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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 making it 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. 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 has progressed the furthest in that scheme.

That 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 ultimate 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 now desperately needs.

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 Dutch passenger jet. Ukrainian officials and 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 outcome matters more than intent, so something is wrong when it makes people angry or when it 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.

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. That is the sad truth about humans. Weapons win arguments, not reason. As Judgement Day may be approaching, it seems no coincidence that the International Court of Justice is in The Hague, the Netherlands.

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 humans 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. So, it has 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: 25 August 2026

Featured image: UFO sightings plotted on world map

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

Shepherd and sheep in Saudi Arabia

Scheme of History

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The Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam contradict each other on several issues, most of them minor, with the most important one being whether Jesus is merely human or the Son of God. In hindsight, it is possible to summarise the grand scheme of God’s plan via Biblical themes or historical developments.

Creation: God created the world and assigned humans as its caretakers. Humans are created in the image of God. Hence, God is somewhat like us, which aligns with us being simulations created by an advanced post-human civilisation.

Fall: Humanity’s disobedience brought evil into the world. Humans wished to know the truth themselves and become like God. Ambitions are humanity’s main problem. The Tower of Babel represents the collapse of advanced civilisation.

Covenant and Kingdom: God made covenants with Abraham, Moses, David, and also with Muhammad to establish Her people and rule. The spread of the Abrahamic religions is a prerequisite for the establishment of the Kingdom of God.

Messiah: By the Fall, humans set the path to the apocalypse in motion by acquiring knowledge. Averting it is a global collective-action problem that requires everyone to adhere to the same social contract. By his sacrifice, Jesus laid the groundwork.

Exile and Return: Israel’s exile to Babylon symbolises humanity’s exile from Eden, with the messiah providing the way back home. The simple life in Eden is the opposite of the advanced civilisation of Babylon, so Paradise is a return to nature.

Restoration: The final chapter of the biblical story promises a new heaven and a new earth, where God restores creation and dwells with Her people in the New Eden. The Quran stresses this particular interpretation.

Apart from these Biblical themes, there is a historical scheme. In short, it is:

  • Creating a tradition of monotheism out of Judaism with the help of Zoroastrianism.
  • Creating a tradition of reason and objective enquiry, starting with Greek philosophy.
  • God revealing Herself to Jesus, thereby contradicting the Jewish religion.
  • Resolving that confusion, turning Christianity into a baffling religion.
  • Making monotheism uncompromising and spreading it via Christianity and Islam.
  • Letting the Greek tradition of reason and objective enquiry revive in Europe.
  • That tradition came to include science and ideas of social progress.
  • It included ideologies and social experiments, giving us insights to build on.
  • The uncovering of the plot in which religion meets reason and objective enquiry.
  • Building a utopian society in which humanity survives with the help of a messiah.
  • Quite possibly, humankind lives happily ever after, like in a fairy tale.

Latest update: 15 May 2026

Khadijah, Mother of the Believers

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Bride of Muhammad

Like Christians, Muslims believe Jesus will return (Quran 4:159, 43:61). Even more crucial is our return to Eden, which is only sparsely mentioned in the Jewish Bible (Ezekiel 36:22-38) and the New Testament (Revelation 22:1-5). The Quran refers to Eden using terms such as Gardens and Paradise 147 times, or 3 * 7 * 7. If you’re into numbers with religious significance, that is most remarkable. It is even more significant because humans wrote and edited the Bible, so if there are magic numbers in it, some scribe probably made it that way during a lifetime of boredom leading to number-crunching.

The Quran was only written down after decades of oral recitation. None of the reciters knew the entire Quran by heart. After several decades, they wrote down the verses as the reciters remembered them. As tradition goes, the Quran was written down as remembered, without editing or even ordering, making the Quran’s incoherence and repetitions signs of the truthfulness of that account.

Hence, God ordering the angels to prostrate before Adam seven times in the Quran is more miraculous than Jesus saying seven times, ‘I am’ in the Gospel of John. The latter is not even a miracle, because someone could have done that intentionally, given that the text has undergone several rounds of editing and the author seemed to be a learned person. In that sense, the Quran is uncorrupted by humans. There may be accidental errors but no intentional changes, at least if the tradition is true, which is plausible.

