Patrick Simpson

After years of crappy customer service, God has finally opened a call centre. In The Netherlands, for some reason. I do appreciate that the recession makes it less profitable to outsource call centres to India – especially as God is manning the phone himself -  but still, there must be nations with more worthy complaints to God than the Dutch. What I also do not understand is why God, who can obviously speak any language fluently, chooses to speak Dutch with a slight northern accent on his voicemail message. Have I been speaking the wrong kind of (what I thought was) accent-free Dutch all my life?

For non-Dutchites (the word foreigners has a nasty, racist undertone here), it may come as a surprise that there are religious people in The Netherlands at all. That is because we have divided up the country between the atheists in the west, the Catholics in the south and protestants everywhere else. We do not mention the Muslims, Hindus, Jews and other religious people that mess up our system. Clearly, all the fun is to be had in the west, so tourists rarely find any reason to go elsewhere.

The phone number has been active for the past week, with 1,000 messages left on the answerphone. But, for the time being at least, God has decided he is still happy with his current phone company. The artist responsible for the phone line told the reporter I’m not a pastor, I’m an artist and I won’t listen to the messages. So, God is not listening, yet again.

In part two of what is clearly God-loves-the-Dutch week, God hates the Dutch. And not just because of the voice mail messages asking for their Icelandic savings back. No, because we allow gay people to get married, apparently. Which seems like a slightly trivial issue for God to worry about, as they are civil marriages that are not valid in his eyes anyway, just like The Netherlands does not recognize church weddings. See, happy coexistence is possible the moment you stop caring about other people and their beliefs. This is what we Dutch people call tolerance. It does have slightly negative effects on the cohesion of society, but nothing a good old riot won’t fix.

But, as it turns out, God hates Sweden, Turkey – which will shock the Muslims there, the USA and many other places, too. So, we’re not that special after all. Which only leaves the question, how will allowing gay marriage lead to us eating our children? Clearly, gay marriages will produce fewer children than straight marriages, so it won’t be because of an over-abundance of them. Is gay marriage a ploy to steal the potatoes? And the bread too? And why not just eat the pets? Or the guy holding that sign? It’ll be interesting times.