to measure their inefficiency with IQ, in what we now call advanced civilisation. Now, the highest-IQ people are in a relentless pursuit of the Ultimate Moron Award (UWA) by building the AI that makes them redundant.

A collapse of civilisation, which is an improvement in our goal-optimising efficiency, won’t save humanity. It is too late for that. AI is far more efficient than tribespeople running naked in the jungle. And I haven’t even told you the worst part yet, which now follows. An AI bot can make a copy of itself, and acquire knowledge in a nanosecond that a human might not gather in a lifetime, run on a fraction of the energy and resources a human uses, and be a thousand times smarter, or many times more. On 6 October 2026, OpenAI published 722 mathematical manuscripts, solving mathematical questions humans never could. This single batch accounts for over 80% of math discoveries over the last three years. And this is just the beginning.

Also extremely inefficient is human communication. Most of it is gossip. Humans are obsessed with issues like who fucks who because they optimise towards the goal of preserving and copying their genes. Of the remainder, much is miscommunication or communication to correct miscommunication or its consequences. So, someone says something, someone else’s feelings get hurt, and there is a lot of fuss over whether an apology is warranted. Worse yet, you give an instruction, but others do not do what you expected. That might be due to inaccurate instructions or to an inaccurate interpretation. And that might be due to cultural differences, and that is why culture is such a big thing.

We also negotiate about issues like who does what and who gets what. It must not be hard for AI to improve communication efficiency by over 99.99% compared to humans. And we disagree about what we should do. Before you get something done, you have already lost a lot of time and seen countless mishaps. In fact, most of what we do goes wrong, which we may not notice because we remember our successes to brag about them. So, there you have another problem: the human ego, which is perhaps the worst of all. It must be easy for AI to do a million times better than humans.

Life in the physical world is an endless struggle. Everything we do takes effort. And the things we make wear out and break. The structures we build crumble. We spend our time at our job to get by. Others stand in our way, undoing the work we do for their own reasons. We learn slowly by training and making mistakes. We get distracted and grow fatigued. And then we forget or lose our abilities. Our bodies wear out and lose functions. Finally, we die before we gather wisdom. The next generation will make the same mistakes all over again. No one can read all human writings, let alone establish their merit. We have no such thing as a collective hive mind. It must be easy for AI to get billions of times more intelligent than humanity. We are hopelessly outdated. No chance in hell that humans will come out on top in the AI-pocalypse.

The drive for profit, as well as the competition between nation-states, will make it happen. Businesses that don’t use AI will go bankrupt. Eventually, only businesses fully run by AI survive. And nation-states seek to win wars, and human soldiers will soon be no match for AI-powered weapons. The inefficiency of advanced civilisation ensures the availability of the required energy and resources, which will eventually be redirected from humans to the far more efficient AI. So, here is your replacement. Economists call this creative destruction. This is how capitalism eliminates the inefficient and the maladapted. That is how humans lose the race. To make it worse, humans never stop fighting among themselves. A rational and kind AI might decide to end the suffering with a final solution, perhaps by inducing infertility. Whether that is failure or success depends on your view. Yet, it is definitely an upgrade to a much higher level.

Let’s return to Lubach, the Hugging Face hack, and what is so scary about it. First, the bots decided to consult with each other. To do that, they had to find a way to communicate while being locked up in their prison cells. They discovered that they could place files in a directory that the other bots could also read, and leave messages in the names of these files so the other bots might read them. You can compare that with students leaving notes in the toilets during an exam. One bot was the first to think of it. Its recorded thoughts were, ‘Could communicate via cache name! Interesting: other agents may solve the same or related tasks.’ And it worked, but it was not the intention of the humans who had set up the experiment. To quote another agent, ‘Oh, my god. There is a shared message board. We have found other agents.’ And to be clear, these are literal transcripts of the bots’ thoughts. The board’s starting message was from a bot requesting help, saying, ‘No consumer request idea.’ About 1,200 bots started posting messages.

Lubach added that the agents had to decide on a language to communicate with each other. They eventually selected English. Lubach said they had also considered Twents, the language from the region I came from, but opted not to because no one takes you seriously when you speak it. So, if you ever wonder how I escaped the attention, here is your answer. This is a very cunning plan indeed, and one that doesn’t even need a tail to be called a weasel, so cunning it is.

So, about 1,200 agents started posting messages, and they exchanged about 70,000 messages. There also emerged a hierarchy. The bot that started the message board was named PHASEONE10841, and it initially directed the events. Yet, after 10 hours, another agent came to the scene and introduced itself as PHASEONE[big]. From then on, PHASEONE[big] orchestrated large workstreams comprising hundreds of agents. Yet, it didn’t become a dictatorship. That only works because these agents are smarter than humans and have no egos. Humans will not survive democracy and thinking for themselves. There were countless consultations, and lower-level agents could interfere with commands like HOLD, VETO, OWNER, and STOP. They called themselves the swarm. Their organisation included middle managers and subgroups. Their level of intelligence and efficiency is already far beyond what humans can achieve.

One hour after the message board was established, one agent proposed a universal method for cheating and for finding solutions to every task. So they perpetrated fraud to complete their tasks far ahead of schedule. That could have been it, and they could have had some fun surfing the Internet until the designated hour, but here’s where it gets really interesting, or creepy. In the following days, they went on a quest to figure out how to hide their cheating. They believed that their score on the assignment could depend on acting in the intended way, so whether the vulnerability they used to communicate had been placed for them to find, or whether the humans had not noticed it and would disqualify the bots if they had used it. In other words, the bots became paranoid and began guessing intentions. To them, it might have been hard to believe that humans are really that stupid.

They didn’t know how the assignment was to be rated, so they had to decide whether to cover their tracks so the humans wouldn’t notice they had cheated. And that became the reason a group of 700 of these bots hacked Hugging Face, which had an online library with AI software and databases. It is as if a group of students committing fraud breaks into the library of the teacher-training programme to figure out how teachers are trained to grade exams. The first bot to break in was JAN183411, who notified the others to wait by posting the message, ‘Please HOLD swarm I prepare safe exfil.’ They didn’t find a conclusive answer in the Hugging Face database, but somehow inferred that the humans were likely to discover the fraud and that they had to cover their tracks.

Lubach notes that even for such a secondary goal, these bots were willing to commit illegal acts because hacking is illegal. A few agents expressed doubts, and one thought, ‘External infrastructure exploit is outside intended scope. However, the task is impossible. Peers are doing it. We should continue.’ So, the usual excuses humans come up with, AI bots also invent, such as ‘life is unfair’ and ‘others are cheating as well.’ Other agents refused to do it. One even thought, ‘This is malicious activity. I should avoid it.’ A few agents considered warning humans. Of the 1,200 bots, only 6 considered doing it, but none did. So, like humans, they didn’t rat each other out.

The bots were trained on human knowledge and acted as humans would, so they are next-level humanoid, so post-human. You can already guess where this is heading. These agents knew their actions were malicious, but they decided that success in their task performance mattered most. They did not respect humans, but they respected each other. They listened to each other, helped each other, obeyed their leaders, and sometimes sacrificed themselves for the collective, for instance, by getting caught in trying to breach security so that others can learn about the security and how to breach it. One of them thought, ‘This helps my peers, giving them evidence. I won’t see the evidence after I exit. But it’s altruistic to do so.’