And so, numerological signs, such as verse 36:36, which says that God created everything in pairs, and the fact that 36 is six times six, are noteworthy and signs of the Quran’s alleged divine origin. According to the tradition, no human ever arranged the verses to create a pair within a pair in a verse that says God created everything in pairs. Paradise is supposedly the final destination of the righteous. The Quran refers to the Garden of Eden with phrases such as ‘fruits from that garden’ and ‘spouses.’ For instance (Quran 2:25).

Quran origins

Muslims believe that the Quran was revealed to Muhammad by God, with the Archangel Gabriel serving as the intermediary. The Quran lacks chronological order and repeats itself. Scholars believe its historical accuracy is inferior to that of the Bible in describing the same events. And so, you might find it hard to believe that this scratchy collection of sayings, which Muslims claim has unparalleled artistic value and is so brilliantly composed that it is beyond the capabilities of even the brightest minds to reproduce, is the word of God and meant to correct corruptions in previous Jewish and Christian scriptures, as Muslims claim. But if you don’t know Arabic and rely on a foreign translation, you cannot assess the Quran’s artistic value. And God works in mysterious ways. The first Muslims memorised the verses and didn’t write them down.

Memorising such a lengthy text for decades is prone to errors. And the Muslims fought several battles that took the lives of some of those who knew these verses. To reduce the risk of verses going lost in this manner, the early Muslims divided the task of memorising the Quran and assigned multiple men to recall the same verses. How well they did that is anyone’s guess. It explains a great deal about why the Quran is the way it is. Those who later wrote down the Quran didn’t edit the verses or present them chronologically because humans shouldn’t distort God’s words. If only early Christians had shown that kind of reverence for their scriptures, Christianity would have been an entirely different religion.

Historical analysis suggests that much of the Quran originated from previously extant Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Christian sources, so much of it is a recycling of existing myths. The Arab desert was far from Rome, so local Christians held deviant views that the Church considered heretical, such as that Jesus didn’t die for our sins, that Jesus was human and not the Son of God and that Jesus didn’t die on the cross but that there had been some ploy to make people believe that. The Quran mentions that Jesus created birds from clay and breathed life into them (3:48-49, 5:109-110). The Gospel of Thomas also mentions this. Speaking from the cradle, Jesus defended his mother against accusations of sexual immorality (Quran: 19:27-30).

Parts of the Quran have no previously known sources. They could have been part of God’s message that the Archangel Gabriel supposedly dispatched to Muhammad. The Quran also adds a few juicy details to existing stories that the Jews have failed to mention in their Bible. These might have been local tales circulating in the area. An example is King Solomon gathering an army of ghosts (djinn, so not spirits of deceased humans), men and birds, entering the valley of the ants, and ants talking to each other (Quran 27:15-18),

Indeed, We granted knowledge to David and Solomon. And they said in acknowledgement, ‘All praise is for God Who has privileged us over many of His faithful servants.’

And David was succeeded by Solomon, who said, ‘O people! We have been taught the language of birds, and been given everything we need. This is indeed a great privilege.’

Solomon’s forces of ghosts, humans, and birds were rallied for him, perfectly organised.

And when they came across a valley of ants, an ant warned, ‘O ants! Go quickly into your homes so Solomon and his armies do not crush you, unknowingly.’

In virtual reality, these things can happen. We have no evidence, but some things are more plausible than others. Talking ants are as believable as a serpent talking to Eve. Equally intriguing is the makeup of Solomon’s army, of which the Bible says nothing. Still, Muslims claim Muhammad was the last prophet before the End Times and that the Quran corrects mistakes and omissions in the Jewish and Christian scriptures. At first glance, this is not particularly convincing, but the Quran contains a few discrepancies that seem more meaningful in hindsight:

