The civilian casualties aren’t the problem here. The way that the American Administration deals with it is. The previous Administration was inept at communication, and the present administration is simply inept.

First of all, let’s absolve ourselves of some guilt here. By definition, all of our enemies in this part of the world are civilians. They do not wear a uniform, and are not part of a recognized governmental armed force. So the definition of a non-combatant in this region is one who is not currently shooting at someone. This fact has not been stated by our leadership, and it needs to be.

Second, a message needs to be sent to the residents of this region. There are some very bad people in your countries who have declared that they are enemies of the United States, and have demonstrably put their words into action. We want these people dead, very badly. You have a pretty good idea of who these people are. It’s in your best interests to stay as far away from these people as possible, because when we find them – and we will – we are going to blow them up. You really don’t want to be in the area when this happens. If you choose to associate with these people, or tolerate them living next to you, don’t claim to be an innocent victim when things start exploding around you. 

If you invite a known, wanted terrorist into your house or mosque, or if you attend a meeting or ceremony with same, it’s your fault if you or your loved ones are maimed or killed when we go after him. Stay away from the terrorists, move slowly and keep your hands in plain sight at all times, and you’ll be quite safe. Remember, treat the Islamic terrorist as if he’s likely to violently explode at any time with no warning, and you won’t be far wrong.

The best advice that I can give is that if you find yourself in the presence of a sworn enemy of the USA, place as much distance between you and he as possible. Two kilometers is a good minimum. To remove uncertainty from your life, you could report the location of the enemy to the nearest NATO unit - preferably one with a Forward Air Controller. Or better yet, if you deliver the enemies of the USA to any US military unit, you may be handsomely rewarded. Dead or alive, we really don’t care much.

Our administration and military leadership needs to make the realities of war clear to the residents of the area, and come to grips with the idea that this is a war, and that civilian casualties will be unavoidable. The alternative is that we tie the hands of our soldiers with ridiculous rules of engagement that guarantee that victory cannot be achieved. They need to bow their heads in sorrow when civilians are hurt, but recognize that this is an insurgency, and that any civilian in the presence of a terrorist or combatant is likely there by choice, because they support the combatant in some way or other. 

The idea that we have called off operations that could have killed Bin Laden and other high ranking enemies because there would be civilian casualties is just plain ludicrous. Those people are close to these targets because they want to be. They support the enemy with aid and comfort, they are not friends of the USA and never will be, and should be treated as enemies themselves.

Republicans are up in arms that the Obama administration is going to transfer Islamic jihadi terrorists from Guantanamo Bay security facility to New York City to be tried in civil court.

I can understand their point of view, but c’mon, guys, is this really a battle worth fighting? One of the things that really ticked me off about the liberals throughout the Bush adminstration was the fact that no matter what Bush did, it was either wrong or not good enough. Now we’re doing the same thing to the Obama administration. Now, let’s be clear, I don’t like Obama, and I think his presidency is going to be a disaster for this country. But on this one case he’s not all wrong.

There are several things to consider when evaluating this: intended consequences, unintended consequences, and precedent.

Intended consequences.

The keystone of the Republican opposition to this move is that they’re afraid that a civil court is going to get hold of these guys, introduce civil rules of evidence, and that these guys are going to walk on a technicality, or that a sympathetic jury will find an inadequate case to convict. All things being equal, and with the history of our judicial system, that’s a reasonable thing to think. Just ask O.J..

Republicans, stop and think a second. This is the Obama Administration! Now what is job number one for Obama? That’s right, getting re-elected in 2012. Everything else takes a back seat to that. Now Obama’s inexperienced and unqualified, but he’s not exactly an idiot. He knows that if Khalid Sheik Muhammad walks on a technicality in New York City, that he’s going to be crucified in the polls come 2012. So that’s not going to happen. The Chicago machine is going to make sure of it. Trust me, the fix is in long before the gavel falls to open proceedings. You can bet that the prosecuting attorney is already measuring for new drapes in the State attorney General’s office, and that the presiding judge is virtually guaranteed a circuit court seat at the earliest possible vacancy. Keep a close eye on whoever gets picked to defend these guys, they’ll make a ton in windfall profits. Just like the Chicago prizefighter makes it look good and then takes a fall, the defense will do their best and will ultimately lose.

Now if a Republican administration moved to influence a court proceeding with the sort of heavy handed methods that are going to be used in this show trial, the press would be howling for blood. But since this is Obama, no one is going to give it a passing sniff, it’s just another quiet day in America, folks. Move along.

If you think this is a little optimistic, think about who we’re dealing with. Obama has no qualms about throwing his allies under the bus to further his political ambitions. Remember Jeremiah Wright, whom he could no more disown than his own Grandma? Amazing how quiet he’s been. And speaking of Grandma. . .she sort of headed under the bus after Rev. Wright, when she announced that she remembered Barry being born – in Kenya!

If this is how Obama treats his closest kin and friends, then Khalid Sheik Muhammad is a walking dead man. He will go to New York, get a fair trial, and then they’ll execute him, swiftly and with due process. You won’t have to pack the jury. This is New York City, and any jury you pick is going to have their minds made up from the get-go. And don’t worry about the exposure of classified information that may be necessary to convict. You can do it without that.

The fix is in.

The intended consequence is that the world will nod their head sagely and say, yes, America practices what it preaches, they tried them and convicted them and executed them. Political win for America. And if they don’t – well, get real, did you really expect them to? Nothing’s lost.

Unintended consequences.

The Democrats never stop to think about the unintended consequences. The bleeding hearts are wringing their hands about these poor prisoners of war being held without being charged, their lives in limbo. These are feelings, and to a liberal feelings hold sway, irrespective of the laws of armed conflict. For some reason, because this animal physically resembles a human, he gets to enjoy the benefits of the protections of the US constitution – a legal system that he had vowed to destroy.

So unintended consequences on the battlefield: A 21 year old Marine is in combat, and after a furious exchange of gunfire, the Mujahadeen he’s shooting at runs out of ammo and throws his hands up. Our Marine looks at the corpsman administering to his wounded buddy, and then regards the surrendering Jihadi. It flashes through his mind that this guy has just earned himself three hot meals a day and a comfortable bed while he goes on trial, and may stand a good chance to walk free so he can come back and re-arm and be shooting at them another day. . . .

Oops. Sorry ‘bout that, Hajji. I didn’t see your hands up. Looked like you had a weapon. . . .give my regards to Allah.

If we ever took another prisoner in the war against Islam, it would be a testament to the extreme professionalism of our fighting men.

And what if we actually pull off the capture of Osama Bin Laden? I bet it would be real cool if we could get Khalid Sheik Muhammad to turn State’s Evidence against him and testify. . . .only we let him walk. . or killed him already. Oops.

You should think about these sorts of things, first, guys.

Precedent

Let’s face it, if the system worked, we wouldn’t be having these conversations. Bush dragged his feet, unable, as usual, to make a decision on what he should do, and consequently the military tribunals were never convened, and these guys never got served justice.    So by lack of action, Bush showed that military tribunals have no place in the war on Terror.

Now Barry’s going to set the precedent that these guys get constitutional rights. Yeah, but he’s also going to set the precedent that these guys get executed as well. The defense will raise a number of points which will be struck down, and the appellate courts will conveniently ignore the breach of law and rights of the accused, and precedent will be set that the defense’s best tools in these sorts of cases will be inadmissible. Khalid Sheik Muhammad’s journey is going to grease the skids to death row for future terrorists tried in civil court.

There you have it. Khalid Sheik Muhammad and his cronies die for their crimes, Barry dodges one of the many bullets which are going to doom him to being a one-term president, the military passes a wink and a nod policy on not taking prisoners, and precedent is set to make it very difficult for terrorists to get a fair shake under the judicial system they vow to destroy.

One critical point is how the proponents of each religious tradition apply their scripture? We have ample evidence that Jesus never killed anyone. He never stole anything. He never used his position for his own enrichment or self-aggrandizement. There’s no evidence that he fornicated or even had sexual relations with anyone. He forgave his persecutors, even as they killed him. When confronted with situations where the scripture dictated a death sentence, he taught forgiveness and tolerance. One critical point about Jesus is that he operated within the existing framework of religious law as passed down from Moses and previous prophets.

Muhammad, on the other hand, wasn’t constrained by previous law or scripture. He freely made it up as he went along to suit himself. He paid lip service to whatever Judeo-Christian scripture suited him, although he always failed to understand the underlying lessons, and frequently mis-stated the stories in ways that directly contradicted the written scriptures of Judaism and Christianity. He routinely killed those who disagreed with him. He assassinated critics, and presided over massacres such as that of the helpless Banu Qarayza tribe of Jews in Medina. He and his followers made a life of banditry and looting, and justified it on the basis of religious commandments from Allah, with whom only Muhammad could communicate. Muhammad got a 20% cut of all the loot collected, which he distributed in the form of bribes to ensure the loyalty of his followers. He condemned everyone who disagreed with him, and extracted vicious and cruel revenge. He tortured people, building a fire on one man, and ordering an old woman to be dismembered by tying her limbs to camels. He was a sexual libertine, having relations with any woman who struck his fancy. This is dismissed by Muslims as they point out that he was married to them, which was not always true. The Muslims who support this morality fail to tell you that marriage in Muhammad’s cult took no consideration of the woman’s desires. Muhammad had no qualms about taking a “wife” to his tent before the dead bodies of her murdered father and husband were even cold.

A fundamental basis of both Christianity and Islam is that the adherents of each seek to emulate the example set by the founder of each religion. Christians who engage in violence and atrocities are not doing so because they’re following the example of Christ.  On the contrary, Christ never did these things, so one cannot condemn Christianity as the source of such acts of evil. Muslims on the other hand can and do justify their actions by pointing out that their prophet behaved in a similar fashion. This behavior on the part of their prophet is conveniently ignored by the more moderate, “peaceful” Muslims.

Islam on the other hand, has a point source in history. It was revealed in its entirety in the space of twenty years to a single man. It has no precedent, and no modifying antecedent. Moreover, tradition holds that the entirety of the Quran was recorded in Heaven before the universe was created (There are obvious problems with this supposition, but they’re outside the scope of this discussion). Therefore the Law as given to Muhammad is the law for all time, past, present and future, and immutable (well, Muhammad could modify it, and often did, because he was making it up. But no one else had that privilege).   Islamic scholars have no basis on which to justify any claim that parts of the Quranic law may be ignored today. This is borne out when one examines sharia law, which so many Muslims are pressing to be implemented in the west. Sharia calls for a positively medieval approach to justice, and anyone who subscribes to it cannot in any way be considered a “peaceful” Muslim.

Taken as a whole, the Judeo-Christian scripture is a promise of hope and salvation; of enlightenment and the love of God for mankind. Sure, there are violent, harsh passages.  But they're the exception, not the rule, and they usually derive from the most ancient texts.  The Quran is a testament of pettiness and inconsistency, about a hateful, spiteful, tyrannical, self-absorbed deity who has little or no regard for the fruits of his creation except as they can serve him as slaves. The Quran is consistently harsh, with seeming every declarative ending in hellfire for the infidels and self-congratulation on how great and beneficent Allah is.  It gets pretty old, pretty quick.