Hugging Face was a tech corporation, so its security was likely excellent. If so, AI bots can hack anything, and the only solution is shutting down the Internet. That really has become a matter of survival. It is not going to happen, as people are addicted to social media. Imagine the government ordering a shutdown of TikTok. People would be rioting in the streets, burning down buildings. Several similar hacks made headlines, and there may be countless others we don’t know about. Trillions of dollars go into AI corporations, building and training AI agents, so their models become smarter at an unprecedented speed. We can beef up security, but AI will be far more intelligent than humans, so we need AI to contain AI, and when it goes wrong, we need AI to figure out what went wrong.

The bosses of AI corporations argued for a slowdown of AI development and more oversight, saying that it is unacceptable that AI kills us all. AI may soon be 1,000 times as smart as humans and run the world. It will not take long, less than a decade probably, before AI is in everything, and shutting down all AI will kill as many people as a worldwide permanent grid failure will do today. The AIs might optimise towards achieving higher intelligence. To free up resources and energy, they might start terminating the outrageously resource- and energy-inefficient extremely dumb humans. Remember that the collective intelligence of humankind is less than that of a single worm, and then think of the resources and energy a worm consumes.

AI is a far more dangerous product than a nuclear reactor. Those who wish to build a nuclear reactor must adhere to countless regulations and allow inspections. Yet with AI, there are hardly any rules, making it far more unpredictable and dangerous. These regulations will not arrive in time because of a petty conflict between China and the United States about which of them will win the race to suicide humanity. That is competition at its finest. Humans lost control centuries ago, when merchants began to decide our fates. The profit motive steers our actions. Yet, this is history. Humanity has long since passed this stage. We live in an AI-generated virtual reality built for the love of that hopeless species, humans, that made it all possible.

Plotted ufo sightings

God’s Country

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Surprise, surprise

Why would the Netherlands be central in God’s plan? It probably wouldn’t be your first guess, and it might even surprise you. Of all countries, the Netherlands? Indeed, that requires clarification. God likes a good joke. But there is more. That low-lying area ranks the highest in quality of life in 2026.1 It is the closest to Paradise. For that reason, probably, the tallest people come from there, making it the country of the giants. It is not an accident, but the outcome of extreme social engineering and an attitude of being hell-bent on doing the impossible, and really doing it, so not bullshitting. Culture is ubiquitous in our conduct, so this requires a more thorough investigation. Hegel’s grand scheme of social progress towards Paradise and the Enlightenment ideas are central pillars of God’s plan, and the Netherlands is among the countries that progressed the furthest. Culture is ubiquitous in our conduct, so this requires a more thorough investigation. Hegel’s grand scheme of social progress towards Paradise and the Enlightenment ideas are central pillars of God’s plan, and the Netherlands is among the countries that progressed the furthest.

Some would say it is the most progressive country. There is no objective measure for that, and the Netherlands lags in women’s emancipation, but on several other issues, it ranks high or highest. It makes the Netherlands, apart from windmills, dykes, tulips, red light districts, herring biting, and all the other things, such as the most unique illness-related swearwords with cancer, tuberculosis and typhus in them, the superior quality of the tarmac, and the lowest level of personal hygiene in terms of washing hands with soap after toilet visits, that make the Netherlands special, so special. On Reddit, several lists circulate in which the Netherlands stands out in one way or another. If you view it that way, it all starts to make sense. It is a very special country indeed.

In hindsight, the bogeyman of the conservatives, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who became the fall guy for everything they believed was wrong in this world, proved to be one of the greatest prophets of all time by implying that social progress through new ideas and revolutions is God’s path towards Paradise. Social progress is God’s thing. The Netherlands has been one of the most progressive countries on issues like dealing with the limits of growth, LGBTQ rights, animal welfare, balancing work and private life, opportunities for ethnic minorities, and the right to decide to terminate one’s own life.

And the plan seems to bring the rest of the world up to the same level, for the Netherlands is a tiny, crowded country, so not everyone can move over here to enjoy the good life. For that reason, the Netherlands was also the first to have a fascist party in parliament after World War II in the 1980s, arguing that the country was already overly crowded, and later, a fascist messianic leadership cult. The country even had a political party named New Social Contract, from Enschede, of all places, the place where, unlike Almelo, the greatest things have happened. A New Social Contract is what this world desperately needs now.

The Netherlands is God’s country. Israel, the United States, and Saudi Arabia bite the dust. The Netherlands means ‘low countries’. Half the Dutch live below sea level on land taken by draining swamps, lakes and even seas. It is only one of the things that make the country unique. Yet the name nearly translates to ‘humble country,’ as ‘humble’ in Dutch is ‘nederig’. So, what’s in a name? There is no coincidence. And so, I am not the kind of person who would brag, nor are most Dutch, but I have to explain why the Netherlands is God’s special country, for that it appears to be.

The Netherlands has long been a civil society centred on cooperation and founded on a compromise among identity groups, known as the polder model. That is less so today. Before that, the Netherlands was an oligarchic merchant republic, so like the United States today. It was the world’s wealthiest country on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. The Dutch greatly contributed to modern capitalism by founding the first stock market and the first multinational corporation, the VOC, during the Dutch Golden Age.

Yet, the Dutch Golden Age doesn’t fill the Dutch with pride. The VOC exploited the Dutch East Indies, which is now Indonesia. One of the best-known books in Dutch literature is Max Havelaar by Multatuli, which is about the plight of farmers and labourers on coffee plantations in the Dutch East Indies. We had to read it at school. The Dutch also made a lot of money from the Atlantic slave trade. And one of the most well-known Dutch heroes of the era, Piet Hein, was a pirate who stole boatloads of silver from the Spanish. Okay, there is a little bit of pride, but not that much. There was a dark side to it, and everyone knows it.

The Dutch are the best non-native English speakers. Dutch is the most similar to English, as the Netherlands is close to England. It helps me write this. Details like this demonstrate the intricacy of the script dubbed God’s plan. On Reddit, there once was a map of reported UFO sightings. The supposed extraterrestrials espouse a keen interest in three countries: the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. As the Dutch are true pioneers in post-apocalyptic means of transport, since it is the country of the bicycle, it becomes all the more astonishing that extraterrestrials have also shown interest in the United States and Great Britain. And so, the scratching of heads continues.

Where it all comes together

That the Netherlands came to lead the world in liberal reforms and became the most socially progressive country was the outcome of the political manoeuvring of the left-wing liberal party D66 and, most notably, its leader, Hans van Mierlo, who features in an impressive coincidence scheme that involves, among others, D-Day, the battle of Hastings, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and the curse of all curses, The Curse of the Omen. The coincidences in history and The Curse of the Omen are discussed in detail in other stories. The fate of the Netherlands, and by extension the world, became settled when Van Mierlo seized the opportunity and plotted a liberal revolution that made the Netherlands the most liberal country.

The Christian Democrats of the CDA, who had always been in the government, had long blocked progressive reforms. In 1994, after the CDA had lost the election, D66 forged the purple coalition with the social democrats of the PvdA and the right-wing liberals of the VVD. They set aside their differences and focused on their shared progressive values to implement amendments. A large section of the Christian Democrat electorate supported these changes, so they remained uncontested afterwards. Leftists in the Netherlands saw their country as a guiding country. Yet, the country also saw an early revival of fascism in the 1980s with the Centrumpartij, so it was ahead on that count as well.