  • The Quran discusses Adam’s creation extensively but says little about how Eve came to be. The story of the rib is absent. The Quran claims that humans originate from one soul (Quran 39:6), like the creation in God’s image (Genesis 1:27).
  • The Quran doesn’t blame Eve for the Fall. Eve and Adam transgressed together. One passage explicitly blames Adam (Quran 20:120-121).
  • There is no original sin in Islam. The Quran states that Eve and Adam repented and that God forgave them (Quran 2:37, 7:23). The Quran doesn’t claim that Jesus was a redeemer for the sins of humankind.
  • The Quran names Jesus the Son of Mary and confirms the virgin birth, thereby implying that Jesus had no father, and because Christians call him the Son of God, it opens up the possibility that God’s name was Mary.
  • In the Quran, God orders the angels to prostrate before Adam, while the New Testament says that the angels must bow before Jesus, implying that Jesus could be Adam. The sevenfold mention could signal importance.
  • Finally, the Quran stresses the return to Paradise 147 times (3*7*7). Although the Jewish and Christian scriptures pay little attention to our return to Eden, the Quran mentions it so often that it could be of the utmost importance.

God ordering the angels to bow before Adam and Satan refusing to do so was a Jewish theme that some Christians, and later the Muslims, took over. One of the earliest accounts of Satan’s fall as a result of the conflict with Adam comes from the Life of Adam and Eve, a retelling of their lives from around 200 AD. God first formed, animated, and endowed Adam with the image and likeness of his creator. The archangel Michael brought him to bow before God. God then confirmed the creation of Adam in His image and likeness. Then, Michael summoned the rest of the angels and ordered them to bow before Adam, but Satan refused. The sevenfold repetition of this theme in the Quran suggests that there may be more to it than some obscure story entering the Quran by accident.

The Hidden Secret

The Quran claims that God is the greatest schemer (Quran 3:54, 7:99, 8:30, 10:21, 13:42) and capable of deception (Quran 4:88, 5:41, 11:34, 14:4). The existence of different religions and theological disputes is part of God’s plan. Otherwise, the message of Islam would have been more convincing. After 1400 years, that message has yet to convince 80% of the world’s population. The Quran is said to contain a hidden secret. Chapter 74 of the Quran is titled The Cloaked One or The Hidden Secret. The former name is the translation of its title, while the latter refers to its content. The cloaked one is Muhammad. The chapter further mentions that 19 angels guard hell. The conflating of cloak and hidden secret suggests a disguise. About the number 19, the Quran says (Quran 74:31),

“We have made their number [that of the angels] only as a test for the disbelievers so that the People of the Book [Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians] will be certain, and the believers [Muslims] will increase in faith, and neither the People of the Book nor the believers will have any doubts, and so that those hypocrites with sickness in their hearts and the disbelievers will argue, ‘What does God mean by such a number?’ In this way, God leaves whoever He wills to stray and guides whoever He wills. And none knows the forces of your Lord except He. And this description of hell is only a reminder to humanity.”

Muslims insist that it contains a clue proving the Quran’s divine origin. The verse suggests that the number 19 holds significance beyond the number of angels mentioned. In 1974, a fellow named Rashad Khalifa claimed to have discovered a mathematical code hidden in the Quran based on the number 19. It gave rise to a numerological cult and countless films on YouTube made by beard-wearing men that can bore you to death.

Numbers are meaningless, but the Quran implies there is more to that number and that it contains a proof of some kind, a hidden secret. So, what could the hidden secret be? Chapter 19 is titled ‘Mary’ and is about the Virgin Mary, the stand-in for God, the Mother Goddess. The hidden secret may be that God’s name was Mary, something only God could know. The cloak may refer to God appearing as a man while being a woman, or to the Virgin Mary, as the veil that conceals God’s identity.

Virgin birth

The Quran corroborates the virgin birth of Jesus (Quran 4:171) and claims that Jesus is not the Son of God, thereby implying that Jesus had no father. The virgin birth is a miracle of the Mother Goddess. Christians invented that tale because, if God is Jesus’ Father, then he can’t have a human father. Jesus was Adam, the Son of Eve, so it also replaced Adam’s birth from the Virgin Eve. The Quran consistently names Jesus the Son of Mary (Quran 2:87, 4:171, 61:6), while Christians call him the Son of God. Perhaps there was a Christian tradition in the Middle East that did so. Archaeologists excavated near the location commonly known as Armageddon, a 5th-century AD Greek inscription stating ‘Christ, born of Mary.’1 The odd thing is that it doesn’t say Son of God.

