My Religious Development
I was brought up as a Roman Catholic.
Back then, in the sixties, it still made a notable difference which denomination you exactly belonged to. My maternal grandparents were Protestant, my paternal grandmother Catholic. While I never saw the former in a church service, my Catholic grandmother took her faith very seriously. She also insisted that her grandchildren were brought up in the Catholic faith and that the church wedding was performed according to the Catholic rite. This, in turn, prompted my maternal grandparents to stay away from their own daughter’s wedding (!), even though, as I said, they never practiced their faith, at least not in a way that would have been noticeable to me.
Religion is part of our identity even if we don’t take it seriously or don’t think we have one at all. My maternal grandparents resembled today’s secularized Europeans who never attend a Christian service, who may not even be a member in church anymore, but still see Islam as a cultural, even transcendental threat to their identity. The loss of our social, cultural and spiritual identity is just as threatening to our souls as the loss of our kin identity. Whether we like it or not.
Be that as it may, my home region of North Baden is one of the areas of Germany that is neither decidedly Catholic like the deep south nor clearly Protestant like the far north. In most places it’s half, half, there’s always a Catholic and a Protestant church in town. A confessional battleground, you might say. Consequently, there was as well a Catholic and as a Protestant run kindergarten in the village, but no municipal one. And because my sister and I came from a mixed-denominational marriage and nursery places were scarce – I’m a baby boomer – neither of the two institutions felt responsible for us and we had to stay at home. That’s how it was back then.
Like everyone else, I attended religious education in elementary school, which was led by a pastor and was also divided into denominations. I drew the Lord Jesus Christ riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, listened to Bible stories and sang Christian songs. I attended confirmation classes after school and made my first and only confession to the parish priest, which was the prerequisite for admission to confirmation. I still remember dreading it and frantically thinking about what I – as a ten-year-old – had to confess. In the end, all I could think of was that I was sometimes not diligent enough and disobedient to my parents. The priest was satisfied with that, in a very serious manner without the slightest blink.
Later, I attended church on Sundays accompanied by my grandmother and, at least at first, my sister. My parents were only seen there at Christmas and Easter. (My grandmother was fighting a hopeless battle even then.) I sat quietly and obediently in one of the first rows and was sometimes rewarded with pictures of saints, which I put in my hymn book. At some point, perhaps six months after my confirmation, I stopped going to church. I don’t remember how I persuaded my grandmother to let me do this. But I do remember one day when the vicar rang our doorbell and kindly, but sternly reminded me that he hadn’t seen me in church for a while. That was also how it was then.
In response to the priest’s admonition, I just kept quiet, embarrassed.
What did I think about all of this during the – you could say – Christian phase of my religious development? Consciously little or nothing. I accepted the faith prescribed to me like everything else that my parents and my other surroundings demanded of me in terms of views and behavior. You went to confirmation classes and made your confession, just like you made a servant’s bow or a curtsy before esteemed visitors and put your cutlery neatly on your plate after finishing your meal.
What I remember most is a feeling of strangeness and unwholesomeness. I, or rather my soul, as I analyze it today, never believed in that God of the Christians. I have never felt anything when listening to all the Bible stories except a feeling of unreality, of not belonging to me, as if none of this had anything to do with me. I’ve always found Christian priests to be slippery, insincere, lurking, like someone just waiting for me to say or do something that he can criticize. I never felt anything of the supposed love of God or Jesus towards me. The church services were torture for me, during which I had to sit still and listen to incomprehensible things and sing along to sickly sweet, insincere songs.
Above all, without being able to reflect on it at the time, I experienced a feeling of fundamental cultural alienation. Christianity was something alien, something imposed on me and mine, as if my own mind was being controlled by aliens. Today, I realize why: Christianity is an African, Arabian religion that has only put on a European clothing. It is alien to us and our European soul.