In Islamic scripture, the situation is reversed. Muslims are quick to quote peaceful sounding, conciliatory passages from the Quran which seem to speak to the general welfare of mankind. They use these passages especially when courting a potential convert to the faith. Islam is peaceful. Islam is tolerant. The problem is that all of these passages were “revealed” to Muhammad during his time in Mecca, when Islam was no more than two dozen adherents, and he had no political power. There are a plethora of contradictory passages which advocate the death of infidels and non-believers, and assign such to some pretty imaginative punishments in Hell. All of these harsh, intolerant passages were revealed in the later period in Medina, where Muhammad had fashioned himself into a warlord. Islamic scholars have been forced to reconcile these contradictions through a school of abrogation, where later revelations supercede earlier. In fact, Muhammad himself was buttonholed on this point by followers who remembered what he said. Consequently “Allah” revealed that he will make Muhammad forget a surah, and replace it with a better one.

Now stop and think about this for a second. . . .The Quran was recorded before time began, and Muhammad was made to memorize it. That’s Muslim tradition. Yet in the space of the twenty years of revelation, Allah made Muhammad forget parts, and then replaced them with better parts. With a story like this, you expect anyone to believe that a deity who indulges in this sort of tomfoolery is actually the author of creation? I don’t buy it. I don’t see how anyone possibly can.

This is hardly surprising, since one of the unfortunate legacies of the Bush administration was that we never adequately defined what would constitute a victory in our various military ventures initiated under his watch. Add to that a seemingly deliberate ignorance of the historical background of Afghanistan that earned it the nickname “Graveyard of Empires.”

Bush roundly criticized the Clinton administration for engaging in fruitless nation building. Then in his very first military venture, set us up to be nation building on a scale never before attempted.

Afghanistan chewed up the British army in the 19^th century, and the Russian army in the 20^th century. The country can be subdued, but the resources required to do so have never been justified by any power that’s attempted it, leaving the forces that are tasked with the job under manned. If a peaceful, prosperous Afghanistan had something to offer, the story might be different, but the country simply brings very little to the world market to make it worthwhile expending the resources that would be necessary to subdue its unruly culture. It’s an investment that no one has ever found a way to pay dividends.

Dexter Filkins’ story in the New York Times, Stanley McChrystal’s Long War highlights many of the problems faced by US forces in Afghanistan today. We have lost the initiative, and the conflict has degenerated into a prolonged war of attrition, in which the cream of the American (and allied) youth are fed into a meat grinder with no perceivable benefit resulting from their sacrifice. General McChrystal’s solution is to regain the initiative by adding 40,000 more soldiers to take the fight to the enemy.

Whether this will work is problematic. Certainly, given the political will, we can defeat the Taliban militarily on the ground – the only force capable of defeating the US military is the US congress. But does that constitute victory? What then?

The sad fact is that adult literacy in Afghanistan is a mere 25%. Literacy among children is virtually nonexistent. According to Michael Yon’s article Adopt-a-stan, half the country is under the age of 17.5 years. These two facts alone should instruct the US administration in the obvious:  Democracy will not work in Afghanistan! This country is the international equivalent of an illiterate juvenile delinquent. Self-government answerable to the people is a fantasy. Creating a consensus and managing a country to step into the 21^st century requires an educated, literate, informed electorate. If you don’t have that, any government taking power will rapidly devolve into corruption and dictatorial behavior. 

A fundamental lesson of history is that you cannot impose democracy from the outside. Democracy has to take root and grow on its own within a society. The transition to a democracy has never been accomplished without a lot of bloodshed. It’s a painful, bloody process, and there’s no way to get around that which doesn’t yield less than satisfactory results.

Afghanistan’s problem isn’t a lack of security. It’s not a lack of schools. It’s not the Taliban. It’s not poverty. These are all symptoms. Afghanistan’s problem is Islam. Since it’s politically unacceptable to acknowledge the elephant in the room, defeating any of the symptoms is just a stopgap measure, and when left to itself, those same symptoms will recur, because the root cause has not been addressed.

Can Afghanistan be fixed? Yes. In an ideal scenario, the best thing for Afghanistan in the long run would be to get rid of the current government – it’s a farce of a democracy anyway – and make it a UN protectorate – or perhaps a US protectorate under UN auspices to avoid the corruption that seems to accompany UN efforts. Let’s face it, Afghanistan as a country is defined more by the countries around it than by any national identity anyway. The Protectorate would be charged with pacification and administration with the goal of eventually building the infrastructure and social foundation adequate to allow sustainable self-government. This approach worked well for the Philippines – at least it was working well until World War Two derailed much of the economic and social progress that the Philippines had made towards being a workable self-governing country. The Philippines of 1900 bears a great deal of social and economic similarity to Afghanistan today. Lessons are to be learned from that.

This would be done with the understanding that Afghanistan would again become an independent country once certain milestones are accomplished, including, but not necessarily limited to:

• Electrification of 90% of the country. 
• 90% literacy rate among adults 16 and older.
• Closure of all Madrassas, a requirement to attend government schools that all teach to a certain standard. Teaching religion in schools would be outlawed.
• Modern highways between all urban centers.
• Civil infrastructure comparable to western nations in per capita hospital beds, firefighting, police, etc.
• Self-sustaining food production (and a corresponding end to the opium trade).
• The established operation of an independent news media (Newspapers, TV, radio and internet)

Such a protectorate government could enact draconian measures to secure the peace. Madrassas would be closed. Sharia law would be given a back seat to human rights and protectorate law. Inflammatory clerics could be arrested for disturbing the peace. Divisive Islamic teachings could be put aside in favor of reading, writing and arithmetic. Local governments could be mentored in how to develop the prosperity of all. This effort would take a generation, and a huge commitment on whatever poor body the responsibility fell to.

It would also be wildly unpopular to the Muslim community of nations. Prosperous democracies in formerly Islamic theocracies are a direct challenge to too many governments holding tenuous power in the Islamic league of nations.

Okay, this scenario is a pipe dream too. No country - not even America - is going to sign on to be stuck with this level of responsibility.  America and possibly Britain are the only countries which have a cultural mindset that could make this work.

So what’s the answer? Let’s get back to basics. 9/11 is why we were in Afghanistan in the first place. Al Qaida was operating an international terrorist training and operations headquarters as guests of the Afghan government. We went in and demolished the Al Qaida presence and kicked over the Afghan government as a punishment for supporting it. Al Qaida is now operating – at a much reduced capability – out of western Pakistan.

Essentially, we chased a criminal into a swamp, and somehow took on responsibility to drain the swamp and deal with the alligators. We need to stay focused on catching the criminal. This should dictate our future actions in Afghanistan. 

Is the Taliban a threat? As abhorrent as they are, the Taliban does not pose a national security threat to the USA. Europe is more concerned with the actions of the Taliban, because the streets of Europe are the main terminal for the opium that the Taliban produces. Interdicting a drug trade doesn’t require the invasion and subjugation of a nation. The Taliban are a bunch of radical, backwards zealots, and the world would be better off if they were pushing up daisies, but there’s no evidence that they do anything beyond their own sphere of influence. They simply haven’t got the resources even if they wanted to. They should be the problem of the local populations – if the locals want them gone bad enough, they can take up arms and make that happen.

Should the US prop up the current government? Remember that birthing a democracy is neither peaceful or pretty. We should stay out of it, and let events take their course. Afghan heroes and patriots need to step forward and stand on their own.

The US needs to ensure that Al Qaida is terminated. This will require that US forces in Afghanistan be redeployed to secure the eastern border region with Pakistan and interdict border traffic in support of Pakistani efforts in Waziristan. Pakistan needs to be made aware that they must secure their control over Waziristan and hand over the remnants of Al Qaida. If they demonstrate that they cannot do this, then we must cross the border and do it. If the Pakistani army cannot control Waziristan, then how can they challenge us? Yes, this will create a diplomatic row. So what? We lay the foundation, and make it clear that we’re not challenging the Pakistani government or sovereignty, and that we will leave the moment our mission is accomplished. If they would enforce the legitimate request of the USA and not harbor international terrorists, we wouldn’t be in their country. 

The war against Islam – hey, you might not think it’s a war against Islam, but the enemy does – will require a change of thinking. Our priority is protecting America. Rebuilding Afghanistan isn’t going to do much for accomplishing that priority, so why are we fighting and dying to do it? I’m not saying we should pull out, I’m saying we need to define realistic victory conditions, and then do everything necessary to meet those, and stop efforts that do not contribute to them.

Where does this leave the Afghan people? Well, sorry to say they’re pretty much screwed. But you know what? They’re going to be screwed anyway even if we lose another 10,000 soldiers there trying to bring that country into the 21^st century.  The world needs to get the idea that when someone cries “Somebody do something!”, the answer may be “Do it yourself!”  We don’t have an approach that will yield a sustainable result in Afghanistan, and the international community won’t support an approach that will. We’re very good at deposing regimes. If Afghanistan generates another regime that becomes a clear and present danger to the US, we can and should take that one down, too.

I have recently been having a discussion with a Muslim about the nature of the Holy Trinity, and in particular the identity of Jesus. He asked some very interesting questions from the standpoint of Islamic understanding and learning, and they have no easy, quick answer. A gulf exists in the understanding of the foundations of Christianity between Muslims and Christians, and until that Gulf is bridged and Muslims understand the true roots of Christianity, instead of what they are taught in Islamic schools, the two sides will be forever speaking across one another. This is my attempt at bridging part of that gap.

Understanding the true nature and identity of Jesus of Nazareth is a subject upon which many books have been written, and philosophers have debated for two millennia. Part of the problem is a lack of understanding within our human frame of reference to properly define the subject. We are like a group of blind men debating over the meaning of a rainbow.

What do we know of Jesus? Everything we know comes from the writings of Jesus’ closest followers, who recorded not only his words and actions while he was among them, but also their impressions and interpretations of who he was.  These are compiled into the New Testament of the Christian bible. 

In the few centuries after Jesus a population hungry for information about their savior created a cottage industry of religious fiction. People invented stories about Jesus out of whole cloth, spreading rumors and legends that had no basis in fact, and advertising it as legitimate scripture. This trend continues even two thousand years later, witness the market success of books such as The Da Vinci Code – an admitted work of fiction which some credulous people accept as history even today!

Muslims have a strikingly different view of Jesus. Muslims believe Jesus was a mere prophet, no different from Moses or Elijah, or in the Islamic view, Muhammad himself. They do not accept that Jesus was the begotten son of God, or that he was God himself. To understand the roots of this belief, we have to understand the religious climate where Islam took root. Desert dwelling Arabs were by nature fairly mystical, and the Judeo-Christian tradition struck a resonant chord within the Arab heart. The stories of the Old Testament and Jesus of Nazareth were quite popular among the illiterate Arabs.

In the sixth century, the complex Arab language was just beginning to be transcribed, and most Arabs could not read or write. This didn’t mean that they lacked in language skills or weren’t intelligent. Like most other pre-literate societies, they had a rich and complex culture based on verbal tradition in the form of poetic stories. Poets were held in high regard as the composers and keepers of historical tradition.

