RELIGIOUS WARFARE

The Paper was addressed to Evelyn Hammond.
It was published November 21, 2001

THE LOVE OF ALLAH

There is no explicit message to love one another in the Koran and in Islam as it is found in the Bible and in Christianity. Although there are numerous passages in the Koran where Allah expresses his compassion for man, relationships come from, and are centered on, Allah.

Q3.31: Say: If you love Allah, then follow me, Allah will love you and forgive you your faults, and Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.

Do you recognize what this means if Allah is the Iniquitous One?

When I see thousands of Muslims in one group bowing with their heads to the ground, five times a day, I can only hold my breath in horror at the honors Caligastia has garnered to himself.

In some passages Allah expresses his love for those who obey him:

Q3.76: Yea, whoever fulfills his promise and guards (against evil) -- then surely Allah loves those who guard (against evil).

Q3.134: . . . Allah loves the doers of good.

Q3.146: . . . Allah loves the patient.

On the other hand there are many statements of things Allah does not love.

Q2.205: And when he turns back, he runs along in the land that he may cause mischief in it and destroy the tilth and the stock, and Allah does not love mischief-making.

Q2.190: . . . Allah does not love those who exceed the limits (i. e. moderation).

Q2.276: Allah does not bless usury, . . . Allah does not love any ungrateful sinner.

Q3.57: And as to those who believe and do good deeds, . . . and Allah does not love the unjust.

Q4.107: . . . surely Allah does not love him who is treacherous, sinful.

Compare these teachings with the Bible.

Jesus used the passage in Deut 6:5 to instruct his listeners when they asked him which was the greatest commandment. But he expanded upon it:

Matt 22:37-40

And he said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets."

The law and the prophets were the two great segments of the Old Testament. But the words of Jesus also represent God's justice, and his revelations to man. The Koran does not provide this kind of teaching. It does not say that one should love one's neighbor as oneself. In fact, Jesus went further:

Matt 5:43-48

"You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect."

Contrast this with the teachings of Allah:

Q3.118: O you who believe! do not take for intimate friends from among others than your own people; they do not fall short of inflicting loss upon you; they love what distresses you; vehement hatred has already appeared from out of their mouths, and what their breasts conceal is greater still; indeed, We have made the communications clear to you, if you will understand.

Q3.119: Lo! you are they who will love them while they do not love you, and you believe in the Book (in) the whole of it; and when they meet you they say: We believe, and when they are alone, they bite the ends of their fingers in rage against you. Say: Die in your rage; surely Allah knows what is in the breasts.

Can you see Jesus offering such teaching? Would he command someone to die in their rage? Rather we find militancy in the Koran. Repeatedly Muslims are urged to fight and to kill those who oppose them.

Q9.13: What! will you not fight a people who broke their oaths and aimed at the expulsion of the Apostle (Muhammad), and they attacked you first; do you fear them? But Allah is most deserving that you should fear Him, if you are believers.

Q9.14: Fight them, Allah will punish them by your hands and bring them to disgrace, and assist you against them and heal the hearts of a believing people.

Q2.190: And fight in the way of Allah with those who fight with you . . .

Q2.191: And kill them wherever you find them, and drive them out from whence they drove you out, and persecution is severer than slaughter, and do not fight with them at the Sacred Mosque until they fight with you in it, but if they do fight you, then slay them; such is the recompense of the unbelievers.

Q2.193: And fight with them until there is no persecution, and religion should be only for Allah, but if they desist, then there should be no hostility except against the oppressors.

RELIGIOUS WARFARE

TRANSLATING BELIEF INTO POLITICS

One can see how religion now enters into the formula for political relationships between Muslims and the rest of the world. According to the basic views of Islam, the world is religious. All other aspects of human life derive from that. But this is also the basic teaching of Judaism and Christianity. Only modern secular minds scoff at the concept that western moral fabric and cultural heritage derived from the religious teachings of Judaism and Christianity.

Western civilization, and our enormous material luxury, ultimately came from the teachings of Jesus, the work of his Apostles, and the doctrines of Paul. Paul laid the foundations for Christian society. His theology converted pagan Europe and determined the social attitudes of eighty generations of western man. Our early science was motivated by the desire to know how God worked in the universe. Galileo and Newton both were looking for God's hand in creation.

Do not ask a modern secular mind where his devotions lie. You will not get an honest answer. But let terror strike and he will quickly invoke God and turn to prayer. Let him experience personal pain and he will become solemn before his Maker. The war we now prosecute against Muslim terrorists is taken to God for support.

Therefore, when Muslim engage in hostility toward "unbelievers" they hold animosity toward the principles inspired by Jesus.