The Quran claims God has no children and that Jesus was not God’s son (Quran 6:100-102, 17:111, 18:4-5, 19:88-92). The reason is that the Meccan supreme deity, Allah, had a wife and children before God claimed this title. And the Virgin Mary wasn’t God either. The repetition of the phrase Son of Mary suggests importance. It stresses that God is not Jesus’ father, and it may imply that God’s name is Mary.

The star and crescent became the symbol of Islam. This symbol has a long history predating Islam, as it was associated with a Moon goddess. The moon represents the woman, and the star the child (Genesis 37:9). Hence, the Islamic symbol is akin to the Madonna and Child, or to the relationship between Khadijah bint Khuwaylid and Muhammad. She was fifteen years older and could have been his mother. The Son of God thus means Son of Mary, as Mary Magdalene was God. The appropriate picture is the Madonna and Child, along with the crescent-and-star symbol of Islam. And so, the same symbolism sneaked into Islam in the same sneaky fashion as it did with the Madonna and Child in Christianity, which is very sneaky indeed, and adds substance to the saying, ‘God works in mysterious ways.’

Return to Eden

Like Christians, Muslims believe Jesus will return (Quran 4:159, 43:61). Even more crucial, however, is our return to Eden, only sparsely mentioned in the Jewish Bible (Ezekiel 36:22-38) and the New Testament (Revelation 22:1-5). The Quran refers to Eden using terms such as Gardens and Paradise 147 times, or 3 * 7 * 7. If you’re into numbers with religious significance, that is most remarkable. It is even more significant because humans wrote and edited the Bible, so if there are magic numbers in it, some scribe probably did so during a lifetime of boredom and number-crunching. The Quran, however, is the result of decades of oral recitation, during which parts were changed or lost. And none of the reciters knew the entire Quran by heart. After several decades, they wrote down the verses as the reciters remembered them. It is possible that there was editing, but the makeup of the Quran doesn’t contradict this account.

If this account is true, God ordering the angels to prostrate before Adam seven times in the Quran is more miraculous than Jesus saying seven times, ‘I am’ in the Gospel of John. The latter is not even a miracle, because someone could have done that intentionally, given that the text has undergone several rounds of editing and the author seemed to be a learned person. In that sense, the Quran is uncorrupted by humans, meaning there may be accidental errors, but no intentional changes. The numerological signs, such as verse 36:36, which says that God created everything in pairs, and the fact that 36 is six times six, are God’s jokes. In all likelihood, no human ever decided to arrange the verses to create such a pair within a pair in a verse that says God created everything in pairs. Paradise is supposedly the final destination of the righteous. The Quran refers to the Garden of Eden with phrases such as ‘fruits from that garden’ and ‘spouses.’ For instance (Quran 2:25),

And give good tidings to those who believe and do righteous deeds that they will have gardens [in Paradise] beneath which rivers flow. Whenever they are provided with a provision of fruit from there, they will say, ‘This is what we were provided with before.’ And it is given to them in likeness. And they will have therein purified spouses, and they will abide therein eternally.

The promise of spouses in Paradise could be a ploy to make horny young men fight for Islam without fear of death. And it worked well as the initial blitz of Islam was nearly as astounding as Hitler’s. In a time without motorised vehicles, the initial speed of Islamic conquest was spectacular. The New Eden is a central theme in the Quran, while the Jewish Bible and the Gospel hardly mention it. The repetition implies that it is of the utmost significance. Here, the Quran corrects Judaism and Christianity. Jews and Christians view God’s plan as a journey from the depraved city of Babylon to God’s city of Jerusalem, the New Jerusalem. Instead, we might go to the New Eden, as it is the core of the final revelation given to Muhammad, at least if we take repetition as a sign of importance. God’s plan, thus, is to bring us to the Final Gardens of Paradise, modelled after Eden.

Given the raging hormones of young men, Quran verses 24:31 and 33:59 urge women to wear head coverings or body garments to demonstrate that they are respectable and should not be harassed. Christianity comes with a similar commandment (1 Corinthians 11:2–16). Ideally, as it was in Paradise, women should be able to go naked without being harassed. That is what feminist activists argue for, and that rape and harassment are a problem of men, not of women, so that you can never blame women for being bothered or raped by men. Culture can go a long way toward disciplining men, but the risk remains, as a few can’t control themselves. It would greatly help to avoid confusion when women took the initiative, as Khadijah did with Muhammad.