Furthermore, my soul sensed that Christianity is not primarily, or perhaps not at all, about love and forgiveness. It is about power and submission. Even in today’s relaxed, tolerant and enlightened final phase, it is, at its core, an authoritarian system that forces children who have done nothing wrong to submit to a priest during confession, that forces believers to fold their hands like serfs, to kneel and – could it get any more repugnant? – to swallow the alleged body and blood of their executed prophet. In horror novels, this is called the blood wedding with a vampire. Some sadists turn people into slaves by forcing them to drink their urine and eat their excrement. The Christian Eucharist is just a purified, symbolic and cleverly disguised form of it.
The core of Christianity is not love, but despotism. For it is an oriental religion. Its love is only the grace that the master is willing to show his obedient slaves.
Why did I in particular feel this – albeit unconsciously – even as a child? Because I was not born to simply submit to and accept other people’s views without inner conviction? Or because Euródin planted the truth into my soul as a seed at birth? It’s probably the famous problem of the hen and the egg. No one can become a prophet if they only parrot the catechism of their environment. The prerequisite for a belief in the new is an unbelief in the old. But unbelief is different from non-belief. On the contrary, it is a longing for true faith.
A childhood friend of mine, who was brought up as a strict Protestant, once confessed to me in the presence of her mother that sometimes she didn’t feel like going to church service (the very name is telling). Her mother responded in horror: “But […], you go there to hear a good sermon!” Well, suit yourself. Unsurprisingly, she didn’t become a prophetess.
My turning away from Christianity
While my soul knew from the very beginning that Christianity was a lie, my mind realized it for the first time when we went through the Walk to Canossa or some other religious-political topic in history class. I was reading a lot at the time, including a novel about the ravages of the Spanish Inquisition, all the violence, torture and executions. So, I burst out in class that Christianity was in fact cruel and intolerant and not a religion of love. The teacher and my classmates reacted partly with amusement, partly with shock. For them, I was a heretic ever since.
Please note: Religions do not always have to be tolerant, gentle and peaceful. They represent group norms, and these must be enforced with brutal force at times if necessary – in the interests of the survival and prosperity of the group. But other religions do often not describe themselves as gentle, tolerant and peace-loving. Instead, they are simply honest. On the other hand, dishonesty, concealment and deviousness are traits that I would describe as un-European, but which are well known from those regions south of the Mediterranean Sea.
I left religious education class in school at the age of 14, as soon as I could without my parents’ permission, and left the church shortly after I came of age.
Nevertheless, Christianity still haunted me for many years. For a long time after I had attended a church service for the last time, I automatically crossed myself whenever I entered a church for mere sight-seeing purposes. As a young adult, I even got my first Bible, to the astonishment of my friends who, unlike me, had never left the church but neither attended services nor owned a Bible. The unbeliever is the true believer, because faith means searching within oneself, means trying to grasp the truth, not possessing it. Because possession is passive, something dead. I always felt within me that the answer to the Christian lie was not nothing, but a truth I just still needed to discover. I saw Mel Gibson’s movie “The Passion of the Christ” and it touched me in a way that reminded me that there was an unfinished chapter waiting inside me.
I finally found my inner peace – for the time being – by reading Richard Dawkins’ books. “The God Delusion” cured me of my quiet inner doubts for several years. From then on, I could consider myself an atheist, confirmed by reason and science. And aren’t they ridiculous, all the fabulous claims of all religions, if you exclude the far cleverer Asian ones? Creation of the earth in six days, dividing the Sea, multiplying bread loaves and so on? The Catholic Church believes in miracles to this day. So why not do away with all that and believe that we are all just “genetic survival machines”, products of Dawkins’ Blind Watchmaker? Without a deeper meaning in this world and no prospect of salvation in the hereafter?
My search for the true religion
The paths of the gods, including Euródin’s, are winding, their footsteps are soft and their breath so gentle that we usually don’t notice it. No angel appeared to me floating on a cloud on the horizon with a flaming sword in hand, no mighty voice thundered inside me. Instead, I gradually developed the idea of wanting to become a writer. I searched for a suitable topic for a long time, finally deciding on a horror story – I loved reading them back then – the plot starting in the Guatemalan jungle with the discovery of a mysterious statue of a god. (I knew the fictional site, Tikal, from a longer trip through Central America). But here something happened for the first time that I now recognize as the gentle knocking of my true God at the door of my soul. Out of nowhere, I had the idea of placing some Germanic runes on the statue – a jaguar skull carved in obsidian – alongside Mayan religious symbols. I even bought a book on runic studies, even though I’d never had any contact with or interest in the Germanic religion before, and it wasn’t even a topic in films and television at the time.