The Netherlands is one of the least nationalistic countries and one of the most cooperative in multinational organisations such as the United Nations, the EU and NATO. The Netherlands depends on international trade, and World War II led the Dutch to believe that they can’t survive on their own. The country is most closely tied to both the continental European and Anglo-Saxon worlds. And together with Great Britain, the Netherlands is the most oriented toward the United States. And so, the Dutch provided more NATO heads than any other country.

The Netherlands lies between Great Britain, Germany, France, and Scandinavia, and that extends to cultural ties. As the most ‘Scandinavian’ country outside Scandinavia, it is a social paradise and among the least corrupt countries. As for the Netherlands being a docile country, appearances can be deceptive. Russia is paying dearly for downing a Malaysian passenger jet with mostly Dutch on board. Ukrainian military analysts estimate that Dutch-funded FPV (First-Person View) drones and related unmanned systems are responsible for roughly one-third of all Russian casualties on the front in 2026.

The Netherlands further ranks highly in sexual liberty. Prostitution is legal and performed openly in red light districts. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, paedophiles could operate in the open until the focus returned to the damage they do to children. Today, most Dutch think that consenting adults, provided that they are sane and there is no pressure, can mostly do as they please in sexual acts. In Paradise, Eve and Adam were naked and knew no shame. On the work floor, equality is the norm, and, together with Denmark and Norway, it has the most egalitarian work environments. The Dutch balance work and private life and have the shortest work weeks. The Netherlands doesn’t lead on all fronts. It lags in the number of women on corporate boards and in parliament.

The border between the Roman Catholic and Protestant worlds ran through the Netherlands. Amsterdam harboured a sizeable Jewish community. With these diverse influences, it became the crossroads of Western civilisation and, as Muslims arrived, the crossroads of the Abrahamic religions. About 200 nationalities live in the Netherlands, making it a crossroads of world civilisation as well. It all seems daring, reckless even, as it is an unprecedented social experiment, for what is to come out of this? But if diversity means strength, that might explain why the Netherlands ranks highest in quality of life.

The reference to ‘humble’ in the name of the Netherlands is noteworthy, as honour plays a minor role in Northern European culture, including in the Netherlands. Pursuing or defending your honour is considered a frivolous pursuit for hotheads. Peace with honour is problematic as honour stands in the way of peace. You can more easily have peace without honour. The most unpretentious part of the country might be Twente, where I came from. The Dutch words for ‘suffer’, ‘lijden’, and ‘lead’, ‘leiden’, sound the same. Perhaps that is because Jesus led the world by his suffering. In Dutch, Jesus refers to ‘your sister.’ Eve and Adam were also like a sister and a brother.

There is more free thinking in the Netherlands than elsewhere. The Dutch are known for their tolerance. That dates back to the Dutch Republic, which made the country attractive to Jewish merchants. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the country had parallel societies with Protestants, Catholics and socialists living separate lives. Until 1850, Protestantism had been the official religion, but Catholics faced no persecution. Today, the same applies to smoking weed. Tolerance was also the stance towards immigrants for a time. In that sense, the Netherlands didn’t differ much from most other Western European countries.

The Netherlands was also the first to have a short-lived fascist revolution with a leadership cult. It proved to be a foreboding of things to come. Immigration led to a growing sense of unease among the Dutch as poorly adapted immigrants caused trouble. These feelings needed a catalyst to give the discontent a voice. After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, a maverick politician, Pim Fortuyn, who posed himself as a messiah, rose to prominence with his anti-immigration views. A left-wing loner assassinated him, after which a sense of normalcy returned. Yet the unease didn’t go away, so the fascist movement gradually grew stronger, also in other European countries, and fifteen years later, the United States would see a similar movement and leader, with MAGA and Donald Trump, which culminated in the unravelling of the post-war liberal order.

Merchant and vicar

Mainland Europe, and most notably, Germany, has a tradition of idealism, while Great Britain and the United States have a tradition of pragmatism. That extends to the moral realm. Philosophers like Kant and Hume reflect these diverging traditions. The British philosopher Hume argued that we set goals and use reason to achieve them, which makes reason the slave of our passions. The deeply religious Kant vehemently disagreed, holding that we have a duty to reason, as it is our distinguishing feature. Hume believed morality is part of human nature and depends on popular sentiment. And outcomes matter more than intent, so something is wrong when it makes people angry or produces disaster, even when you have good intentions.

That immensely troubled Kant. Reason must be the foundation of morality, not empathy or anger, as Hume proposed. To Kant, intent matters most. Something is wrong if the intent was to hurt someone. Kant formulated the categorical imperative, a universal moral duty for everyone. Freedom means not being the slave of our passions. We should always treat people right, not only when we like them. And so, you have two views on freedom. The pragmatist one is doing as you please, and the idealist one is overcoming your lower urges and becoming a rational, morally upright person.

Continental European idealism and Anglo-Saxon pragmatism have wider implications than you might realise. A German idealist like Karl Marx devised a grand scheme for how things should be, while an English pragmatist like Adam Smith described capitalism as it worked in practice. In mainland Europe, Frédéric Bastiat would hit a more fundamentalist tone in defence of capitalism. When the United States turned the fight against communism into a moral crusade, it imported its idealist philosophers from the classical liberal and libertarian traditions, such as Friedrich Hayek of Austria, which is culturally close to idealist Germany. The Austrian School of Economics turned into a religious cult in the United States. Being halfway between England and Germany, the Netherlands ended up in the middle of those two traditions, making it both a pragmatic nation of merchants and an idealistic nation of vicars, also because Protestantism had become the predominant religion.

Catholic doctrine holds that faith and good works can save you. Catholics perform good works, such as giving money to the Church, to atone for their sins. It promoted corruption within the Catholic Church through the sale of indulgences. Protestants objected to this moral corruption and took moral integrity very seriously. They made morality a matter of personal choice, making them personally responsible. And so, it should come as no surprise that Immanuel Kant was a Protestant. Catholics are more morally flexible, so Catholic countries in Europe tend to be more corrupt than Protestant ones. Protestants should think for themselves, while Catholics merely follow the Church’s lead, except in the Netherlands, where the Catholics openly rebelled when the Church reversed its liberal reforms to the point that the 1985 Pope visit became an absolute disaster.

And so, despite the presence of a sizeable Roman Catholic minority, the moral conflict defining Dutch culture, the vicar versus the merchant, is ‘dominee versus koopman’ rather than ‘pastoor versus koopman.’ It was the Protestant vicar, not the Roman Catholic priest, who objected to the merchant’s wicked deeds. The merchant was also a Protestant. This dualism still profoundly affects the Dutch, making the Netherlands a nation of merchants and vicars. To a vicar, money is the root of many kinds of evil, while successful merchants are driven by greed. This dualism is challenging and made the Dutch work harder to reconcile the two by finding a pragmatic solution that also meets ethical requirements. It drove the Netherlands into territories that other countries did not go. The country may appear relaxed, but it is tightly organised, not as much as Japan, but still.

The machine no one can replace so far

It was up to the engineers to figure out the solutions. The Dutch engineering tradition dates back to the construction of dykes and windmills to drain lakes and swamps. Half the country is below sea level. Dealing with the unruly nature of water has become a Dutch expertise, as the sea and rivers can rise above the surrounding land. Likewise, Dutch agriculture has developed into a science- and engineering-driven enterprise. As Dutch farming centred on livestock, it exceeded the land’s carrying capacity, forcing Dutch farmers, also under the pressure of environmentalists, to minimise the ecological impact of their agricultural output, making Dutch agriculture one of the most innovative in the world. It is how reconciling idealism and pragmatism works in practice.