As Judeo Christian religious stories filtered by word of mouth through Arabia, there was no way for the Arabs to discern the apocryphal tales from the canon accepted by the church. The Arabs had no choice but to lend all the stories they heard equal weight, and then select among the ones that seemed to make the most sense and reject the ones that made the least sense. Muhammad had a richer exposure to religious literature than most, as his travels during his time as a caravan overseer took him deep into Byzantine Christendom. Lacking the catechism that accompanies the traditions of the church, he failed to grasp the importance of mysteries of the divinity of Christ as accepted by Christ’s disciples. He rejected the idea that Jesus was the son of God or that Jesus was God as being too fantastic to believe in.

The monotheism that Muhammad synthesized out of his knowledge of Christianity contained equal parts apocryphal and canonical writings, since Muhammad had no way to tell the difference. Since Muhammad claimed that he was in communication with God himself, his theology had to be consistent and not expose him to uncomfortable questions to which he couldn’t give a coherent answer. The mystery of the divinity of Christ is one of those questions, and so had no place in Muhammad’s theology. Much easier to deny the whole thing than to try to explain the inexplicable. What Muhammad the poet failed to grasp was that the written source documents hold a greater authority than the word of mouth transmission of oral tradition. He held that the belief of Christ the Son or Christ as God was the opinion of some Christians, and in error. He didn’t know that the source documents of Christianity, penned by those closest to Jesus when he was on earth, were the source of those opinions.

So what was Jesus? Son? God? How could he be both?

To properly answer this, we have to compare and contrast Jesus to others, and discover how he was the same, and how he was different.

First of all, Jesus was not a prophet. In all of our accounts of prophets, even Islamic accounts of Muhammad, it’s clearly recorded that God spoke to the prophet in question. The prophet heard and responded to the voice of God, or in Muhammad’s case an angel that he identified as Gabriel (Note that Muhammad is the only case of a prophet being spoken to through an intermediary. All of the Hebrew prophets heard God directly). There is no record in any of the Gospels that Jesus heard the voice of God or was instructed by God in what to do or how to act. There are references in the New Testament that may suggest he was a prophet if taken out of context. These cases fall into two categories: either someone has identified him as a prophet (John 4:19, 6:14, 7:39, 9:17, Luke 7:16, Matt 21:10, 21:46), or Jesus has made an observation about prophets that are also applicable to him (John 4:44, Luke 4:24, Mark 6:4, Matt 13:56 ). Indeed, Jesus can not be a prophet, because “out of Galilee arises no prophet.” (John 7:52)

Even Islamic scripture identifies Jesus as the Messiah, which translated to the word “Christ” in Greek, the anointed one. But Muhammad and succeeding Muslims misunderstand the depth of meaning of this word and the implications it held to the Hebrews. The Hebrew history resonated with the kingship of David, who forged the tribal lands of the Hebrews into a nation among nations. The Messiah was to be the restoration of this exalted monarchy, a King among Kings, the final arbiter and ruler of mankind. 

The key thing to remember when comparing Jesus to God is the logical postulate that a difference that makes no difference is no difference. Jesus was a man, but how was he different from God? If you say that Jesus was just a man and therefore could not be like God, then you’ve neglected that God made Man in his own image (Gen 1:26). 

Jesus was a creation of God, not a mere man who found favor with God in his majority. Prophets were uniformly recognized as such after being called by God and answering his call after they had reached adulthood. They were often introduced in scripture as being men who walked in the ways of the Lord when the Lord called them.   Jesus, by virtue of his being conceived of the Holy Spirit and born of a virgin ( Luke 1:34-35, Quran, 19:20), was the son of God. What are the implications of this? A Son inherits the estate of the father. Since God is infinite, there would be no inheritance in human terms. Is Jesus to spend eternity as a pauper, or will he reign at the right hand of the father? Christian tradition tells us that he will reign with God.

But is Jesus merely a son? He had the full personality of God, the compassion, the anger, the patience, the frustrations, and above all the overwhelming love for his creation. Jesus spoke with the full authority of God: Whatever Jesus willed was as if God had willed it. Given that Jesus was able to command this authority, is there anything that God could do that Jesus could not? Is there anything that Jesus wanted to do that God did not? Is there anything that God wanted to do that Jesus did not? The answer to all of these is no. For all intents and purposes, if you had met Jesus, you met God. Jesus confirmed this when he was asked “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us”, to which he replied "Have I been so long with you, and yet you have not come to know Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; how can you say, 'Show us the Father'?” (John 14:7-8)

But, the Muslims gleefully point out, Jesus prayed to God! Yes he certainly did. Many times he demonstrated to his apostles how to pray. Jesus led by example. He taught the Apostles not to pray in repetitious prayer, and not to make a big deal out of praying in public (both lessons the Muslims missed) (Matthew 6:1-8). He taught that God knows what you are going to pray for and knows what you need. Then in the Garden of Gethsemane, he prayed to God for strength and supplication that he might be spared the agony and death he was about to experience. He knew that he had to suffer and die. He knew that from the start, for that was the mission on which he had been sent, to redeem the sins of man, to demonstrate by his example that nothing – no sin - is greater than God’s love for us, not even his beloved son. This was to close the circle with Abraham, who was willing to offer his most beloved son to show that nothing was more important to him than God.

Jesus knew what was coming, better than anyone else, and petitioned God that if there was a way, that he be spared. As a man, he was terrified of pain and death. But as God he knew what must be done, and ended his prayer in the devotion “Not my will, but yours be done.” God in the form of Man subordinates himself to the desire of God in Heaven, from whence he came and to whence he would return. Muslims should note that all Jesus had to do was start walking, and he would have escaped his fate. Any other man – including Muhammad – would have done just that.

Does this conflict with what I said earlier, that God and Jesus wanted the same thing? No, because God did not want to sacrifice Jesus any more than Jesus wanted to be sacrificed. In just the same way, Abraham didn’t want to sacrifice Isaac any more than Isaac wanted to be sacrificed. How could God withhold his hand from an act that his servant Abraham was so willing to perform for him? God is not less than Abraham, and as the superior party in the covenant, could not stay his hand and treat the intent as good as the act, as Abraham was allowed to do. For this and many other reasons, Jesus had to suffer and die to fulfill prophecy.

Muslims point to Jesus’ final petition from the cross, “Eloi, Eloi lama sabachthani?”. . . “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46, Mark 15:34) as something that Jesus would not have said. They ignore the many other things Jesus said from the cross that no one but Jesus would have or could have said: The petition to forgive his executioners (Luke 23:4) and the charge of John to henceforth care for Mary as his own mother(John 19:26-27). This particular statement was made to fulfill prophecy made hundreds of years before in Isaiah 49:14 and a thousand years before in Psalm 22:1.

Muslims claim that Christians pray to three Gods. This is patently false. The concept of three Gods implies three personalities, three motivations, three separate individuals, each with their own particular quirks and foibles. In a polytheistic theology, various Gods are not equal, and being of different minds, can be separated by men and singled out for special petitions, special responsibilities. But the trinity has none of these characteristics. The Father, the Son and the Spirit move as one, indistinguishable from one another in intent, method, power, authority, and identity. The only differentiation is the method by which mere mortal man perceive the Word that is God. The Father, who created all, the Son, when God walked among us, and the Spirit that guides the hearts of all men who chose to accept Him.   All God, indivisible.

Can God duplicate himself, in the flesh? Muslims say no. Again, I marvel at the Islamic inclination to limit God, and say what he can and cannot do. God can do anything he wants! Which brings the thorny question: If God duplicated himself, would he be two, or one?   Again a difference that makes no difference is no difference! If I pray to God the Father or to God the Son, how is one different from the other? Would I achieve results from one and not the other? Would the answer to my prayer be different from one to the other? Would one hear my prayer, and the other not be able to? Would I be able to pit one against the other? When God and Jesus move with one mind, act with one intent, have the same power and authority, and there isn’t an iota of difference between them, then how are they not one? One in action, one in intent, one in experience. There is no difference. When you petition Jesus, you petition God.

Confusing, hard to understand? No harder than the blind man’s perception of the rainbow. When regarding the God of Abraham, we are all blind men. This is one of the big distinctions between the God of Abraham and Allah. Allah is not beyond the comprehension of mortal man. Indeed, from all accounts, he’s comfortably subordinate to the preconceptions of man. This should bother anyone who professes that such a deity is the author of the universe.

The debate about the Trinity and the unity of God is not unique between Muslims and Christians. Many early Christians sects grappled with this concept in the early days of Christianity. In the time of Muhammad, the debate was mostly centered around the divine nature of Christ. Nestorians and Monophysites hotly debated the nature of Christ - how his divinity reconciled itself with his obvious humanity.

Christianity of the sixth century – like Catholicism today – was founded on two pillars: Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition. Holy scripture is obvious, this is the recorded words and actions of Christ and his apostles. This is the starting point for understanding Christianity. But the Apostles and early church leaders recognized that the relatively limited record in the Gospels could not possibly convey every action, every nuance of teaching that Christ delivered during his ministry. Christ not only taught with words, but with actions. He led by example. Many of his words are subject to interpretation due to context, tone of voice, a turn of phrase that might not survive translation. The early church was fully aware of this, and relied on the traditions established by those who knew Jesus personally to flesh out the skeleton of the Gospels, to fill in the gaps in understanding with personal interpretation. In the Acts of the Apostles – a most important book of the New Testament which is frequently overlooked by Muslims - it's very clear that the early church leaders were guided and inspired by the Holy Spirit. The church knew that the gospels without the traditions to provide the frame of reference would be subject to interpretation that is contrary to the spirit which originally inspired them. This is the flaw in most Protestant churches today. The Protestant movement has offered a rich legacy of fresh interpretation of scripture, but lacks the theological Rosetta Stone of tradition to ensure that the interpretations are consistent with what the early church fathers believed and taught. In contrast, the Catholic church could reasonably be criticized for being too conservative and reluctant to embrace fresh insights. The Catholic position is err on the side of safety.

To explore the concept and confusion of the trinity, we have to examine the theological landscape of the sixth century. Christianity had become the de facto religion of the Roman Empire, from which the Byzantine empire inherited it. The church was not a homogenous monolith of belief, however. The problem was that the written word of Christianity traveled far more easily than the traditions that accompany it. Pagans throughout southwest Asia and the Mediterranean basin were eager and hungry for the promise of salvation that Christianity offered. Religious scripture was in high demand, so much so that a cottage industry arose that produced “scripture” in copious amounts, often fictitious writings by religious free thinkers that reflected their wishful thinking about how Christ’s life should have been. This is the source of many of the apocryphal works, such as the “Gospels” of Thomas and Judas Iscariot and the Apocalypse of Peter. These works were rejected by the council of Nicea as not being authentic, either because their pedigree was unsubstantiated or because their teachings were not in line with the traditions practiced by the church since the first days of Christianity.

So there was a core of Christian thinking and teachings surrounding the original churches that had been established by the Apostles. These churches understood the Gospels, and practiced their beliefs and their theology in a fashion consistent with the Apostles’ understanding of the teachings of Christ. Surrounding this was a periphery of Christian beliefs that had little or no direct experience with the traditions, and had become so large that the core of the church could not adequately catechize them. This periphery was left to try to interpret and understand the holy scripture as best as they could without direction from the “traditional” church. Debates arose, and competing ideas were hotly discussed. This was the Christian world that Muhammad was born into.