Buried beneath the veil of Islamic "love" is the stricture that either the "unbeliever" tolerate the teachings of Islam, or else be condemned as a foe -- to the extreme of death.

Allah does not express love but rather hatred:

Q40.35: Those who dispute concerning the communications of Allah without any authority that He has given them; greatly hated is it by Allah and by those who believe. Thus does Allah set a seal over the heart of every proud, haughty one.

Allah excites hatred:

Q5.14: And with those who say, We are Christians, We made a covenant, but they neglected a portion of what they were reminded of, therefore We excited among them enmity and hatred to the day of resurrection; and Allah will inform them of what they did.

Q40.10: Surely those who disbelieve shall be cried out to: Certainly Allah's hatred when you were called upon to the faith and you rejected, is much greater than your hatred of yourselves.

Can there be any serious question of the extreme of Islamic teaching? If large groups of Muslims tolerate, and benefit from, the western way of life, is such acceptance not a betrayal of the fundamental teachings of the Koran? And if modern western secular and godless minds also reject the religious foundations of the civilization from which they so greatly benefitted, is that not why fundamentalist Islam must destroy western civilization?

Some Muslims, in an effort to rationalize their conduct, may claim that similar teachings are found in the Bible.

Deut 32:43

Praise his people, O you nations; for he avenges the blood of his servants, and takes vengeance on his adversaries, and makes expiation for the land of his people.

But Jesus did away with those Pentateuchal images. Jesus brought us a new way of life, of love in place of vengeance. God cannot contain such purely human emotions within himself. Those old teachings must have derived from the social milieu and attitudes of 1500 BC. Hence Muslims cling to the social attitudes of Pentateuchal times. They never left those images. That is why they can accept Abraham as their father, but reject the prophets and Jesus. Muslims are living in Old Testament times. Muslims are trapped in a social milieu that uses vengeance as a basic principle of social conduct -- a principle derived from and taught by Allah.

Fundamentalist Muslims hold bitterness against the secular materialism deriving out of Judaism and Christianity. They despise, abhor, and detest our materialistic way of life. We have forgotten God. We have forgotten proper devotions. We need only visit shopping malls to discover where our devotions lie. As one woman said: "If I am not at home I am at Wal-Mart." She did not say: "If I am not at home I am at church." That well symbolizes our turn from God to mammon.

Wrapping all this up we can see how the foundations of Islam are based on adverse emotions, on selecting Jews and Christians especially for hatred, and on militancy. No wonder Islam presents such a threat to the western way of life, which symbolizes all that is counter to their teachings. No wonder Muslim fundamentalists feel an abhorrence for those among themselves who tolerate and accept western culture. Such people can only be regarded as hypocrites.

The great threat on our world today is the ability of a few individuals or small groups to bring destruction to mankind. The entire world is vulnerable to the hatred of a few. When animosity rules among men they will exercise whatever power is available to them. In primitive times it was stones and clubs. Then it became swords and spears. This prevailed until the invention of guns about four hundred years ago. The methods of mass production and increasing technology gave more and more power into the hands of a few. There has never been a weapon invented by man that was not used. If we did not have our heads in the sand we would know that sooner or later all will be used. Today it is the ingenious use of passenger aircraft as powerful bombs. It is a matter of time before nuclear holocaust breaks out.

As stated by the Urantia Papers:

P.1490 - It is not a question of armaments or disarmament. Neither does the question of conscription or voluntary military service enter into these problems of maintaining world-wide peace. If you take every form of modern mechanical armaments and all types of explosives away from strong nations, they will fight with fists, stones, and clubs as long as they cling to their delusions of the divine right of national sovereignty.

But it is more than national sovereignty. It is a way of life. It is contest of one form of society over another. It is warfare between social philosophies. In the end the basis of those societies derive out of religious forces.

Many people today are saying we should nuke them. This thought has now made its way into our national media. Saddam Hussein is building nuclear weapons in order to nuke us. It is a matter of time before the world is torn asunder with such power, to bring an end to our civilization.

We watched the breakdown of social structure. The Soviet Union, so proudly functioning, suddenly disintegrated. Their economic environment deteriorated. A few here and there, with access to weaponry, were willing to sell it for transient gratification to anyone with sufficient funds. Plenty of funds were available. A major part of those funds came out of the purchase of oil by the United States and western Europe. And so the technology of chemical or biological or nuclear warfare was sold to the Muslims -- through the use of western money.

Now, to save ourselves, we must destroy those Muslim nations.

All of this was foretold. But we did not believe. We did not understand.

I shall now describe the general shape of coming events, as God showed us.

But first I must detour into biblical and prophetic validity.