What on earth could Germanic runes be doing on a religious artifact from a secret underground chamber in the jungles of Central America? I was as perplexed as my characters but left the grossly incongruous element nevertheless in the story. (Although there is evidence that the Vikings also reached America in their dragon boats, there is no evidence that they reached Guatemala, nor was I aware of any of this at the time).
But it didn’t stop there: not only the Mayan faith, but also Christianity played an important role in the story, in the form of the faith of several characters and a Christian priest who tries to save the hero from being possessed by the foreign, Mayan god-demon – but fails. Christianity is dead, that was the message, but in its place I couldn’t yet recognize the new faith, only a spiritual emptiness that must lead to hopelessness, damnation and extinction. It is the moment when the larva sheds its cocoon and is naked and unprotected until it becomes a butterfly. The old king is dead, the new one not yet crowned. Perhaps not even born yet.
The Conquista, the conquest, enslavement and Christian missionary work in Central and South America by the Spanish, also played an important role in the story. In it, it caused a powerful, immortal Mayan priestess to place a curse of revenge on the Whites, which was to haunt and subjugate the West in the form of the statue of Tezcatlipoca, the “jaguar god”, who came to life.
The revenge of the enslaved and exploited in spiritual, idealistic, but also physical, sexual form against the former slave owners, exploiters and humiliators. The year 2015, which really started the illegal Third World mass immigration into Germany. was still a long way off when I wrote this. Today I know that it was my first religious vision, which I just wasn’t able to recognize as such.
The literary merits of my first attempt at writing may have been doubtful. However, all my later novels had religion as an important theme, sometimes as their only one. I even invented my own religions, but without believing for a moment that they could be true. They were outbursts from my inner self, expressions of my restlessness and perplexity. Strange for an avowed atheist, isn’t it? We can deceive our environment; we can deceive our own minds. But we cannot lie to our souls.
When my world fell apart in 2015
I still remember the day Angela Merkel opened Germany’s borders, or rather the day she didn’t close them to the flood of refugees from the Middle East. Stunned and open-mouthed, I watched it sitting in front of my computer screen. And I cried.
Never before had I thought of myself as someone whom today’s liberals call a racist. But now, in the year 2025, I saw young German women throwing teddy bears and flowers onto train station tracks in a gesture of joyful welcome, in truth a result voluntary submission to male Syrian “war refugees”, who in reality were overwhelmingly soldiers of fortune. Some of those girls later cleaned the toilets in the refugee shelters for the young African men. Something that in earlier times the enslaved women of a conquered tribe were forced to do. Now the former slave owner made himself a slave.
I saw German female students at an anti-NPD (a right extremist party) demonstration chanting “There is no right to Nazi propaganda” with the kind of ignorance that only a young person with no experience of live can muster, cheered on by pot-bellied, smug trade union, Green Party and church functionaries whispering to each other that without “them” (meaning: the tiny bunch of NPD-representatives) they wouldn’t even have the “party” here, and accompanied by the thieving grins of small, nimble “traumatized” Somali drug dealers who set off for their business from the hotel in the background, which had been converted into a temporary refugee shelter.
Back then, I regularly came across an alleged African asylum seeker in my home city, whistling happily and in high spirits as he cycled through the streets at a leisurely pace, having all the time in the world and clearly not worried about his future or his livelihood. The sons of white, slave-owning African plantation owners must have roamed their father’s property a century and a half earlier with exactly the same nonchalance and superiority, safe in the knowledge that any offense against them would pay off badly for the offender. The only difference is that the new landowners did not conquer their territory by cunning and force, but it was laid at their feet by the old owners without a fight, the work of the African god Vili, who knew how to spiritually deaden and morally corrupt his brother’s Urvolk through his sham Christian religion.