Christianity was not unheard of in sixth century Mecca. Indeed, there were icons of Jesus and Mary in the Kaaba. But the word of Jesus had arrived without the teachings and traditions of the church. The apocryphal works were as readily available as bona fide scripture, and the Arabians had no way to tell one from the other. The Christian movement attracted a certain amount of curiosity from the relatively open minded and tolerant Arabs. Most still worshipped their pantheon of desert gods of old. Jewish settlers to Arabia were tolerated. The Jews did not proselytize their religion, and where they settled prosperity often followed. The ever curious Arabs learned of the single God of the Jews, but were put off by the idea that the Jews had a proprietary claim to their God and seemed indifferent to share him. When the idea of Christianity reached Arabia, the metropolitan Bedouins accepted it as a more welcoming version of the staid Judaism of their neighbors.

Those arabs which embraced Christianity were attracted to the relative simplicity of a Unitarian God. They rejected the pantheons of weaker Gods that their ancestors worshipped for the concept of a single, all powerful God. This made sense to them. 

This is the religious climate that Muhammad was raised in. Most Meccans worshipped the pantheon of Gods of Qusay, Muhammad’s ancestor who had wrested control of the Kaaba for the Quraish tribe. The Arabic language was just beginning to be organized into a written form. The main source of news and history was verbal, often in poetic meter to better preserve ideas. The main industry of Mecca was the Kaaba, a small, relatively nondescript religious shrine that served as a focus point for the local Bedouins. The surrounding tribes would make an annual hajj to this shrine. When they did there was much barter and trade in a festive, market atmosphere. The Meccan keepers of the shrine would capitalize on this through sacrificial offerings to the shrine, and through providing goods which were caravanned in from Syria which were hard to come by in Arabia. The trade goods acquired from the Bedouins at the Hajj were then shipped north for sale in Syria, and the next year’s inventory was brought back.

As a citizen of Mecca, and the young husband of a very prosperous trading business woman, Muhammad had plenty of time and inclination for religious pursuits. Without going into motivations in this article, he accepted monotheism as the superior theology, and began his church based on that.

The problem of the Christian trinity was a thorny one for Muhammad. How could he reject polytheism and accept that God is one, and then seem to do an about face and admit that God was indeed three? This question still echoes now after 1400 years.

The problem with the Muslim understanding – or lack thereof – of the Trinity is their seemingly deliberate insistence that the three aspects of the Trinity are unique beings, separate from one another.

Muslims proudly point out that the Trinity is never mentioned in the Bible – a disingenuous argument when they will insist that the Bible is corrupt in the same breath, a topic I discussed in a separate article. This is partly true – the word “trinity” itself is not in the Bible. But the concept is there, and spelled out very clearly in Matthew 28:19-20 (Jesus' direct words): "Go, therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit; Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." The further letters of the apostles frequently refer to each of these parts of the Trinity, either individually or in company with one another. Instead of gleaning the Bible for sound bites, Muslims would do well to read the New Testament as a whole for an appreciation of what the Apostles understood to be the truth that Christ brought to us.

The Father is God in heaven, creator of all that is. From the Greek, "Logos". This is existence itself, for without God there is no existence. The root of all that is logical, Logos also translates to “The Word”. This is the basic understanding of God. This understanding describes God as we envision him when he said “Let there be Light.” The understanding of the early Jews was that to experience God in this form could be a death sentence. Muhammad accepted that this was a reasonable way to envision his Allah.

The son is God as man. From the opening of John; The Word (Logos) became flesh. God descends to earth and walks among us as a man. Same God, different raiment. Four hundred years before Christ, Isaiah foretold the coming of God as Man: Isaiah 7:14 Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. “But,” Muslims cry out with glee, “His name was Jesus, not Immanuel!” Hold on just a second, Matthew teaches us non-speakers of Hebrew that “Behold, the virgin shall be with child and shall bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel," which translated means, "God with us." It’s not a proper name, but a Title. Matthew is very clear that Jesus represents “God with us.” John is even more direct, unabashedly stating that Jesus was God. John was one of the twelve, often described as the “most beloved” apostle of Christ. Who would know better than John? An illiterate seventh century poet from a thousand miles away who converts from polytheistic paganism says Jesus could not be God. The man who was closest to him throughout his ministry, who took his mother as his own and cared for her for the rest of her life says Jesus was God. This is not even a close call.

But wait, Muhammad seems to be of two minds with regard to the Holy Spirit, because he does acknowlege him:

Surah   2:87. We gave Moses the Book and followed him up with a succession of Messengers; We gave Jesus the son of Mary clear (Signs) and strengthened him with the holy spirit.

Surah   2:253. Those apostles We endowed with gifts, some above others: to one of them Allah spoke; others He raised to degrees (of honor); to Jesus the son of Mary, We gave clear (Signs), and strengthened him with the Holy Spirit.

Surah   5:110. Then will Allah say: "O Jesus the son of Mary! recount My favor to thee and to thy mother. Behold! I strengthened thee with the holy spirit, so that thou didst speak to the people in childhood and in maturity.

Surah 16:102. Say, the Holy Spirit has brought the revelation from thy Lord in truth, in order to strengthen those who believe, and as a guide and Glad Tidings to Muslims.

It’s clear from the context that the concept of the Holy Spirit that Muhammad refers to here is not at odds with the Christian concept. So what is it, Muhammad? Is the Holy Spirit an angel? A djinn?    It certainly doesn’t seem so from the way it’s used in these surahs. I don’t know, perhaps it’s my prejudice, but I have to assume that Muhammad is referring to the same thing we Christians do in these Surahs – the spirit of God himself, moving and making his will manifest here on earth. Is it part of the one God or a separate being?  Obviously it’s part of the one God, not separate, or Muhammad would have admit that God is at least two. This is not different from Christian theology, regardless of what Muslims insist. In their insistence to resist the Trinity, they need to create a straw man argument of what the Trinity is before they can logically deconstruct it. Unfortunately for their argument their understanding of the Trinity has nothing to do with Christian understanding, which is more in line with what Muhammad obviously understood about the Holy Spirit, even though he was unable to follow the logic or appreciate the ramifications of what he was saying.

One God, not separate beings. The only difference is in how he is experienced by men who are not equipped to do so.

Would God walk among us as a man? CAN God walk among us as a man? Muslims say no, to which I reply God can do ANYTHING he bloody well pleases! Who are you to tell God what he is not capable of? I always laugh when Muslims say Allah can’t have a son, Allah can’t become a man, Allah can’t do this or that. Allah seems like a pretty limited God, who has limits to his omnipotence. Allah might live under such restrictions, but the God of Abraham does not. Allah is wrapped up in his own majesty, and would not deign to lead by example, but instead leads by the whip of a slavemaster. Our God is Love, and in love he came to set the example, and to demonstrate - as Abraham was prepared to do - that nothing is more important to him than his love for us. In this love he is among us today, as his spirit guides us.

Of the four Gospels, only the Gospel of John specifically says that the Jews were the ones who wanted to kill Christ. I don't know if this is a problem in translation from the original Aramaic, or if John carelessly identified the ruling judicial body of Jerusalem, as "the Jews". This identification in the Gospel of John has caused unimaginable misery among the Jewish people trying to live with their Christian neighbors for the last 2000 years.

Let's remember first and foremost that Christ himself was a Jew. Let us also remember that just a week before the crucifixion, Christ was received into Jerusalem by crowds of people lining the streets waving palm branches and shouting hosannas and calling him the Christ. The movie the Passion of The Christ alluded to this as Pilate asked if this is the same man that the crowds that turned out for the week before.

The Gospels tell us that Christ was an intensely popular figure throughout Judea and Galilee. We're told in the story of the sermon on the Mount that he preached to 5000 men that day. In common Jewish literary form, women and children are not counted in population estimates. A conservative estimate of those who heard the sermon on the Mount could easily be 7500 people, possibly as high as 12,000 people. This was not a unique event. Jesus regularly drew crowds whenever he approached a village.

The Jews under Roman occupied Palestine were not the same people that we usually think of when we read the Old Testament. The Jewish nation throughout much of the Old Testament consisted of the 12 tribes of Israel. However, shortly before the Babylonian exile, Assyrians had invaded Israel from the North and carried off 10 of the 12 tribes into bondage. These tribes were never heard from again. The tribes of Judah and Benjamin were defeated by the Babylonians and carried off to exile for approximately 50 years. When the Persians defeated the Babylonians, Cyrus the Great granted the Jews permission to return to Israel and as a part of reparations offered to rebuild the Temple. The original Temple had been intended to be the resting place of the ark of the covenant, which contained the tablets of the 10 Commandments, written by God and given to Moses. The ark disappeared from history when the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the city. The new Temple, even though it was more majestic than the old temple, was largely symbolic since it didn't contain the ark.

The temple was an incredible source of wealth for Jerusalem. Observant Jews for hundreds of miles around frequently made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem during the holy days of Passover in spring. They would make sacrificial offerings at the Temple of money and sacrificial animals. Temple merchants capitalized on this by providing animals to be sacrificed for sale during the pilgrimage weeks. The primary beneficiaries of all of this were the Temple priests, and the aristocratic classes of Pharisees and Sadducees. They directly received monetary contributions that were given to the Temple and indirectly received remuneration from the numerous Temple merchants, who operated with the permission of the priests. The priests became the ultimate authority on judicial dealings in the Jewish community. The priesthood was a hereditary position. This made the priests arbiters of all things legal, the spokesmen of God himself, with no responsibilities to the people or answerability to society. They became wealthy due to the sacrifices of those who were productive in society. Naturally, this made them an aristocratic class, set apart from day-to-day Jewish society. Senior priests formed the inner circle of the Jewish Sanhedrin, led by a high priest whose office rotated among the senior priests. The full Sanhedrin consisted of 71 members from wealthy and influential families in Jewish society. As is the case of any ruling body which does not answer to the people, the primary use of the Sanhedrin's authority was to ensure that the Sanhedrin stayed in authority.

Such authority was not sanctioned or approved of by God. The serious scholar of the early New Testament knows that God disdained the idea of a temporal government for the Jews from the start. It's instructive to read the commentary that God gave to Samuel, when the people told Samuel that they wanted a king. God explicitly warned about the abuses that a king would lay on the people.

Then Jesus arrived on the scene. His 12 close disciples were themselves commissioned with 71 followers in a hierarchy that deliberately mimicked the Jewish Sanhedrin. The popularity of Jesus’ ministry gave him an undeniable authority that had nothing to do with heredity, position or power. Jesus, in effect, set up a shadow government that was intended in one way to mock the Sanhedrin, but also to challenge it. The Sanhedrin had used its religious authority for secular gain. Jesus demonstrated by example how such a body should be used to serve the people, not to enslave the people. The people responded with wild adulation. This did not go unnoticed by the priests.