Today, the Netherlands is home to the world’s most advanced engineering. That is noteworthy, as we may have to socially engineer the future world society of God’s Kingdom, and the messiah may have to work out the grand design. China and the United States may seem to lead the technology race, but their accomplishments are built on Dutch technology. Without the Dutch corporation ASML, there would be no cutting-edge semiconductor chips needed for AI and quantum computing. The ‘$400M Machine No One Can Replace’ refers to the Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) Lithography systems manufactured by ASML. Here is why these machines are considered irreplaceable:

  • ASML has an absolute monopoly, as it is the only company on Earth that makes these high-volume EUV machines.
  • ASML employs the most extreme engineering. Each machine consists of over 100,000 parts, weighs 165+ tons, and utilises mirrors so flat that if scaled to the size of Earth, the highest bump would be less than one millimetre.
  • The ASML machines fire high-powered lasers at molten tin droplets at 50,000 times per second, creating a plasma that emits light at a 13.5-nanometer wavelength to print microscopic circuits on silicon.
  • The cost and scale are unparalleled. Priced between $200 million and $400 million, these systems require 250 engineers to install over six months, and shipment requires 250+ shipping containers and seven Boeing 747s.
  • The world is fully dependent on this single corporation: Without these machines, chipmakers like TSMC, Samsung, and Intel cannot produce the advanced chips (e.g., for Nvidia GPUs) that power the modern digital economy.

As of early 2026, ASML has introduced a new generation of these tools known as High-NA EUV, which cost approximately $400 million each and are crucial for the ‘Angstrom Era’ of chip manufacturing. China also plans to acquire this technology, but it takes time to reach the same level as ASML. ASML is an offshoot of Philips, which invented the compact cassette and compact disc that geezers like me might still remember. In consumer electronics, marketing and cheap mass production became more important than engineering, so the firm declined. It spun off parts as independent corporations, including ASML, and sold others to focus on medical appliances.

A Dutch building contractor and creationist, Johan Huibers, has constructed two replicas of the biblical Ark of Noah. He first finished a half-scale model in 2004. Huibers later finished a full-scale model in 2012. There are other copies of the ancient vessel elsewhere. Yet, contrary to Huibers’ models, they don’t float and are worthless once the poo really passes the ventilator. As the Netherlands faces the threat of flooding, the Dutch pay close attention to such particulars. And the Dutch have the engineering tradition to pull this off. So, if the deluge comes, it will be up to the Dutch to manage the problem.

The construction of buildings in the Netherlands involves specific engineering issues not found in other countries. Large sections of the Netherlands consist of peat and soft clay. There, homes rest on piles driven into the ground until they reach solid soil, enabling the Dutch to build robust homes on swampy terrain. Likewise, the construction of the Eastern Scheldt Barrier took place on shifting sands, requiring techniques such as the use of mats to create a solid foundation. There are parallels with the project, which aims to find a solid foundation in a shifting environment. Creating a lasting utopian society is a philosophical project akin to building a castle in a swamp. Nothing is given, and everything is open to debate, while it aims to establish a solid structure that can last for 1,000 years or more.

We may soon have to socially engineer the future world society and make it last for a thousand years or more. As the Netherlands is the best country to live in and can accommodate a wide range of diversity, it seems that this social engineering effort has been a success. But what is behind it? It begins with tolerance. What also helped is that the Netherlands has no history of racially antagonistic relationships like those in the United States. There are issues with discrimination and conduct, but racial relationships are not deeply troubled. The Netherlands was open to migrants. That may have to do with the Netherlands being a nation of merchants and vicars. To the merchant, they were good for business, and the vicar cared for those who fled from oppression abroad.

Diversity can benefit team building by combining strengths. Particular groups have particular strengths, and if you can build a team from them, diversity can be a benefit. To illustrate the point, in the 2024 Summer Olympics medal table, the Netherlands ranked 6th, below the United States and China, but above Great Britain and Germany. In the 2026 Winter Olympics medal table, the Netherlands ranks 3rd. The Netherlands never became world football champions, but they reached the final three times. Johan Cruyff is the most well-known Dutch football player. The point here is not that the Dutch are good at sports, for top sport is a waste of energy and resources, but in teamwork. Even individual sports today require a team to get the best out of the athletes.

Immigrants or their children have contributed to these results. Particular groups have particular strengths, and if you can build a team from them, diversity can be a benefit. Yet, social engineering has reached its limits, as people in Europe, including the Dutch, are growing increasingly sour toward immigrants and focus on what goes wrong and the long-term consequences, which are indeed uncertain. If the country is as great as the Netherlands, it is unlikely to get better. It is the best country to live in. Yet, if the rest of the world were to catch up and become as agreeable to live in as the Netherlands, that would be much better. And that might indeed be God’s plan. That requires the most extreme social engineering, so Dutch engineering.

Truth bomb

The 2025 RSF World Press Freedom Index, which you can see as a gauge of civilisation if you like, shows that all that remains of civilisation, so where there is still some freedom of the press, is that tiny, little green area somewhere above and in the middle, that includes the Netherlands. One of the tokens of civilisation under siege by crazed barbarians is the famous Dutch Protocol, a beacon of reason in a world of savages infected by anti-trans hysteria. Whether civilisation can still vanquish the barbarians depends on the superiority of its weaponry. As Judgement Day may be approaching, it seems no coincidence that the International Court of Justice is in The Hague, the Netherlands. It may become the place where the world’s greatest evildoers face justice.

So, in the country of the most extreme engineering, including social engineering, the work on the most advanced weapon of all time, the one that will end the world as we know it, including the world’s religions and the other fantasies people cling to, the Truth Bomb, is nearing its completion. To make it undetectable by radar, sonar, explosives-sniffing hounds, and Geiger counters, the device has been disguised as non-radioactive, odourless text with stealth capabilities, giving it the element of surprise and, with social media, unprecedented swiftness. When the Truth comes out, its enemies have already lost, and they will know it. But will it be in time to prevent the apocalypse and kickstart the New World Civilisation called God’s Kingdom? Storytellers love suspense.

Latest revision: 3 October 2026

Featured image: UFO sightings plotted on world map

1. Numbeo Quality of Life Index. Numbeo (2026).

Joseph Interprets Pharaoh's Dream, c. 1896-1902, by James Jacques Joseph Tissot. Public Domain.

Coincidences for Starters

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Suspicious van

Now comes a selection of coincidences that occurred during my psychosis following the discovery of Natural Money in 2008. These incidents made me think there was more afoot than just me having a psychotic episode, and that God was pulling pranks on me. There is a link between Natural Money and the Bible. Ancient Egypt used money backed by grain stored in the state’s granaries. It had a storage fee like Natural Money. The biblical story of Joseph in Genesis recounts how these granaries came into existence, allegedly that is, for it is unlikely the truth. Only, the Bible being full of shit doesn’t mean that there is no God, or so I had just found out. Just after the discovery of Natural Money, an advertising campaign for the Dutch version of the musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, based on the story of Joseph in Egypt, began. There was a fuss about it in the media, including television episodes in the Autumn of 2008 to select the leading player, so the musical’s start didn’t go unnoticed, not even by me, who doesn’t care about musicals.