In other words: the late revenge of that Mayan deity from my first attempt at a novel, served up with a diabolical grin. The weakness of the once oppressed returns like a virus to the oppressors in order to destroy them.
A house in Thuringia and the first idea for “We Children of Euródin”
I had earned good money as a controller and financial manager for many years and, in view of the developments in Germany, my wife and I decided to build a house in rural Thuringia, where Germany is still Germany and things are still how they used to be. The last step of the construction was paving the courtyard, and at this point someone from above was knocking at my door again. Out of nowhere, it occurred to me to have the courtyard paved with a huge Othala rune as an expression of my general connection to my Germanic heritage, I thought. I hadn’t even realized at the time that it stood for the god Odin in particular. In the end, I let it go because it raised legal concerns in the building contractor, and also because it became clear that we would not be moving into the house permanently. But another seed had been planted in my soul, and this time it was one that would soon blossom.
In the final phase of my time in Thuringia, I spontaneously developed an idea for a new book. This time it was to be about a secret community of Europeans who founded a people calling themselves “Nordians” on a private island in the Caribbean in order to one day liberate Europe from the clutches of the left and Christianity. Their leader, known to readers of “We Children of Euródin” as Armin Weskamp, considered himself an atheist, but thought it beneficial and even necessary to give the group a religion – whereupon my celestial inspirator unsurprisingly brought himself and all his emanations from Thor to Tyr to Freya into play.
A religion you don’t believe in just because you think the group needs one? “That won’t fly,” I wrote in the margin of the first plot sketch. There is no right life in a false one, there is no truth in a lie, no matter how well-intentioned it may be.
A trip to the Baltic Sea and the discovery of the stone
This was the time when I first began to systematically study the Germanic religion – or religion itself, for that matter. After selling the house, we moved back to West Germany, and there I soon developed a plan to travel to Scandinavia. Again, “something” drew me there, just as it had drawn me to my East German sisters and brothers. Wasn’t the Baltic Sea – which, strangely enough, I had never visited before while having been to all the far corners of the earth – His sea? Something was waiting for me there, I was sure of it. Even on the drive there, I felt as if He was sitting behind us, looking forward to us visiting his favorite territory, surrounded by those people whose ancestors had been the last to turn away from him and surrender to the strange god Vili.
It happened on a beach. I chose a stone to sit on, wiped away the sand on the surface so as not to soil my trousers – and discovered strange engravings carved flat into the rock. I already knew that they were runes and that the drawing in the middle was a triskele, but I didn’t know what it all meant. There was only one thing I was sure of: it couldn’t be a coincidence that I was here and had found the stone. It was meant for me and must contain an important message.
But again, the path to knowledge was arduous and long winding: no voice sounded thunderously from the dune grass, no Valkyrie glided towards me on a cloud over the Baltic Sea. Everything remained silent and as usual and my life went on as normal.
With the stone in the trunk, I drove home and continued to work on the concept of the novel, which began to take on a completely different shape than at the start. At the same time, I continued my studies of history and religion in search of the message of the stone, the key to all my questions.
The revelation of the message
It happened without fanfare and radiant wreaths of light, but simply, silently and soberly. An inspiration made me look up something again in the Edda, which I had already read several times, but always with the feeling that I had missed something crucial. As before, I turned to the passage in the Gylfaginning where Odin’s brothers Vili and Vé were mentioned. This time, however, the true meaning of the stone’s message was revealed to me.
What if, instead of one god, there were three, each responsible for a different original people? What if the differences between Asians, Europeans and Africans were determined not only by their genetic heritage, but also by the diversity of the gods that shaped them?
The runes and the triskele suddenly made sense, as signs for the three gods and their three original peoples. I sat down at the PC and began to not feverishly what gushed from my soul into my consciousness like a dammed-up lake: The history of men and the gods, the primordial consecration, the ongoing soul consecration and its rules, the three paradises and what our God asks of us. And thus the core of what I call The Confession.
With this, after many decades, I had found my God, whose prophet I call myself.