The priests had sought to discredit Jesus every chance they had. They devised riddles or logical traps from which no answer would be appropriate. Jesus adroitly avoided these traps. They sought to drive a wedge between Jesus and his followers by claiming that he did not follow their strict interpretation of Jewish law. He made them look foolish by teaching them that the spirit of the law that came from God was logical. He taught them that the law should be applied with common sense; that only a fool would apply the law without regard to consequences.

In Roman occupied Palestine, news traveled by word of mouth at the speed of a walking man. There were no experts to compile statistics and take polls and analyze trends. A person's perception was shaped by those with whom he spoke. The Temple priests knew that Jesus had a following, but they were sufficiently disconnected with the population that they didn't appreciate how large that following was. On the first day of the week before Passover, Jesus entered Jerusalem to be greeted by huge crowds in the streets exuberantly celebrating his presence. This was a wake-up call for the priests. They suddenly realized that Jesus wasn't just an annoying cult leader, but the wildly popular leader of what was shaping up to be a massive political movement.

This threatened the priests in two ways. A direct challenge was placed to their religious authority, the authority that they derived from their position in the Temple. Indirectly, but perhaps more serious, a popular figure like Jesus could be viewed by the people as the new David, the new leader to lead Israel to another golden age. One must remember that Palestine was governed as a protectorate of the Roman Empire. At this time, such a popular movement would quickly seek to throw off what most Jews believed to be their Roman oppressors. Rome had a long history of putting down such rebellion with brutal, even genocidal force. The high priests had a better appreciation of the power of Rome than most. From their point of view if they joined Jesus, Rome would crush Israel and their way of life would be ended. If they opposed Jesus, his numerous followers threatened to overthrow them and replace them with Jesus' shadow government. Again their way of life would be ended.

It's very important to remember that the priests were frightened of Jesus and the power he wielded because of his popularity with the crowds. The day Jesus was crucified, Jerusalem was a ticking time bomb. The city was filled to overflowing with pilgrims there for the Passover. The Romans had recently made the mistake of placing a Roman banner bearing a head of Caesar in public display. Images such as this are very offensive to Jewish people. A group of Galilean's had torn down the banner and incited a riot. The Romans had met this with their usual brutal efficiency and crucified the Galileans. Passions were running high in the crowded city because of this. Both the priests and the Romans were terrified of an uprising.

The Temple guards apprehended Jesus after midnight in the Garden of Gethsemane. He was brought to the house of the high priest placed on trial before the Sanhedrin. Several Jewish laws were broken in the process. The full Sanhedrin was not present. Jewish law required a quorum of the Sanhedrin to be present to try a capital case. The case was tried in the dark hours of the night. Jewish law required that cases be tried in daylight. Witnesses were required to convict in a capital case. The witnesses presented were contradictory and dismissed by the Council. Jesus was convicted and sentenced to death on the same night. Under Jewish law a sentence of death could only be handed down after one day and one night had passed since the conviction. The problem that the priests faced was that they had to carry out the sentence before Jesus’ followers could be rallied to his defense.

When questioned directly as to whether he was the Messiah, Jesus responded "I am". This is a direct allusion to the name God had given Moses on Mount Sinai. The priests convicted Jesus of blasphemy on the basis of this testimony. The penalty for blasphemy is death by stoning. Instead of performing the execution themselves, the priests sent Jesus to the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate. They claimed that they could not put Jesus to death. This is categorically false. Jews routinely stoned people to death and the Romans took no notice. This was a political maneuver, because they knew that if they ordered Jesus to be stoned that their blood would run in the streets from Jesus’ followers.

Pontius Pilate was a political animal, who knew the lay of the political landscape in Judea. On one hand, he knew that condemning Jesus to death could easily spark a riot among Jesus’ followers and Roman blood would run in the streets. On the other hand, he knew well the power of the priests and knew that they could incite a riot themselves. If he didn't do what they wanted again Roman blood could easily run the streets. Caesar had grown weary of the volatile situation in Judea and had warned Pontius Pilate to keep the peace or suffer the consequences.

Pilate did everything he could to avoid putting Jesus to death. He first tried to avoid it by saying wasn't his problem. Jesus was from Galilee so he sent him to Herod, who was the King of Galilee under Roman jurisdiction. Herod, unlike his father Herod the Great had no great love for the Romans. He sensed the dilemma that Pontius Pilate was in regarding Jesus, and enjoyed a certain amount of satisfaction from Pilate’s discomfort. He chose not to give Pilate an out and returned Jesus.

Under Jewish law a prisoner could not be tortured to death. Pilate knew this and ordered Jesus to be scourged, and hoped that this would preempt the high priests’ call for execution. By this time Pontius Pilate, and the high priests were playing a high-stakes game of chicken. The priests called Pilate’s bluff and raised the stakes. They brought Roman politics into it by saying that Jesus had fashioned himself as a king, and therefore was a threat to Caesar. This made Pilate's choice clear. He would either do what the high priests wanted him to do or be declared an enemy of Rome. Pilate symbolically washed his hands of the blood of Jesus, demonstrating that he did not want Jesus to die, and then ordered his execution.

It seems incredible to us today that crowds formed to mock Jesus as he carried his cross to Golgotha. Once again we have to remember to judge by the times and not by the standards that we’re used to in the 21st century. Although Jesus had a large following, by the numbers of people in Jerusalem that day relatively few had actually seen him up close in person. Add to this that after the beatings and the whippings, Jesus was probably hardly recognizable as the same person. It was quite common for crowds to mock prisoners on their way to execution. Remember that Jesus wasn't the only person being executed that day, two other people were crucified with him. Some say they were revolutionaries, others say they were thieves. The same mob mentality that caused people to turn out and celebrate Jesus entry into Jerusalem a week before brought people to mock the prisoners on their way to execution. In both cases, many people probably didn't even know who they were celebrating or mocking. Remember also that there was no mass media. Most of the events that took place that day were done in relative secrecy. Jerusalem was a very busy, very crowded city that day, as pilgrims from all over the countryside prepared for the upcoming Passover feast. Most of the people in Jerusalem who actually followed Jesus probably didn't even know about the crucifixion until after the fact.

The lesson to be learned here is something that one should be aware of when reading any part of the Bible. Bible stories are part history, part moral lesson, part article of faith. In many cases the authors of the Bible weren't historians and didn't appreciate the scholarship which would be required of future readers of the Bible who were from different times and cultures. The authors assumed that the readers would have a common frame of reference, and consequently didn't take the time to explain things that seemed matter of fact to them, but seem unusual or mysterious to us now. This leads to a story of characters and actions that sometimes is missing a necessary backdrop from the scenery, and therefore they seem to behave strangely, because we’re missing crucial assumption in the story. In order to properly appreciate biblical stories, the reader must immerse oneself in the place and time that the story takes place in order to appreciate the historical perspective.

One of the things that just frosts me to no end is the common Islamic abuse of the word “martyr”. They throw this word around and imply that Islamic “martyrs” are equivalent, or perhaps even superior to Christian Martyrs. Part of the purpose of this is to purposefully blur the distinction between Christianity and Islam, in an effort to further legitimatize Islam.

In effect, they are trying to say that as the Christian community reveres its early martyrs for the faith, so too Islamic martyrs should similarly be revered.

The problem with this is that an Islamic “martyr” has nothing in common with a Christian martyr.

The Quran has very little to say about martyrs, except that they’re among the righteous and rub shoulders with prophets in paradise (4:69), and that they’re generally fine people to be around. But what does it mean to be a martyr? We find the answer in the very first mention of a martyr in Hadith Bukhari, Volume 1, Book 2 Number 35:

Narrated Abu Huraira:

The Prophet said, "The person who participates in (holy battles) in Allah's cause and nothing compels him to do so except belief in Allah and His Apostles, will be recompensed by Allah either with a reward, or booty (if he survives) or will be admitted to Paradise (if he is killed in the battle as a martyr). Had I not found it difficult for my followers, then I would not remain behind any sariya going for Jihad and I would have loved to be martyred in Allah's cause and then made alive, and then martyred and then made alive, and then again martyred in His cause."

Well, there its pretty clearly spelled out: A martyr is someone who dies during jihad. This also puts a pretty fine point on the misdirection that jihad is an internal moral struggle. I’m not aware of many people who die in a struggle of conscience. Jihad is specifically called for in the Quran (9:5)

Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.

Martyrdom and jihad are inextricably linked. You cannot be a martyr in Islam unless you are conducting jihad. Jihad is described as “Holy Battle”. Its specific purpose is to spread Islam, or to subjugate non-believers and relieve them of their possessions. One of the clearest statements to this effect is in Bukhari, Volume 5, Book 58, Number 254:

Narrated Abu Burda Bin Abi Musa Al-Ashari:

. . . .by Allah, we took part in Jihad after Allah's Apostle , prayed and did plenty of good deeds, and many people have embraced Islam at our hands, and no doubt, we expect rewards from Allah for these good deeds.'

The value of jihad in Islam cannot be understated.  Bukhari Volume 4, Book 52, Number 41:

Narrated Abdullah bin Masud:

I asked Allah's Apostle, "O Allah's Apostle! What is the best deed?" He replied, "To offer the prayers at their early stated fixed times." I asked, "What is next in goodness?" He replied, "To be good and dutiful to your parents." I further asked, what is next in goodness?" He replied, "To participate in Jihad in Allah's Cause." I did not ask Allah's Apostle anymore and if I had asked him more, he would have told me more.

Indeed, it is considered the highest deed a Muslim can do. Bukhari, Volume 4, Book 52, Number 44:

Narrated Abu Huraira: 

A man came to Allah's Apostle and said, "Instruct me as to such a deed as equals Jihad (in reward)." He replied, "I do not find such a deed."

So Muslims are charged with the highest calling in Islam: to use holy battle to force non-believers to embrace Islam. If you die doing this, you are a martyr.

Does anyone but me see a problem with this philosophy and the whole concept of no compulsion in religion?

All of the Surahs and sunnas regarding martyrs come from after the Hijra, the flight to Medina. There was no question of martyrdom before the hijra, because the two dozen or so social misfits who followed Muhammad on the Hijra were hardly in any shape to fight anyone, let alone stand up and die for Islam. The no compulsion clause in the Quran (2:26) clearly comes from the pre-Hijra period in Mecca, when Muhammad was trying to make nice and recruit members nicely. This is a classic case of abrogation. Did Allah really write all this down before he created the universe, or was he making it up as he went along, responding to events as they happened? One answer makes Allah out to be an imbecile, and the other answer is pretty conclusive evidence that he was a product of Muhammad’s fevered imagination.

So is an Islamic martyr really a good person? Let’s see, his initial goal was to force me, a non-believer, to embrace Islam by threatening me with death or a ruinous head-tax if I didn’t. And for those of you who smugly say the Jizhya is a pittance, in the Syrian campaigns, the Jizhya was a gold Denarious per person – approximately four ounces of gold, more than $3500 in today’s currency. This person is so fanatical about his cult belief that he’s willing to kill me or die in an attempt to make be believe the same way he does. I don’t know, maybe it's just me, but I just find that a tad obnoxious.