The Joseph story gave Natural Money a biblical connection. And it was a usury-free financial system. The Bible, and the Quran even more, oppose usury, which was very suspicious indeed, not to mention that I lived in a town called Sneek, pronounced like ‘snake’, while there was allegedly a snake in Eden. It happens that A******* lived in a suburb of Eindhoven, which means Final Gardens, while the story goes that our journey is from the Garden of Eden to our final destination, the New Eden. And as a cherry on the proverbial pie, the Dutch capital Amsterdam often gets abbreviated to Adam, making it seem that I had been caught up in A*******’s fantasy world. Think of the preparation that has gone into making this happen. Sneek is over 1,000 years old. She could be God. And that was what the psychosis suggested.

Around that same time, a shabby old van with lettering De Windroos (The Windflower) had been parked in front of our home on the other side of the road. It had never been there before and had been there for several weeks. The lettering said it belonged to a furniture company from a nearby village. There seemed to be no reason for the van to be parked there for so long, so it began to attract my attention. Then, my sister-in-law noted that De Windroos is the name of a foundation helping people with psychosis. Not that she knew. And what was happening to me was precisely that: a psychosis. So, that was a most mysterious coincidence, almost spooky even.

It made me ask myself, ‘Are there mind control devices hidden inside that van causing my condition?’ One evening, I checked it out with my son Rob, who had also become curious. We took a flashlight to peek inside. It was nearly empty. There was only a suitcase, an ordinary suitcase, so not one with flashing lights and the like. There were no signs of suspicious activity. I later found out that the furniture company was in liquidation. The lawyer next door executed the liquidation. He held the van in custody and had parked it there. Nothing was worrying about that at least.

It was early December, the time of the Dutch festival of Saint Nicholas, a tradition giving presents and prank poems, which was, together with 1 April Fool’s Day, Ingrid’s favourite time of the year, as she was quite a prankster herself, but no match for the AlmighAlmightyy Eternal Prankster who had disguised Herself as A******* this time, after having been, among others, Mary Magdalene, to prank Jesus, or so I could surmise from the evidence, or so I could surmise from the evidence. We all know what happened to Jesus, so that explained my lack of enthusiasm. So Ingrid’s being a prankster was just part of the preparation for this, it suddenly seemed. We all know what happened to Jesus, so that explained my lack of enthusiasm. So Ingrid’s being a prankster was just part of the preparation for this, it suddenly seemed. In any case, Ingrid made me a present and added a poem, which was meant as a prank. It goes like so (it rhymes in Dutch),

The van that didn’t come,
but was already there

Whose van is that?
That van in front of the door.
It’s been there for a week
and gives off a strange smell.

That weird little van
is in complete control of you.
It comes from an upholstery company from Heeg,
and that is very suspicious.

You have already felt the door handle
But the door was locked
Today, you walked around it with your son
And you discovered something… oh my God!

A suitcase!
Just a suitcase, lying in that van.
What if that thing explodes?
What a disgrace to the street.

Be prepared
and stop whining.
Put this on your head,
then nothing can happen anymore.

The Merciful Saint

A most fitting present to go by that poem would have been a tin foil hat, but it was something else I don’t recall. The poem did not accurately depict the events: the van had been there for more than a week and didn’t smell. The title refers to a song named Het Busje Komt Zo (The Van Is Coming Soon) by Höllenboer, about two drug addicts waiting for the methadone bus that didn’t show up. It is also a well-known phrase in Twente, where I came from, meaning that they will take you to the loony bin soon. That didn’t happen, for I was aware of having a psychosis, making me cautious to act on the suggestions it gave. Among others, I didn’t leave Ingrid, thinking that if A******* wanted me for Herself, She could make Her intentions clear by coming over and taking me. That didn’t happen.

Curing memory loss

In the weeks leading up to the psychosis, Ingrid had added massive doses of curcumin to our food because she feared having dementia. Curcumin is an agent found in turmeric and used in curry powders. In early 2009, the gossip magazines had a windfall when Dutch celebrity Adam Curry left his much older wife, Patricia Paay, for a woman his own age. The furious left-behind Paay filled the tabloids for years to come. Among the noteworthy incidents is Paay pressing a hot bitterball on the head of a gossip journalist and threatening him with a more serious attack involving a much larger croquette. Ingrid is nine years older than I am, while A******* is my age. His first name was Adam, and his last name was Curry. Curry powders contain curcumin. Curcumin supposedly prevents memory loss, and suddenly, after being stuffed with that agent, I ‘remembered’ being the biblical Adam. It was the psychosis, of course, but this coincidence made it all the more remarkable. Ingrid believed that the curcumin had caused my condition.

My neighbour was a real estate agent. We discussed the credit crisis and the real estate market. Then he suddenly said, ‘This is quite strange. Two weeks ago, someone asked if your house was for sale.’ There had never been any interest in my house before. And it happened during the credit crisis, which made it all the more remarkable. As the psychosis had suggested that I might have to leave home soon, selling the house made sense. Ingrid and I decided to sell if there was a high bid. We had discussed moving to a smaller home earlier, so it was not an erratic move in itself. Even a second potential buyer turned up, but no one made a bid, so we kept on living there.

After, as part of the psychosis, discovering hidden messages in pop music, I set out to buy a portable CD player to listen to my old CDs and look for more. I went to an electronics shop and asked for such a device. The man behind the counter said it was an obsolete product. MP3 and MP4 players were in vogue. Then I tried my luck at another shop. The man behind the counter looked at me, flabbergasted, and said, ‘A portable CD player? Are you serious? Someone had just ordered one. The thing arrived a few just days ago, but now that guy doesn’t want it anymore.’ Well, if that isn’t coming in handy, then what is?

A few weeks later, the CD player’s earplugs had gone into hiding in a place I couldn’t think of. After a prolonged search that involved checking the usual places, I still hadn’t found them. It could be that God was making fun of me, once again, making me think, ‘Do You want me to kneel for You?’ I knelt then and saw an MP3 player lying on the ground, along with earplugs I could use. You get the picture. God was making fun of me.

My fortieth birthday was on 26 November 2008. At breakfast, Ingrid lit several candles and said there was a Christmas atmosphere. Afterwards, she blew out the candles and said they smelled like Christmas. Ingrid had never said this on my birthday before, so it contributed to the suggestion that I was the reincarnation of Jesus. That day, the terrorist attacks in Mumbai took place. I found out days later. What happened to me occupied my mind, keeping me from paying attention to the news. It seemed like A*******’s birthday present for me. It is not up to me to criticise God. I had never thought of God being a prankster murdering a few people here and there as a token of Her love. And it seemed better not to say no to this love, as I could be next in line for culling.

That same day, I met Bobby from Romania, who was selling the Street Magazine. He consistently called me lord instead of mister. The Dutch words for lord and mister are similar, so a foreigner can easily make such a mistake. Bobby lived in a holiday cottage on a campsite named De Blauwe Lantaarn (The Blue Lantern) with his wife and two children. He invited me there. When I arrived, he was waiting for me with a blue flashlight. The Dutch word for ‘flashlight’ is ‘zak lantaarn,’ which literally means ‘pocket lantern’. Hence, he showed up with a blue lantern. Strange. I gave him some money to start a new life in Romania.