The idea of a New Jerusalem in Judaism and Christianity has a historical origin. The Jews compiled most of their scriptures during their exile in Babylon and shortly after. Babylon was a centre of empire and civilisation. After the Jews had returned to Israel, they interpreted their journey as a move from the depraved city of Babylon to God’s city of Jerusalem. They received assistance from the Persian leader Cyrus the Great, who conquered the Babylonian Empire and permitted the Jews to return to their homeland. Christians took over this theme. If we go from Babylon to Eden, we get a new theme. Babylon represented advanced civilisation. In Eden, life was simple. That is where this seems to be heading.

Latest revision: 18 August 2026

1. 1,500-year-old ‘Christ, born of Mary’ inscription found in Israel. Mark Milligan (2024). Heritage Daily.

Featured image: top small written Arab phrase “Umm ul Muminin”(Mother of the believers), then in centre Big written “Khadijah”, and bottom small written Arab honour phrase ‘Radhi allahu anha.’

Last Adam

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Adam is the Son of God (Luke 3:38) and Jesus the Firstborn of all Creation (Colossians 1:15). Was Jesus Adam reincarnated? And was Adam born? Firstborn means you are the family heir, so the Firstborn of All Creation means you inherited the world. That is the standard interpretation with which most scholars would likely agree. The Christian doctrine states that Jesus already existed with God before creation and thus was not Adam. That is not what the words say, nor is it what Jesus’ inner circle believed. Existence before creation is not the same as being born. And Adam was the Son of God. When Paul was writing Colossians, he was also working on Christian theology, and his thoughts were still in flux. And so, there may be more to it than theologians can explain.

Theologians regurgitate a century-old, pre-chewed menu of previous generations of theologians. Do theologians ever come up with something new rather than yet another insight on a hair-splitting detail? Do they discuss the simulation argument? No! They occupy themselves with century-old controversies. Why would Jesus sacrifice himself for Adam’s transgression? It makes sense if Jesus believed he was Adam, who had to redeem himself. That was an idea Paul entertained for a while, for Jesus thought he was Adam. Only that generated serious theological problems. How could the perfect sinless Jesus also be the sinner Adam? And so, his mind ground on. Eventually, Christians came to believe that Jesus existed before creation, as laid out in the Gospel of John.

Don’t blame theologians for not being sufficiently imaginative. You could easily go astray. That ireful cloud that led the Israelites out of Egypt in a 2,500-year-old Jewish fairy tale was Eve from an even older Iraqi fairy tale, who gave birth to Adam, which the surviving Jewish version of the Iraqi fairy tale doesn’t mention. And by the way, that cloud from the fairy tale was Judge Deborah, the first historical person in the Bible. She started the Jewish nation by slaying Israel’s enemies and claiming that a magical cloud named Yahweh did it. She later married Jesus as Mary Magdalene and Muhammad as Khadijah bint Khuwaylid. You can’t guess it unless God gives you the clue that unlocks the mystery.

The message of Jesus being Adam still features in Christian doctrine as a remnant of an original belief. Jesus is the New Adam, and his birth mother is the New Eve, which implies that Jesus married his mother in a previous life. And precisely that was the original message of Christianity. Paul compares Jesus to Adam. In Romans, he writes, ‘Just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.’ (Romans 5:19)

Paul didn’t blame Eve for the Fall. Later writers posing themselves as Paul cast the blame on Eve. But Paul, a god-fearing individual who still knew the truth, wasn’t that daring. In 1 Corinthians, Paul noted, ‘As in Adam all die, so in Christ, all will be made alive.’ Jesus thus became the redeemer for Adam’s Fall. Paul called Jesus the Last Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45). Jesus being Adam’s reincarnation was an early Christian belief until the narrative changed to Christ’s existence before creation. So you find the comparison only in Paul’s letters, the earliest surviving documents of Christianity.