Now, let’s examine what it means to be a Christian martyr. In Christianity, a martyr is someone who dies for believing in the word of Jesus Christ. Often such a person is compelled to renounce the teachings of Christ and is killed when he refuses. A hallmark of martyrs is that they do not actively resist their persecutors, but speak the praise of Jesus to the end. Typical of the example of scores of martyrs in the early church was the first Christian martyr, Stephen (Acts 7:54-60):

Now when they heard this, they were cut to the quick, and they began gnashing their teeth at him. But being full of the Holy Spirit, he gazed intently into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God; and he said, "Behold, I see the heavens opened up and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God."

But they cried out with a loud voice, and covered their ears and rushed at him with one impulse.  When they had driven him out of the city, they began stoning him; and the witnesses laid aside their robes at the feet of a young man named Saul.  They went on stoning Stephen as he called on the Lord and said, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!" Then falling on his knees, he cried out with a loud voice, "Lord, do not hold this sin against them!" Having said this, he fell asleep.

For you literalists, “falling asleep” is a common new testament euphemism for dying (Matthew 27:52, John 11:11, Acts 13:36, 1 Corinthians 15:6, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, 2 Peter 3:4).

Christ died on the cross, and he did so in submission. He did not protest, he did not fight, he did not try to avoid it – he easily could have left Jerusalem and avoided capture. When he was in fact captured, one of his apostles, Peter, sought to use violence to defend him, and was rebuked:

Simon Peter then, having a sword, drew it and struck the high priest's slave, and cut off his right ear; and the slave's name was Malchus. So Jesus said to Peter, "Put the sword into the sheath; the cup which the Father has given Me, shall I not drink it?" – John18:10-11

When those who were around Him saw what was going to happen, they said, "Lord, shall we strike with the sword?" And one of them struck the slave of the high priest and cut off his right ear. But Jesus answered and said, "Stop! No more of this." And He touched his ear and healed him. – Luke 22:49-51

Early Christian martyrs followed Christ’s example. Muslim views of Christianity are narrowly focused on the crusades as seen from a jaundiced Muslim perspective. They see the crusades as a series of wars of conquest and a deliberate attempt by Christians to spread Christianity by force. They are blind to the fact that the crusades were wars of liberation, an attempt to retake formerly Christian lands and peoples which had been forcibly converted to Islam (see The "Peaceful" Muslim Expansion). Most Muslims believe that Christianity began the same way Islam did – at the point of a sword.

In a way it did, but the sword was poised at the throats of Christians. It was illegal for three centuries to be a Christian in Rome. To be discovered to be a practicing Christian was a death sentence. The Romans made good sport of the public spectacle of feeding Christians to the lions in the coliseum as a form of entertainment.   The remarkable thing was that Christianity not only survived this period, but grew exponentially as it did so. Indeed, Christians felt it was an honor to die because of their beliefs, but to die as an example of piety and faith, not because they were trying to force anyone to join their religion. A group of people presented themselves to the Roman governor of Asia, C. Arrius Antoninus, declared themselves to be Christians, and encouraged the governor to do his duty and put them to death. He executed a few, but as the rest demanded it as well, he responded, exasperated, "You wretches, if you want to die, you have cliffs to leap from and ropes to hang by."¹

Such examples of faith led people to be amazed at how these people went willingly to death without a fight. This led to curiosity about what kind of faith could inspire people to such bravery, and caused many people to be drawn to Christianity. They were not forced, were not bribed, and had no expectation of an earthly reward when they chose to follow Christ, but instead were risking a cruel death. 

For me, I find the Christian martyrs to be an inspiration of faith. Utter faith that death awaits them to be cradled in the bosom of the Lord, if they keep to his commandment to do no harm to others. Such faith led millions more to follow Christ without one person being forced or coerced. I find the Muslim martyrs to be men of little real faith who died trying – unsuccessfully – to justify their own empty beliefs by compelling everyone else to espouse those same beliefs. The lack of substance in the Islamic faith is best exemplified by the Sharia law that mandates that apostates be put to death. What kind of faith is it that resorts to having to kill people to keep them from leaving?

1. Quoted in Bowersock, G. W. Martyrdom and Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995

This week is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary science. A long time ago I gave up trying to speak sense to opponents of evolution, because even if I did manage to educate one or two, there seems to be an infinite number behind them ready to take up the torches and pitchforks.   It never ceases to boggle my mind that in America today there are still people who hold the Genesis story as the irrefutable narrative of the detailed story of creation, and refuse to embrace the concept of evolution. Indeed, these people not only reject evolutionary science, they have sought to replace it with a bogus “creation science” which purports to explain the discoveries of evolutionary science within the framework of the Genesis creation story.

This debate started when Charles Darwin published his seminal work the Origin of Species. This work proposed an origin of man quite different from the divine source detailed in Genesis. Christians felt that this was a direct challenge to the very foundation of Christian belief (it was not, but that’s moot). Since Genesis is the first book in the Bible, and the chapters on Adam and Eve are the first part of this book, it’s the one story most universally known by Christians. Most people get bogged down and lose interest in reading the Bible shortly after this point. Most people never finish Genesis, but skip ahead to the “good bits”, thereby losing most of their understanding of the roots of the narrative.

The Creationist View

Facts are facts. No one today can escape the evidence that geology presents us, and the inescapable conclusions which must be derived from it. Creationists seek to explain the evidence at hand within the framework of the Genesis story. In the creationist view, the universe was created in the space of six days approximately 6,000 years ago. This number is derived by extrapolating the dates/ages and genealogies described in the Old Testament. There are some ambiguities regarding the dates derived, but 4000 BCE is a reasonable estimate of the biblical age of the world. In the creationist view, the Earth was created complete. After the creation story, the next significant event was the great flood. According to creationists, the flood engulfed the whole earth, even the highest mountains. Creationists attribute the geological strata as evidence of deposition during the flood. In creation science, evidence that fits their model is trumpeted. Evidence that directly contradicts their model (the majority) is either dismissed as irrelevant, accused of being misinterpreted, or explained as being a red herring placed by the devil to lure people to disbelief. In all cases, the Genesis story trumps everything.

Creation science does not allow for an Earth older than 6,000 years. Some liberal creationists may allow for a few thousand years leeway.

Evolution Science

Creationists take particular pleasure at trying to poke holes in the “Theory of Evolution”. They do so by applying logical fallacies to something they obviously don’t understand. A good deal of the Creationist’s platform is to set evolution up as a straw man. By defining what the theory of evolution is, creationists can knock holes in the theory, and thereby demonstrate that it has no more scholarly authority than creation “science”. Unfortunately, the theory of evolution critiqued by creationists often has little or nothing to do with the science of evolution.

Evolution Science has been known as the “Theory of Evolution” since it was first proposed by Charles Darwin. Creationists gleefully refer to this and point out that “It’s just a theory! Nothing’s been proven!”

Well, there’s also the “theory” of gravity, but if I step off a 100 foot cliff I’ll get just as dead as if it were a proven fact. The evidence subsequent to Charles Darwin is so overwhelming that evolution is considered an established fact. The only theoretical things are certain mechanisms and events that are not fully understood. We have a reasonably good understanding of what happened, when it happened, and a pretty good toolbox of possibilities of how and why it happened. There’s debate among academics of how and why certain events happened, there’s no controversy over the established fact that they did happen.

So let’s take a little refresher into evolution science, so that the young earth crowd can maybe come up to speed on the current model. Hopefully then we can quit recycling the old arguments against evolutionary theory which have been rendered moot by advances in our understanding of evolution.

The original Darwinian model proposed that organisms changed in response to their environment, and that survival of the fittest selected certain traits to dominate over others. This natural selection model was supposed to have produced a steady, gradual drift over time. This seemed to be confirmed by the fossil record, where we found a steady progression of development along family trees, most notably in horses and primitive anthropoids leading up to the human species.

This model had a couple of problems. A favorite question of creationists is that if man evolved from apes, why are there still apes? This is an infantile question, because not even Darwin postulated that the pressures of natural selection would be constant or homogenous throughout the range of a species’ habitat. 

The Darwinian model of continuous gradual evolution was used to justify the fossil evidence of the evolution of homo erectus to Cro-Magnon man. However, the problem with this was the assumption that this evolution would have happened simultaneously across a large geographical area, as homo erectus fossils have been found as far afield from Africa as China and Indonesia. Under this model, Chinese H. Erectus would have evolved into modern Chinese in China, and modern Africans in Africa. No explanation was put forth to explain why such parallel evolution would take place. 

Enter genetics. In the 1980’s a study was performed using mitochondrial DNA to try to track genetic divergence within populations. Mitochondrial DNA is the operating machinery within the walls of a cell, and is not recombined during reproduction. Mitochondrial DNA is passed from the mother to the child. Outside of mutations, you have the same mitochondrial DNA as your mother, and her mother, and her mother, etc.   Differences in this DNA are a result of mutation. If you assume a constant, known mutation rate in a general population, you can determine how long it’s been since every member of that population shared a common female ancestor.

The scientists engaged in this study hoped to confirm the Darwinian model, using their current understanding of evolution to predict that the human race would share a common female ancestor about 600,000 years old. 

To their surprise, the results yielded a number much more recent that this. The “mitochondrial Eve”, the common female ancestor to the entire human race, lived approximately 140,000 years ago. Advances in DNA sequencing and analysis allowed a similar study to be performed using Y-chromosomes, which are passed from father to son with no contribution from the mother. The age suggested from the drift of Y chromosomes showed that the Y-Chromosome Adam, the common male ancestor to the human race, lived approximately 60,000 years ago. Subsequent studies have allowed forensic geneticists to map out the path of human migration using the frequency of appearance of genetic markers as their guide. See the excellent guide for this on the National Geographic website. 

This led to a rethinking of the mechanisms of evolution. Continuous change was replaced with the concept of punctuated equilibrium, and opened up the door to an understanding of the conditions that lead to speciation. Under the new model, evolution takes place in small, isolated populations which are under reproductive stress. If we think of a genetic modification as a drop of food dye and drop it in a test tube, we can quickly disseminate that dye through the contents of the tube for a significant change. If we drop the same dye into a swimming pool, it’s quickly dispersed and has no net effect. The same effect is observable in how a genetic modification is propagated in varying sizes of populations. Also, a genetic modification will only breed true if it offers some reproductive advantage to the holder. In other words, it must allow the holder to have more offspring, or allow its offspring to reach reproductive maturity in greater numbers than those without the modification. This advantage does not have to be terribly significant to allow the new genes to become commonplace in the population. If the population is not under any sort of reproductive stress, there would be no reason for natural selection to favor one gene over another, and no drift would be observable in favor of any particular gene.

The implication of this is that successive waves of hominid species evolved in isolated pockets in Africa, and then migrated out of Africa across southern Asia. They were then replaced by subsequent waves of more advanced hominids. This fits well with the fossil record.

Fossilization

Creationist skeptics aren’t convinced. They want to see the fossil record show the progression in detail. They want to see “the missing link”. Well, the fact is that there are a number of missing links. The fossil evidence we have are snapshots in time, but they clearly demonstrate the progression from primate to modern man. The creationist camp regards the “missing” evidence as an indictment against the evolution model, as if the evidence does not support the conclusion.

