Journal Excerpts of May 30, 2005

5/30/05 6:41PM A proposed introduction to Christianity on the part of Muslims.

The point now is to first open the Muslim mind to the possibility of another way of looking at things. The Muslim can side step the Christian in the presentation of Jesus and countercharge with his own rendition. the Muslims find unacceptable alterations in the Christian documents such that some events and statements are false through confusion and other things were not included that happened. We now accept this story of possible exclusion and turn their attention to something which was left out of the story about Mohammed, or at least not fully understood and comprehended.

According to this story, and we don’t know for sure even that it is true, but it still raises an important question that Islam must answer. According to this story Mohammed comes to his wife at night while cold, sweating and shivering. He tells her that he has had this strange encounter with a supernatural being and he thinks it is either an angel of God or else it must be a demon. His wife thinks it is an angel of God, but Mohammed is not certain still. His wife seeks out an old, blind, Christian woman in the town, known to her, and asks her what she thinks and the old woman agrees with Mohammed’s wife and the being must be an angel of God. And then his wife returns to Mohammed and tells her of the unanimity between her and the blind woman, and Mohammed then decides that the being is an angel of God and that he would then return and listen to what this angel has to say to him.

Now this certainly does not say that Islam is a demonic religion. All it does is add another, very important hypothesis to the equation. Heretofore we would have to consider Mohammed as either facing an angel, or making it all up, or hallucinating the whole thing. Now we add a fourth hypothesis, namely that he was facing a demon. The nice thing about the fourth hypothesis is that you can dispense with all the reasoning and speculation involved in the second hypothesis. The third hypothesis is actually similar psychologically to the new, fourth, demonic hypothesis, for in both case we don’t have to deal with fraud, but merely the question of how we can know whether we are dealing with an angel of God or with something else, the something else now being indifferently a trance or a demon. We shall focus on the demonic hypothesis.

Now we must present the question to the Muslim (and indeed to all people): how does anyone know that they are confronting an angel as opposed to a demon (and the Muslims are big in demons)? How did Joan of Arc know that her vision was from God? How do you tell? How did Abraham know that his voices were the voices of God?

This is actually a very fascinating question. But the reason why is because it opens up an entirely new inquiry. Why all this fuss about getting some information in heaven (a book before the throne of God) to humans on earth? Do we honestly think that God has need of prophets to make his will perfectly clear to all human beings? Do we think we must be able to read this book to know what’s what?

There is a far more marvelous and glorious way of doing the same thing with regard to relay and transmission from God, and that consists in having the contents of any book in heaven written into the hearts of all humans. And this is the clear teaching of Jesus according to the Christian scriptures. Not only was he aware of Genesis 3:22 and the morally judging equality of man and God, but that there was no need for him to judge between two brothers in a dispute (Luke), and he also proclaimed it to the masses in Matthew 7:12 in a way they could understand. The clear communication of this man is that this information concerning what pleases God is already engraved in our hearts.

This has been validated by Kant’s inquiry into practical rationality where we see that the moral law is a product of the reason of every man and that indeed it is by means of a respect that the human has for this moral law that we can know that we are free beings.

And so ask the Muslims to consider how inept the Mohammed story is, especially when paralleled by the equally fantastic (and in some respects superior) story of Joseph Smith, and how much simpler and more glorious it is for God to make it so that there can be no question as to what an individual must do? Wouldn’t that be a far fairer way for a judgment to be conducted, namely by how true we were to this law within us and about which there can be no question of understanding or misunderstanding?

The beautify of the Christian story is that it is so simple and so clear, simple and clear enough for children to grasp.

And so, we shall say to the Muslims, why fret so much of your life in trying to get a myriad of rules straight and complied with when God has really made it so easy. It has been proclaimed by Jesus himself, not relying on any sort of apparition, that the only thing that can please God is a heart attuned to the love that some call the moral law, and which is within you. He spoke with independent authority, and not as a prophet. This identical message has been proclaimed by Paul as well, and declared by him to be the authentic teaching of Jesus, thus providing an source of confirmation independent of the gospel accounts.

Now the beautify of God’s system through Jesus is this: not only can a person know that the compliance with the moral law is all that can please God (or actions moving in that direction), but more: if a person submits to the spirit of Christ and invites the Holy Spirit into his or her life, he or she will find that while the going may be uneven occasionally, a growing love of the moral law will become evident, and that is the final sign of the work of God, that people literally become new creatures in the spirit. [Think of St. Francis and John Wesley.]

The utter simplicity of the system can be seen in the Paulian Christian, the Christian who is not attached to scriptural law at all (those law keepers are called Peterians). This is precusored in the iconic example of Jesus with regard to the supremacy and sufficiency of the moral law (or law of love). According to the Christian scriptures (John 5) Jesus goes so far in the recognition of the authenticity of this law in the heart that he broke the revealed law of Moses, one of the Ten commandments, by refusing to wait until sundown one Sabbath before complying with this moral law the Christians call the law of love. In this way then Jesus reveals with cyrstal clarity to the humans what they already knew unconsciously, namely that it is a categorical imperative to comply with the moral law and nothing can be presumed to be of God if it speaks contrary to this law.*

[* Consider what Kant says on this subject (from Conflict Among The Faculties}:

"If God should really speak to man, man could still never know that it was God speaking. It is quite impossible for man to apprehend the infinite by his senses, distinguish it from sensible beings, and recognize it as such. But in some cases man can be sure the voice he hears is not God’s. For if the voice commands him to do something contrary to moral law, then no matter how majestic the apparition may be, and no matter how it may seem to surpass the whole of nature, he must consider it an illusion."

The only thing we can know for sure then is that some apparition is not of God, and that is if we are told to commit an immoral act.** Otherwise we have no way of recognizing anything about an alleged heavenly being or divine communication.]

[** Click here for a short treatise to salvage Abraham morally. Or for Kant's "Guidance Of The Conscience." Use back button to return.]

And so in the Christian system it is clear that God desires only a love of each other which reflects a love that God has for the humans, and furthermore that everyone can attain to (or at least endlessly approach) this level of God by virtue of the grace of God.

The only way that Islam can prove that it is not a demonic religion is if it contains some clear moral icon on the level of that of John’s “lawlessness” of Jesus. But it does not contain any such. Indeed the so-called “moral acts” of the Muslim are an extortion (according to Kant), not unlike the “deal you can’t refuse” on the part of the Mafia, where you either put some money where you are told, or go to hell for sure, and where the place for the money just happens to be the hands of poor people, and so where there is no moral motivation or element at all.* And there is a general blindness from mixing the moral with the inane with people calling themselves moral because their actions result in effects that would ensue from people who are morally motivated, e.g. giving to the poor.