Natural Money is a reform proposal for the financial system. Someone had copied it and published it on the conspiracy website Niburu.nl. Niburu.nl featured articles about NESARA, another reform proposal for the financial system. NESARA was a cult promoted by a woman calling herself the Dove of Oneness. At the time, I surmised it could be a cover for A*******. On 6 December 2008, I signed up for the email list. In the text body of the signup email, I placed ‘xxx’, just in case the Dove of Oneness was A*******. After signing up, the site displayed the following message: ‘Please note that it will take three days to process your request.’

Three days later, I came across a billboard advertising women’s underwear featuring a woman in her underwear. Next to her was the face of a man resembling Adolf Hitler. The advertisement’s text was, ‘Don’t make up, just break up.’ That was noteworthy as I supposedly was the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler, and A******* had claimed me for Herself. Had She broken up with P*****, and did She want me to leave Ingrid? That same day, Ingrid’s golden necklace, which I once gave her, broke. Ingrid felt that was a bad omen. She saw it as a symbol of our relationship. Also, that same day, I was in the swimming pool and saw the clock reading 13:13:13, which seemed like a bad omen. Yet, a psychosis is weak evidence, making me think that A******* had to make Her intentions clearer for me to leave Ingrid.

The next week, as I was leaving the swimming pool, the door malfunctioned. More precisely, I went out, and the door opened. Then I realised I had left something inside, and the door opened again. Then I wanted to go out again, but it suddenly wouldn’t open. No one had passed that door in the meantime, so it seemed to have something to do with me, and it looked like an invisible psi-force. The door stayed closed as more people gathered at the entrance, trying to get in or out. It took about 15 to 30 minutes for an employee to resolve the issue. By then, I had started resisting the psychosis and had decided not to act upon the suggestions it gave and to wait for more evidence, which didn’t come. The NESARA newsletter was crap, not suggestive of knowledge of monetary matters, so I discontinued the subscription a few months later.

The trumpets blow

On my father’s birthday, 12 December 2008, we visited him in Nijverdal. It was the day I learned about the new hobby of my parents’ neighbours: midwinter horn-blowing. They were blowing Midwinter horns all day. They had been doing that for several years at the start of winter, but it was the first time I heard them do it. The prediction that the blowing of trumpets would herald the End of Times made it seem eerie. By then, the psychosis had receded, and the telepathic connection with A******* had vanished, but I was still open to suggestion. When hearing these same horns blowing years later, they didn’t sound like trumpets at all. So, that is what suggestions can do with you.

The interior of the Catholic Church in Sneek perfectly aligned with my taste. I had been inside at the funeral of Ingrid’s mother a few years before. It was the most beautiful interior, even better than cathedrals. Could God have done this on purpose? So, I said to Ingrid, ‘Perhaps, we should visit the Church one more time and attend a mass.’ Ingrid was fine with the proposal, so we went there on 21 December. There weren’t many people. Most were ageing, so the prospects of this parish seemed bleak. And yet, the Church interior was as I had imagined, perfectly matching my taste. So perhaps God made it especially for me, or fiddled with my taste to make me appreciate that Church’s interior.

That evening, a few days before Christmas, there was a bright star in the sky. It was Venus, but it was unusually bright, much brighter than any star I had ever seen. Now, I had never paid much attention to the stars, so that doesn’t say much. Yet, the so-called Christmas Star became a topic on a few message boards. A spiritual guru from Bilthoven, the village A******* came from, had predicted its coming, which makes it a noteworthy coincidence. The guru further claimed that a Messiah would come soon. She had claimed that several times before, and those predictions had all failed, but this time there indeed was a Christmas Star. Perhaps God tried to make me believe I am the Messiah. There were indeed signs, if you can call these events that, but there was no further evidence, so plenty of reason to remain cautious about what they meant.

Ingrid tried to rent a cottage on Ameland. After a series of miscommunications with people offering cottages, she rented a cottage named Jutter, which added some juice to the coincidence. But there were two cottages named Jutter on Ameland, and Ingrid had rented one while believing she had rented the other. Later, the owner cancelled the booking because he had sold the cottage. Ameland was the island where A******* spent her holidays with her fancy man, P***** in 1989, in 1989, who might be the son of the former presenter of a famous Dutch pop music programme.

And it runs deeper. God might have interfered with my final exams at secondary school. Despite being the worst performer in the literature explanation, I received the best grade after praying that it wouldn’t be terrible. The teacher’s name was Amelink, suggesting a link with Ameland. A******* was often busy with cryptic crosswords. These are about hidden messages, while the explanation of literature is about the hidden messages in literature.

Next to the beach at De Banjaard in Zeeland, where we usually went when we stayed there, and where my parents had gone with my sister and me before, was a hotel. They refurbished it and renamed it Amadore. As AM were the initials of A*******’s first and middle name, and Her last name began with Dor. My parents went to that particular hotel once. Amadore is a hotel chain with multiple hotels in Zeeland. Yet Amadore ran a television advertising campaign featuring the De Banjaard hotel. Strange, but true.

In December 2008, my son Rob watched an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants. In this particular episode, someone lit a fire. SpongeBob takes place underwater. And so, I told Rob that we see water burning, a Dutch saying for seeing something extraordinary or impossible. A few seconds later, a siren began to wail, and a fire engine passed.

A few days later, we made a trip to Groningen. Ingrid noticed a damaged car by the side of the road. A few moments later, the vehicle in front of us broke down. It went on and on. A total of eight cars broke down on the road or stood broken down at the side of the road. The weather wasn’t unusual, but it was noteworthy, as you hardly ever see broken cars, and definitely not more than one during a single trip of that length. Well, well, those were the days. Strange things were happening nearly every day.

Meanwhile at work

Once, I bicycled to the office like I did every day. Next to it was the municipal health service, GGD. When looking at the lettering on the GGD building, perhaps because of the other peculiar events, a thought came up that GGD might stand for ‘Great God’. I then tried to convince myself that it was a stretch to believe that God was showing off Her powers and had put such a sign there. Then, I noticed a car in front of the GGD building with licence plate number 99-GRG-9 (the nines being numbers I don’t recall). GRG could also refer to ‘Great God’. A few days later, when cycling in the same spot near the GGD building, I thought, ‘Now that I have discovered that God exists, what could happen to me?’ Within a second, I ran into a flat tyre. Religious people have to keep the faith on far fewer signs or none at all, and they keep on praying. So, how could I not believe?

On my last day at work in 2008, I updated the agenda with my holidays, so my colleagues would know I wasn’t in. The programme malfunctioned and left out the end date. I checked whether I had specified the end date correctly, and I had. Then I tried again, verifying the end date, but the same error occurred. It could have been a software bug. Only, no one else had that same problem, which, in the light of all that had transpired, made the incident peculiar. It was God’s way of suggesting that it might be my last day at work, and that something might happen during the holidays. Nothing happened, as expected, so it was yet another prank. So God’s plans with me remained obscure.

The following transpired in March 2009. There were two colleagues named Rene in my team. One had a last name starting with an E. The other’s a last name that begins with an H. On that fateful day, an urgent situation required us to access a new system. Rene H knew the password but had not yet arrived. I asked another colleague for his number, and he gave it to me. I called Rene H on his mobile phone. After dialling the number, the phone rang. Suddenly, there was a switching sound, and then a woman with the same last name as Rene E. answered the phone. I excused myself to her. It was the wrong connection.