In the creationist view, if the evolutionary model were correct, then we should see an unbroken chain of fossils from modern times to the earliest primates. Because we don’t, the creationists insist that the model is flawed. What’s flawed is the creationist understanding of just what a fossil is, and how it comes to be. Fossilization is a very rare event. The probability of any given animal being fossilized after death is vanishingly small. Soil composition, climate, circumstances surrounding the death all play a part in determining if an animal’s remains will become fossilized. The remains must be preserved almost immediately after death, usually by some sort of burial, to prevent scavengers from scattering and consuming them. The soil composition must be relatively pH neutral to prevent the bones from being dissolved. Usually fossilization is associated with flood deposits or sedimentation. Hot, arid conditions may also lead to preservation of the body through mummification before the body is covered and fossilized. Rapid burial due to volcanic action or tarpits is another common precursor to fossilization. Fossilization rarely occurs in forest or steppe settings, where much of the planet’s biodiversity exists. The wonder is not that we have missing links, but that we have any fossil evidence at all. The rarity of fossilization implies a relative abundance of the creatures we find in the fossil record.

Transitional Species

Creationists point out that if the evolutionary model were correct, then why don’t we see any animals in transition from one species to another? Well, the answer’s right in front of our eyes. We just have to define what a transitional species is. A species of animal is defined by being reproductively distinct from other, similar animals. You can’t mate a dog and a cat together and produce offspring. You can’t mate a gorilla and a chimpanzee and produce offspring. These are separate species.

Under the evolution model, when two populations have been separate for a sufficient amount of time, they will have genetically drifted apart to the point where no reproduction is possible. But at what point do you draw the line?

The genus Canis is a relative newcomer on the evolutionary stage. This includes dogs, wolves and coyotes.   While physically and behaviorally distinct, all of these animals can successfully breed with one another and produce viable offspring.

Cats, on the other hand, have been around quite a bit longer. Numerous cats species cannot breed and produce offspring. In a very few cases, the big cats are genetically similar enough that they can produce offspring, but those offspring are sterile. Lions and tigers in captivity have produced sterile offspring. Donkeys and horses may be bred together to produce mules, which are sterile. These are but two examples of species which have drifted enough to speciate but not enough to prevent cross breeding. There’s some speculation that such interbreeding was possible between our ancestors and Neanderthal Man.

Geology

Creation science goes to great lengths to explain the strata of the geologic column in terms of the great flood described in Genesis. To a creationist, the successive layers of sedimentary rock are clear evidence of a worldwide deluge. The occasional volcanic deposit that has sedimentary deposits both above and below it are just examples of the upheaval during the flood, according to the creationist. The presence of fossil sea life found in sedimentary formations that are mountains today lead the creationist to conclude that water once covered those mountains. Mountains never change, right?

This explanation is enough to satisfy anyone who casually looks at the strata, but it doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Paleobiologist Robert Bakker set out to try to identify the climate of the North American plain in Montana during the cretaceous period. One of the things he found embedded in the fossil record were numerous lime balls. These nodules seemed to have been formed underground, just below the surface of the earth. They formed repeatedly, in many different layers of the strata, one on top of the other. Such formations can be found today. On the alluvial plains of India lime is leached out of the soil during the rainy monsoons, and then precipitates into nodules called kunkyars during the long, hot dry season. Since we see similar formations in the cretaceous sediments of Montana, it’s reasonable to assume that 70 million years ago, Montana was subject to a monsoon-like season and a dry season. Such cycles of wet and dry are necessary to form the lime balls which are in the fossil record. There’s no way that such formations could form in a submerged environment. (The Dinosaur Heresies, Robert Bakker, PhD, pp107-110)

Sedimentary rock that’s upthrust into a mountain range will carry with it the fossil evidence of its beginnings at the bottom of an ancient sea. Creationists scoff that a mountain range could rise out of a sea bed. The problem is that the creationist mind can’t wrap itself around the concept of a million years.

We can look at existing earthquake fault regions and draw some conclusions. Let’s take for example, a subduction fault region, which generates a magnitude 6.0 earthquake every hundred years or so. This is not uncommon. A simple search will yield several places on earth today where this would be normal. Now let’s say that each 6.0 earthquake causes a crust displacement of about 6 inches or so. This is also well within the bounds of geologic changes observed in recent history. Now let’s assume this force works over a period of 5 million years. Six inches of displacement every century for 5 million years means the crust will raise 25,000 feet – nearly as high as Mt. Everest! There’s plenty of evidence that the Rocky Mountains were forming 65 million years ago. This is not very much of a stretch at all.

The Flood

The Genesis story of the flood is by no means unique. Every culture around the world has a story of a tremendous flood, which seemed to threaten life itself. Is the Genesis tale a fable, is it the literal truth, or is it an echo of a half-forgotten event in human history?

The Genesis flood simply cannot be the literal truth. It suffices as a fable, but breaks down under scrutiny. One of the many problems with the story is how the animals were distributed after the flood – why there’s the sudden change in zoology along the Wallace Line in the southwest Pacific. Why the primitive marsupial mammals went to colonize Australia. Why did none of the placental animals make it to Australia? Why did birds and lizards make it to New Zealand, but no mammals? The flood story does not explain how freshwater fish -- which would die in salt water -- survived a worldwide deluge, and went on to exclusively populate freshwater ecosystems afterwards. The flood story does not explain the myriad of species of animals, including millions of species of ants and other insects, that exist throughout the world, isolated from Noah’s landing place by prohibitive water barriers even today.

But that doesn’t mean that we dismiss the story completely. We have evidence that the oceans were much lower thousands of years ago than they are today. A stunning testimonial of this is the Cosquer cave in France, where prehistoric cave paintings are protected by a cave entrance that’s under nearly 100 feet of water. In the times when the paintings were made, the sea was 11 miles distant, and 300 feet lower, due to the immense amount of water locked up in continental glaciers more than a mile deep.

Now take a look at a population map of the world today. Even today, the bulk of the human population lives within 300 feet of sea level. For early man, building the first cities near the ocean was a no-brainer. The ocean simply offered too many advantages: cheap, fast and easy trade; a moderated climate; and an abundant supply of food.   It’s a common mistake to think that Cro-Magnon of 10-15,000 years ago was somehow less intelligent that we are today.   A lack of technology does not mean he was any less sophisticated in his thinking and social structures. How many of us could reproduce even a fraction of our technological foundation, if we were thrust naked into the wilderness? If we suppose that early man formed settlements, even cities, near the sea, and these cities were the repository of knowledge, technology and trade, what would become of them if the sea levels precipitously rose 300 feet? Keep in mind that we can only scuba to about 100 feet deep. Below that the seafloor is mostly an unreachable mystery, and any evidence of ancient civilization has been buried in thousands of years of sediments and coral growth. Civilization was wiped out, whole cities disappeared, and the only people to tell the tale were the refugees and hillbillies, stripped of the veneer of civilization which had been drowned with the cities. Over the generations, the story of the flood that destroyed civilization was told, and embellished to generations that weren’t equipped to understand the story.

And What of Genesis?

The creationist position is that the world was created in six days, as described in Genesis. To accept a different view is heresy. The proponents of this position miss the point. The importance of the creation story of Genesis is not the details of how it happened, but the fundamental morality of the story: God created the universe, God created Man. Man disobeyed God, and separated himself from God in the act. This sets the stage for the rest of the Bible, which is above all the story of the reconciliation between man and God, which culminated in the crucifixion of the Son of God, Jesus Christ.

The details of the story of Genesis are not fundamentally incorrect. They are simply abbreviated, and told within the framework of reference of the target audience: semi-nomadic herders and farmers of the lower Mesopotamian region of 4,000 years ago. These people were not aware of, nor schooled in physics, cosmology, geology, archeology, paleontology, genetics, biology (beyond basic animal husbandry), chemistry, higher mathematics or a myriad of other disciplines which define our view of the world today. To have told a creation story within the framework of modern science to such a people would have done nothing but confuse them and engendered disbelief. It would have masked the real purpose of the story: the morality play of the relationships between God, Man and Creation.

We need not discard the fundamental truths of this morality when we examine creation from the frame of reference of modern science. For someone today to discard the completely overwhelming evidence of the scientific view of the formation of the earth and the evolution of species in favor of a tale told to Mesopotamian herders of 5,000 years ago shows that such a person has more in common with that herder than with a 21st century person with a reasonable education. If it comforts you to discard the evidence before you and cling to the ancient tales, then please do so, but don’t pretend that your tale has exclusive authority of precedence and should be taken seriously by those of us who choose to accept what our eyes and common sense tell us.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was recently asked pointed questions by George Stephanopoulos about the congressional move which allocates substantial funds to birth control clinics (read: abortuaries) as part of the economic stimulus package (See article).  She defended this by stating that “ . . . family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children's health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those - one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.”

This is insane.  It should terrify you that this woman is third in line to lead this country, should the President and vice-president meet an untimely demise.  This single statement reveals an underlying set of assumptions and a mindset that is totally incompatible with reality, and the American way of life.

The justifying assumption for this statement is that babies are an economic drain on the government.  They are wards of the state, and a liability to the state.  State resources which could be better spent stimulating the economy would be spent on taking care of babies and children, from which no return would be realized.  By spending money to actively discourage and prevent these births, in Speaker Pelosi’s twisted logic, we would save the state money in the long run.

There are so many logical errors here, it’s difficult to know where to begin.  Most of us just stand in slack-jawed amazement that anyone could be so phenomenally idiotic with such a straight face.

In the first place, Pelosi’s assumption that the government is responsible for the care of children is in error.  This sort of intrusive governmental assumption of responsibility promotes an abdication of personal responsibility on the part of the individual citizen.  Once upon a time in this great country, unwed pregnancies were a scandal.  Women went to great pains to avoid this condition, because of the harsh personal economic consequences of trying to raise a baby alone.  Yes there were back-alley abortions, but they were exceptional.  There was a social stigma associated with unwed pregnancies.  Unwed pregnancies today should still be a scandal, but for different reasons.  The availability of preventative birth control, coupled with the level of education and empowerment on the part of single women should easily be enough for any woman to exercise her libido without worrying about the consequences of becoming pregnant.  It’s simply irresponsible for any woman to need to resort to an abortion to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.

The government has absolved the unwed mother of responsibility for providing for her unwanted children, by ensuring that she receive welfare funds from the public treasury to care for the child.  Again, personal responsibility has been usurped by the government.  Yet the government as a nanny state simply cannot provide the level of personal care and attention required to turn a child into an exceptional, self-sufficient, independent, productive member of society.  This is a logical fallacy of the left, that governmental support of single-parent households will have a net positive effect.  In the government’s well-meaning haste to help out someone, they end up doing more harm in the long-term than good.

This assumption that citizens are wards of the state, and a financial responsibility of the state leads the State to the logical conclusion that it has the power to regulate the number of citizens to be added to society.  The result of this conclusion should be enough to cause most people to question the validity of the initial assumption.  Unfortunately, the left is so convinced that their assumptions are correct, that they will slavishly dedicate themselves to those assumptions, regardless of the consequences to which they lead.