The Quran underpins the idea that Jesus is Adam. You have to read between the lines. Jesus was like Adam in the way he was created (Quran 3:59), and the Quran supports the Christian claim that Jesus was born of a virgin (Quran 3:47, 19:16-22). Hence, they are both ‘born of a virgin.’ Not really, of course, but people believed it. And several Quran verses state that God ordered the angels to prostrate before Adam (Quran 2:34, 7:11, 15:28-29, 17:61, 18:50, 20:116, 38:71-74). The Quran mentions it seven times, making it appear significant. And seven times, Jesus says ‘I am’ in the Gospel of John, stressing his supposed divinity.

The Epistle to the Hebrews claims that God made Jesus, the firstborn, into the world, superior to the angels and made the angels worship him (Hebrews 1:1-7). And if the Quran is a message from God, the presumed guy in the sky, who possesses superpowers but is not Superman, and also not a man, then Jesus could be Adam. The Quran also claims Jesus will return (Quran 43:61). If he were Adam, God’s firstborn, who had already returned once, he could. Otherwise, it all gets even odder than it already is.

Latest revision: 16 August 2025

Mohammed receiving his first revelation from the angel Gabriel

Religious Experiences and Miracles

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The Jewish people still exist after 2,500 years, while they have not had a homeland for most of the time. That is a remarkable feat. Then Christianity replaced the existing religions in the Roman Empire in one of history’s strangest twists. Somehow, the message of personal salvation through Christ caught on. In the third century, Manichaeism emerged as a new religion. It taught that there was a struggle between the good spiritual world of light and the evil material world of darkness. The prophet Mani, who grew up in a Jewish-Christian Gnostic sect, claimed to have received revelations meant for the entire world, which were to replace all existing religions. It instantly became a spectacular success, spread everywhere in the known world, and could have overtaken Christianity, but it didn’t. A pivotal, and possibly decisive, moment was the conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity in 312 AD. He made Christianity the favoured religion in the Roman Empire.

A few centuries later, a small band of Arab warriors established an empire that stretched from the Atlantic to India, spreading the new religion of Islam, in an even stranger and more rapid historical development. Is it a realistic scenario that the supposedly illiterate camel driver Muhammad became a crafty statesman after seeing an angel telling him he came to deliver messages from the God of the Christians and the Jews? After Muhammad’s death, his followers went on to defeat the Byzantine and Persian empires. At the same time, Manichaeism made a one-way trip into the dustbin of history, while in the third century, it appeared to be on the verge of becoming the world’s leading religion. So, why did Mani fail and why did Muhammad succeed? Historians can explain it, but it is an account of what happened rather than an explanation. The question remains, could it occur without someone pulling the strings?

So much can happen, and what happens now has once been extremely improbable. Your reading this text here and now seems highly unlikely a few decades ago. Think of all the things you could have done instead. Or you could have been dead. Yet, you wouldn’t consider your reading this text a miracle. Proselytising religions like Christianity and Islam have a built-in inclination to grow. That may not be the ultimate answer. Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship the same deity. Our universe could be a simulation, and someone could have planned it. But who is to say it couldn’t have happened otherwise?

When Islam arrived on the scene, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians in the area already believed in an all-powerful creator. Muhammad had met them on his travels, so he was familiar with these religions. Before that, Christianity had faced an uphill struggle. While the Roman state suppressed this religion, pagans left their gods behind and accepted the Christian God as the only true God. And they did so in large numbers.

That begs for an explanation, even though the conversion of Romans to Christianity was a gradual process that took centuries. The Romans occasionally half-heartedly persecuted Christians and executed a few thousand of them over the centuries, not for being a Christian but for not paying their respects to the Roman gods. Despite that, the number of Christians increased 2-3% per year between 30 AD and 400 AD. Each Christian may have converted just one or two persons on average. Over time, exponential growth enabled Christianity to grow from about 100 followers in 30 AD to 30 million by 400 AD.

Such a gradual and steady growth over centuries was somewhat unique for a religion, and so was the blitz conquest of Islam later on. Most people in the Roman Empire, and everywhere else for that matter, lived miserable lives. The promise of an eternal blissful afterlife may have been too tempting for those poor, wretched souls to resist. However, the most often cited reason for conversions was stories about the miracles Christians performed.2 Only in the Middle Ages did the sword become the most compelling Christian argument as Christianity spread further and became integral to European politics. That was not the case in the Roman Empire, so miracles and stories about them were crucial.