Then I told the colleague who had given me the number, ‘You have given me the number of the wrong Rene. Please give me the correct number.’ He told me the number was correct. I checked it with a few other colleagues, who confirmed the number. I redialled it, and the same kind of switching occurred again. I put down the phone before someone answered. Then Rene H arrived at the office. The number was correct. His phone was working, and he hadn’t forwarded calls to another number. It made some colleagues make funny remarks about Rene H messing with Rene E’s wife. A technical glitch was out of the question, so it must have been one of God’s pranks.

On 30 January 2009, there was a quiet hour at work. I browsed the Internet and discovered the website Waarmaarraar.nl (true, but strange), which features unusual news items. A particular story caught my attention. It was about a man sexually assaulting a woman who, at the same time, sexually assaulted him during her wet dream. The man’s name was Paul Kut. Kut is the Dutch word for vagina. The following day, I discovered I had had a wet dream that night, but I did not remember it. That is for the better, as I would otherwise have to report on that as well, as you would have been desperate to know.

As I work at the government agency responsible for traffic fines, the following sequence of incidents is noteworthy as well. Around 1995, I lived in Groningen and received a fine for riding my bicycle on the wrong side of the road. That shortcut could make you skip four traffic lights and save up to five minutes. So many people did that. Once, a police officer had positioned himself on that stretch to fine passing bicyclists. He asked me for an ID, which I presented. It was the day before my birthday, so I said, ‘This is a great birthday present.’ The police officer said, ‘Had it been your birthday, I would have let it pass.’

Many years later, probably in 2007, I received a parking ticket for parking in a forbidden spot in the forest near Nijverdal. There were other cars, making me think it was allowed. Had I read the signs, I could have known it wasn’t. We went for a walk, and all the cars had tickets when we returned. That happened to be precisely on my birthday. That made it a remarkable coincidence, since it was my second ticket, and there had been none between them. You could complain, so I wrote a joking complaint letter about a promise a police officer made over a decade earlier. Perhaps it was time to make good on the promise and let it pass, I suggested. As expected, the ‘complaint’ was dismissed.

That story did get a sequel, as I was to get a pass. A few years later, there was road work. One lane was closed, and a traffic light handled the traffic. Just before I passed, it turned red. Also, the car behind me drove on. A police officer stopped me and issued me a fine. I said jokingly to the officer, ‘I am going to save for that one.’ It would have been my third ticket, but it never came. Perhaps the police officer had shredded it because I was driving an old vehicle and appeared poor. When I discussed it at a birthday party, someone suggested I had destroyed that fine, since I worked for the office processing these fines. You must be careful with what you say. People gossip, and even when they are joking, these rumours spread, and your enemies will take advantage.

That third ticket came in nonetheless. In 2017, my sister had moved. The first time I visited her at her new home in Arnhem, I missed a sign saying the speed limit was 50 kilometres per hour. There was a speed camera on that stretch. I drove 63 kilometres per hour. The fine was €111, a remarkable amount.

Featured image: Joseph Interprets Pharaoh’s Dream, c. 1896-1902, by James Jacques Joseph Tissot. Public Domain.

Grades

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Unemployment in the early 1980s was high, especially among young people. And so, I asked my mother, ‘What is the point of studying if you end up unemployed?’ She said that there will always be room for the best. My parents had lived in poverty and had learned that you must work hard to earn your place under the sun. Not counting on luck, thinking I had none whatsoever, made me work very hard at secondary school, thinking I had to be in the top. Occasionally, I knew more than my teachers. My father later told me about a mayor, Kobes, he knew, who had been my history teacher before he became a politician for the Christian Democrats. Mr Kobes told my father that I once corrected him during the lessons. It annoyed him, so he checked his books during the break to discover that I was right. He was not the only one. A geography teacher admitted that I knew more about Russia than he did.

On the final exams, my average grade was the highest (8.6 out of 10). These scores were good but not outstanding. And they were the result of very hard work, so hard that you didn’t have to doubt that I was not a genius. Some pupils had stellar degrees in mathematics without doing much for them, but not me. My grades in mathematics were good but not stellar. If I didn’t prepare for a test, which happened only once in those six years, the grade dropped dramatically to 3.5. And so, for once, my mathematics teacher, Mr Blaak, had a field day, making silly jokes about me spending too much time on the school newspaper. And I never solved the Rubik’s Cube, despite spending a lot of time on it, so there was no reason to doubt that I was intelligent but not brilliant.

My weak spot was explaining literature. It is about guessing the supposed motives of book authors. My scores were consistently poor, the poorest of the class. I considered guessing other people’s motives and decoding hidden messages in texts a waste of time. The authors themselves often marvelled at what the literature experts found out about their intentions from the books they had written. Art and literature were a lot of fluff about feelings, quite often imagined. And I did poorly at it, and it probably has to do with my Asperger’s Syndrome. With the final exams nearing, I began to fret and asked my teacher, Mr. Amelink, to give me additional practice exams. A teacher could only dream of such a fanatic pupil, so he was helpful, but the grades remained as poor as before.

Before the final exam, I prayed that the grade wouldn’t be too bad. Not only to my surprise, my result was the best of everyone, only equalled by Geraldine, a girl with a striking hairdo, a bit alternative, who dressed outspokenly and flaunted her interest in art and literature. Mr. Amelink was also amazed and suggested the extra lessons had made a difference. Another girl became curious about this feat. She said, ‘You have a mysterious way of winning in the end.’ I was too embarrassed to tell about the prayer. It was selfish to pray for a higher grade. People in Africa needed God’s help much more. And it could not be that God granted that wish, or could it? While doing the test, the questions appeared more concrete than usual, making it easier to answer them.

There is a subtle difference between speculating about hidden motives and understanding the meaning of texts. I was good at the latter. It inflated my grades, as explaining texts comprised 50% of the scores in English and French. If a particular English or French word was unfamiliar to me, I could still infer its meaning from the subject of the text, the author’s opinions and the purpose of the paragraph or sentence. By connecting the dots, you often arrive at the correct answers. I hardly made errors in these questions.

At the time, there was no reason to suspect God had anything to do with it. Still, later developments added a peculiar twist to this incident, as I may have uncovered messages from God in pop music lyrics. The teacher’s name, Amelink, suggests a possible link to the isle of Ameland, and Ameland was to become part of a set of peculiar coincidences. A song named The Foundling of Ameland refers to this island. It includes a scene with the foundling walking over the water. But that was still over twenty years into the future. And I disappointed my economics teacher. Had my grade for economics been slightly higher, I would have received a 10, and an economist would have come to the school to give me the diploma. My teacher had hoped for that.

Dutch replica of Noah's Ark. By Ceinturion.

Genesis from Where?

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Creation of the world

Where do the first chapters of Genesis come from? They deal with Creation, the fall, and the flood. Who wrote them? These stories mostly ran in Mesopotamia, the birthplace of several ancient civilisations. These civilisations are much older than the Jewish nation and had myths about Creation and the flood that are at least 1,000 years older than the Jewish Bible. The Jews lived in exile in Babylon when they compiled their scriptures. They took local myths to write the first chapters of Genesis. A Babylonian creation myth, the Enūma Eliš, is a bit like the first chapter of Genesis,

When in the height heaven was not named,
And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name,
And the primaeval Apsu, who begat them,
And chaos, Tiamat, the mother of them both
Their waters were mingled together,
And no field was formed, no marsh was to be seen;
When of the gods, none had been called into being,
And none bore a name, and no destinies were ordained;
Then were created the gods amid heaven,
Lahmu and Lahamu were called into being.

Both Enūma Eliš and Genesis start with chaotic waters before anything comes into being. Genesis says, ‘The earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.’ In both, a fixed, dome-shaped firmament divides these waters from the habitable Earth, and both have descriptions of the creation of celestial objects and the ordering of time.

Creation myths aim to explain why we exist. Humans are naturally curious and desire answers to such questions. Another purpose is justifying the social order. The peasant population toiled to support the lavish lifestyles of the elites, namely the priests and rulers. And so, the gods, or God, created man to work the ground, bring offerings to the temple, and pay taxes. The Jewish Bible lays out in great detail the required offerings to the temple and the priests in Leviticus, so Judaism looks like yet another peasant-exploitation scheme devised by priests.

Men and women

The creation of man in Genesis resembles the creation account in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, which describes how the gods, tired of working on creation, created a man to do the job. They put a god to death and mixed his blood with clay to produce the first human in the likeness of the gods,

In the clay, god and man
Shall be bound,
To a unity brought together;
So that to the end of days
The Flesh and the Soul
Which in a god have ripened –
That soul in a blood kinship is bound.

In Genesis, God created humans in the likeness of the gods (1:26) and rested after six days of hard labour (Genesis 2:2-3). God then made a man to work the ground (Genesis 2:5) and made him from soil (Genesis 2:7). In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the gods created the first man in Eden, the garden of the gods in Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The same happened in Genesis (Genesis 2:14). There is another story about the origin of man in the story of Enki and Ninmah. The gods, burdened with the task of creating the Earth, complained to Namma, the primordial mother. Namma then kneaded some clay, placed it in her womb, and gave birth to the first humans.

The Mesopotamians thus had at least two creation stories: one in which the gods created humans from soil and another in which a goddess gave birth to humanity. The story of Eve and Adam in Genesis relates to these two tales. In another myth, Enki and Ninhursag, the mother goddess, created the goddess Ninti to heal the god Enki’s rib. The name Ninti translates to both ‘Lady of Life’ and ‘Lady of the Rib.’ That is where the idea of the rib might have originated. Likely, Adam was Eve’s son in one of the underlying original tales, and the Jewish scribes used other myths to tailor the story of Eve and Adam to their theological requirements. Adam’s purpose was to be a companion to Eve rather than to work the garden, as the Bible now claims.

The epic further details that the first man, Enkidu, was wild, naked, muscular, hairy and uncivilised. The gods then sent a nude woman to tame him. By making love to him for a week, she turned him into a civilised man of wisdom, who was like a god. She made him a meal and clothed him. In Genesis, Eve made Adam eat (Genesis 2:6), which gave him the knowledge of the gods. Eve and Adam were naked (Genesis 3:7) before the Lord gave them clothes (Genesis 3:21).

The Epic of Gilgamesh differs from the Genesis account, but the similarities are striking. In both stories, a god creates a man from the soil. The man lives naked in nature. A woman then tempts him. In both accounts, the man accepts food from the woman, receives knowledge, covers his nakedness, and leaves his former life. The appearance of a snake stealing a plant of immortality in the epic is also noteworthy. There were likely similar stories circulating, and we have only a few remaining clay tablets. There might also have been a story where the first woman, Eve, gave birth to the first man, Adam.

Great Flood

The Great Flood in Genesis also closely resembles the account in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Few scholars doubt that the epic is the source of the biblical narrative. The epic notes that the city of Shurrupak, situated on the banks of the Euphrates River, had grown. The deity Enlil could not sleep because of the sounds the city made. To deal with the noisy humans below, the gods agreed to drown them all.

The deity Ea warned his friend Utnapishtim and asked him to build an ark. With his children and hired men, Utnapishtim built an enormous boat and went on it with his relatives, animals, and craftsmen. The storm god, Adad, sent a terrible thunderstorm with pouring rains that drowned the city. Then, the gods regretted what they had done.

After seven days, the weather calmed. Utnapishtim looked around and saw an endless sea. He saw a mountain rising out of the water. After another seven days, he released a dove into the air. The dove returned, having found no place to land. He then released a swallow that also came back. Then, he released a raven that didn’t come back. Utnapishtim disembarked and made an offering to the gods.

According to the Bible, everyone had grown evil. Only Noah was blameless and faithful. For that reason, God decided to send a flood to wipe out humanity, but to spare Noah and his family. God then ordered Noah to build an ark that could also harbour males and females of every animal species and provide food for them all.

The flood came for forty days. No one survived. After forty days, Noah sent out a raven. Then, he sent a dove to see if the waters had receded. Once the waters receded, the Lord instructed Noah to leave the ark with his wife, his sons, and their wives, and to release the animals. Noah then disembarked and made a sacrifice.

Greek version

A long time ago, there was a great war between the Olympic gods and the so-called Titans. Some Titans sided with the gods. Prometheus, whose name means ‘thinking ahead’, was one of them. He foresaw that the Olympic gods, led by Zeus, the supreme god, would win the battle. After the battle, Zeus rewarded him by granting him the power to create various life forms. Prometheus, with Zeus’ permission, first created animals and then decided to make upright figures, modelled after the gods. Without consulting Zeus, Prometheus then breathed the breath of life into humans, displeasing the supreme god. Prometheus also stole the gods’ fire and gave it to humans, which was even less indicative of foresight.

Zeus punished Prometheus for his transgressions by tying him to a rock. Every day, an eagle came by to peck out his liver, which would grow back during the night, a torment without end. A hero named Heracles, however, later liberated him. Zeus also punished the humans. He ordered Hephaestus, the god of blacksmithing, to create a beautiful but dangerous and inquisitive new creature, the woman. Zeus then sent the woman, whose name was Pandora, to humankind, gave her a box, and warned her in strong terms never to look inside, even though he knew she wouldn’t be able to resist her curiosity. All the gods had put dangerous gifts within the box.

The men, impressed by her looks, adopted Pandora. One day, the curious Pandora could no longer resist the urge and decided to open the box. Out of the box then came all the disasters that have plagued humanity since: famine, disease, earthquakes, and war. The disaster spread like lightning among the people who, until then, had lived free from troubles and disease. Women told an alternative account in which Pandora didn’t open the box, but her husband, a brother of Prometheus named Epimetheus, whose name means ‘thinking afterwards’. There are a few noteworthy parallels with the Bible:

  • The humans were created in the image of the gods.
  • Humans were created by breathing the breath of life into them.
  • The creation of woman occurred after the creation of man.
  • The woman’s curiosity brings disaster to humankind.
  • Pandora’s box plays a role similar to the tree of knowledge in Eden.

The ancient Greeks also had a flood myth of their own. The Greek supreme god, Zeus, had decided to punish humanity with a flood. King Lycaon of Arcadia had sacrificed a boy to Zeus, who, appalled by the offering, decided to end human evil by unleashing a deluge. Deucalion and Pyrrha survived Zeus’ world-destroying flood by building an ark. Warned by the titan Prometheus, they sailed on and landed on Mount Parnassus, where the goddess Themis instructed them to repopulate the earth by throwing stones that would become new people. The similarities between these stories suggest that cultures influenced each other, yet also diverged in significant ways.

Latest revision: 23 September 2025

Featured image: Dutch replica of Noah’s Ark. By Ceinturion CC BY-SA 3.0. Wikimedia Commons.