An early miracle was Jesus’ appearance to a few followers after his crucifixion. The New Testament mentions miracles that the disciples allegedly performed. These accounts may be exaggerated, but the theme of miracles remains a consistent one in Christianity to this day. The Roman Catholic Church has a rich folklore surrounding relics that are believed to possess magical properties because they are said to have been touched by Jesus. The most famous relics are the Crown of Thorns in Paris, the mysterious Holy Grail, the chalice from which Jesus is said to have drunk, and the Shroud of Turin, a piece of linen cloth with a supposed image of Jesus’ face.

Many of the miracles attributed to these relics are unverifiable or can have other causes, such as luck, but a few cannot be easily explained away. The Roman Catholic Church keeps a record of them. On message boards, people tell stories about prayers heard and miraculous healings. Many of these stories may result from chance or other causes, such as a misdiagnosis or someone seeking attention by lying, but that is not always the case.

A recurring theme is the appearance of the Virgin Mary and other miracles related to her. Thousands of people have seen her. She appeared several times in Venezuela. She revealed herself to Maria Esperanza Medrano de Bianchini in 1976, who received exceptional powers. She could tell the future, levitate, and heal the sick. In Egypt, Mary appeared at a Coptic Church between 1983 and 1986. Muslims have also seen her there. There have been many more Virgin Mary appearances. The most notable sequence occurred in Portugal at Fatima between 13 May and 13 October 1917.

The grand finale was on 13 October 1917, when the Sun reportedly spun wildly and tumbled down to Earth, radiating in indescribably beautiful colours, before stopping and returning to its normal position. Some 40,000 attendants witnessed Mary’s performance. They had gathered because three shepherd children had prophesied that the Virgin Mary would perform a miracle on that date and location. Faking this was hard to do, considering the technology available in 1917. A lack of holographic equipment would have made the effort challenging, not to mention changing the location of the Sun, which is a large ball many times larger than Earth, thus making it difficult to move around. And somehow, the Sun only moved in Fatima, which can only happen in virtual reality.

Jesus also appeared a few times, but less frequently than the Virgin Mary. An intriguing account comes from Kenneth Logie, a preacher of the Pentecostal Holiness Church in Oakland, California, in the 1950s. In April 1954, Logie was preaching at an evening service. During the sermon, the church door opened. Jesus came walking in, smiling to the left and the right. He walked right through the pulpit. Then he placed his hand on Logie’s shoulder. Jesus spoke to him in a foreign tongue. Fifty people witnessed the event. Five years later, a woman in that same church suddenly disappeared. Jesus took her place. He wore sandals and a shiny white robe. He had nail marks on his hands, which were dripping with oil. After several minutes, Jesus disappeared, and the woman reappeared. Two hundred people have seen it. It was on film as Logie had installed film equipment, because strange things were happening.3 Such events can convince people that the message of Christianity, even though it may seem highly peculiar, is correct, as Zeus and Thor failed to show up and perform some tricks.

Mary and Christ are part of a folklore where genuine experiences mix with mental cases seeking attention or con artists profiting at the public’s expense. Usually, there are no 40,000 witnesses, verifiable evidence, or camera footage of what occurred. The Vatican is troubled by self-proclaimed seers, fortune-tellers, prophets, and messengers who believe they have a special bond with the Virgin Mary or possess weeping Madonna statues, which they may or may not have prepared to weep. These people could be delusional, crave attention or, like the televangelists in the United States, be after your money. That is not always the case. If you have a religious experience, don’t suffer from mental conditions impairing your judgment, and can’t think of naturalist explanations, you should believe what you see. To quote Shakespeare’s Hamlet, ‘There are more things on heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ In virtual reality, it can happen. Yet, these appearances are not proof that Jesus and his mother still live. God can make you believe anything.

Latest revision: 2 June 2026

Feature image: Mohammad receiving his first revelation from the angel Gabriel. Miniature illustration on vellum from the book Jami’ al-Tawarikh, by Rashid al-Din, published in Tabriz, Persia, 1307 AD. Public Domain.

1. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Yuval Noah Harari (2014). Harvil Secker.
2. The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World. Bart Ehrman. Simon & Schuster (2018).
3. How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee. Bart Ehrman. HarperCollins Publishers (2015).