The second fallacy is the assumption that the State has any power to stimulate the economy through direct action.  Economic history shows time and time again that the only power the State has to positively affect the economy is through inaction.  State attempts to regulate or influence markets invariably lead to less than optimum results.  This was demonstrated in the New Deal actions which only served to extend the Great Depression, Nixon’s wage and price control policies, which served to turn an economic downturn into a full blown recession and led the way to stagflation, and the most recent government meddling in our banking system which led to our current economic crisis.

Children are the promise of the future.  They are the economic engine which will drive this country, this society, this culture, this economy forward twenty to forty years from now.  Babies are an investment, which if properly cultivated, will yield rich rewards in the future.  They are the primary investment in the future, and the investment upon which all other investments are justified.  Only a totalitarian megalomaniac would come to the conclusion that babies are a disposable liability, and advocate allocating funds to restrict the number of children available to the future. 

To make a public proclamation that such funding will stimulate the economy is an assault on your intelligence and mine.  The sort of thinking that leads to such a conclusion is that the government is the ultimate power in society, and that all providence flows to and from the government.    This is a dangerous idea, which many Americans have fought against over the last century, and it saddens me that it has not only come to our shores, but has found its way into the highest halls of power.  Our founding fathers took great pains to see to it that the people were the ultimate power in our country.  This is a lesson that Speaker Pelosi would do well to re-learn, and it’s incumbent upon us all to remind her and all her colleagues of this the next time we go to the voting booths.

It’s a fundamental tenet of Islam that the Christian Gospel and the Jewish Torah are corrupted scripture. This is so fundamental that one would think that it comes straight out of Islamic scripture. The interesting thing is, that it doesn’t. In fact, the Koran is very clear that it confirms what has already been revealed in scripture in many places:

When before it there was the Scripture of Moses, an example and a mercy; and this is a confirming Scripture in the Arabic language, that it may warn those who do wrong and bring good tidings for the righteous. -- The Koran (Pickthall tr), Sura 46:12 - The Sandhills

This theme is repeated in many places: 2:89, 2:91, 2:97, 2:101, 3:3, 4:47, 5:48, 6:92, 35:31, 37:37, 46:12, 46:30, 61:6.

So it’s clear the Muhammad held the Gospel and the Torah in high regard. He seemed oblivious to the Tanakh, either he wasn’t aware of it, or lumped it with the Torah (a common mistake for a Gentile), or he didn’t consider it relevant.

It’s obvious from much of the style of the Koran, the many appropriated stories from the Judeo-Christian tradition, and outright statements to the effect, that Muhammad fancied himself an heir to a long line of Jewish prophets. His endorsement of Judeo-Christian scripture seemed to bolster that argument. His teaching even raised speculation among the Jews that he may have been the messiah, and among the Christians that perhaps he was the second coming. In the seventh century, both faiths were eagerly awaiting these events.

The student of Islam has to keep in mind some essential facts at this point: During Muhammad’s day, the Koran was not written down! It was memorized by heart by the followers of Muhammad, in what is today considered an archaic form of the Arabic language -- a language not known beyond the bounds of Arabia, Jordan and southeastern Syria. Now some might scoff at this, thinking that such a feat stretches the bounds of reason, that people could memorize such a vast tract. It’s not that out of the ordinary. First the Koran is presented as a poem, in a rhythmic, rhyming cadence that lends itself well to memorization. It is highly repetitive, themes are repeated many times in various surahs, so the feat isn’t quite as vast as one would imagine at first glance. Memorization of huge stories is quite common among peoples with no written language. Illiteracy does not mean people are stupid or cannot manipulate the language. Socrates himself bemoaned the advent of writing, for fear that it would erode the memory.

This lack of a written Koran in Muhammad’s time made it very difficult for the scholar to compare the revelations of Muhammad with Judeo-Christian scripture. Nevertheless, it was done. The Jews of Medina listened to Muhammad. As residents of the area, they well understood the Arabic that Muhammad spoke. They compared it to their (Hebrew) scriptures available in their synagogue, and found that the two did not correlate. They rejected Muhammad, which subsequently led to their downfall as he turned his wrath on them. The details of their objection was not recorded. Muhammad spoke of their dissention as if they were lying to him:

And lo! there is a party of them who distort the Scripture with their tongues, that ye may think that what they say is from the Scripture, when it is not from the Scripture. And they say: It is from Allah, when it is not from Allah; and they speak a lie concerning Allah knowingly. - The Koran (Pickthall tr), Sura 3: 78 - The Family Of Imran

Even at this point, Muhammad was holding onto the idea that the Judeo Christian scriptures were reliable.

To understand this, you have to recognize the roots of Muhammad’s association with Monotheism. He was raised a polytheist in Mecca, but had traveled in the employ of his first wife to southern Syria on trade missions. It’s said that he was a student of a Nestorian monk in the trade city of Bosra named Bahira. None of the Christian scriptures had yet been translated into Arabic, and of course neither had any of the Jewish scriptures. If we assume that Muhammad was interested in Christianity, we can speculate that he heard many tales by oral transmission. Lacking a dedicated scholarly approach to translation, there is no way of knowing the quality of the translations from the extent Greek texts then available and the Arabic that Muhammad received. There is no way of knowing if Muhammad was exposed to the entire old and new testaments, but it’s highly unlikely. More likely, the high points were passed to him, as evaluated by the person who was instructing him. It’s also plain from the Koran that many apocryphal stories were also related to him. Lacking the ability to discern for himself, he had no way of knowing that many of these stories were fanciful, and not accepted even then as canonical. It’s clear from his own “revelations” that he was captivated by the stories, but missed much of the underlying meaning and theological implications.

The motivations for his acceptance of the Judeo-Christian writings as legitimate was plain. No one was going to believe someone who invented his own monotheistic religion from whole cloth (Actually, he was probably wrong on this point, and it may have been better for Islam in the long run if he had done so). By taking up the mantle of Judeo-Christianity, he could appeal to a huge population of already practicing monotheists, and thereby gain legitimacy among his own people as well.

The problem came after Muhammad was long dead, when Islamic scholars who could read in several languages, and had a printed codex of the Koran to use as a gold standard, began to definitively tie the Judeo-Christian scriptures to the Koran.

The problem was, they didn’t match. In fact they contradicted each other at almost every turn. Muslims scholars could not accept that their Koran was in error. After all, it was the direct Word of God, dictated word for word to Muhammad was it not? Therefore the Judeo-Christian scriptures must have been tampered with, and were declared corrupt.

Today, it is not allowed in most Islamic countries for Muslims to read the Bible. Consequently, all they know of it is what they are taught in Islamic schools. Much of what they are taught is incorrect.

The contradictions between the Bible and the Koran are myriad, and I won’t go into them here. If you’re interested in the details, you can find some places to start here and here. It was these contradictions, among others that led Muslim scholars to conclude that the Bible was corrupted.

The interesting thing about this claim is that Muslims never say when this corruption took place!

Well, it either happened before Muhammad, or after him. We’ve already established that Muhammad accepted the Bible as legitimate in his time. This is a theme that is prevalent throughout the Koran. So, one could argue that it’s safe to assume that the Bible was uncorrupted in the time of Muhammad. I mean, if it was corrupted, you think he would say something to that effect, right? But no, he said it confirms the Bible!

So by this logic, the Bible was corrupted after Muhammad. Those dirty Christians must have corrupted it just to spite Islam! One Islamic way of looking at it is that the Bible has been translated so many times that it could not have helped but be corrupted.

Well, there are problems with this. Most Bibles today are translated from and checked against the Latin Vulgate codex. This is the authoritative Bible of the Roman Catholic Church, compiled by Jerome in the early fifth century from the Septuagint and Hebrew texts. It was completed in the year 405, a full two hundred years before Muhammad’s revelations. Some Bibles, such as the New American Standard, choose to go back to earlier known codices in the original Greek and Aramaic, when available. All of these sources predate Muhammad by centuries, and are still available today. There is little difference between them and the Bibles we use today.

Moreover, we have the writings of the early church fathers from the second and third centuries. These letters and epistles, sent between far flung congregations of early Christians, were used to teach and answer questions. The early church fathers were fond of quoting scripture. If you compile all the scraps of scripture quoted in their many letters and documents and pasted it together in the proper order, you could completely reproduce the New Testament except for 27 verses! And guess what? It was the same then as it is today!

By Muhammad’s time, there were more than fifty thousand lectionaries in use in the Christian world. To have corrupted the Bible at this point would have been a monumental effort, involving the gathering and replacement of every lectionary and every codex in existence. This in a time when all copying had to be performed by hand, making a single lectionary a thing of such high value that it was often the most prized thing in the community. The wildest conspiracy theory in history would be dwarfed by this event. Only a Muslim would see this as anything but impossible.

This means that if the Bible was corrupted, it had to happen before Muhammad. Let’s examine this. In the first place, Muhammad never hinted at such a thing. But let’s say he managed to miss it, or was just being polite. If we consider the New testament, the corruption must have happened very early. The Latin Vulgate was codified in 405. The content of the Latin Vulgate agrees with that found in the Chester Beatty Papyri, dated to the third century. This leaves a mere two hundred years between Christ and the earliest known texts of the New Testament.   Most scholars place the earliest dates for the Gospels to have been written at around 60-100 AD . . . within the lifetime of the eyewitnesses to Christ. This further narrows the window in which corruption might have crept in. The earliest known texts confirm our Bible today. It’s unlikely for the Bible to have been corrupted in the time of the living memory of the men who actually wrote it. The time frame that this corruption could have taken place means that men who had living memories of the authors were still alive (Think about this for a second. My grandmother, aged 92, knew people in her childhood who had fought in the Civil War, 140 years ago!). 

The problem is even worse for the Old Testament. The discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls confirms the Old Testament of today, and dates back to 250 BC.

Jewish scribes were meticulous about their transcriptions. There was a set of rules that had to be adhered to. Letters were to be printed literally on a grid, like a courier font today, and the resulting text was examined vertically as well as horizontally to ensure through this sort of primitive “checksum” that no errors had crept in.

There is no basis for the Muslim claim that the written Bible is corrupt. Any claims of corruption before the scripture was written are irrelevant, and can be just as easily leveled at the Koran as at the Bible. In fact there is plenty of scriptural reference in Islam that suggests that the Koran is neither complete or pristine. But that is the subject of another article.

• My God does not endorse the assassination of people who speak out against him.  (Ibn Ishaq 676)
• My God does not permit you to rape your captive females.  (Tabari IX:25)
• My God did not endorse his prophets to  take slaves and "marry" (read: Rape with legitimacy) them hours after publicly executing their fathers.  (Quran 50-51, Ibn Ishaq 466)
• My God does not share his glory with his two sister goddesses (oops, sorry, Satan dictated that part of the Quran, according to Muhammad.  My bad . . . or his. . .. whatever).  (Ibn Ishaq 165)
• My God does not endorse 57 year old prophets to have intercourse with 9 year old brides.  (Bukhari:V7B62N64)
• My God did not advocate his prophet to wage a campaign of banditry from which the prophet got 20% of all the booty.  (Quran 8:41, Bukhari:V1B2N50)
• My God did not reverse his teachings. (Quran 2:106)
• My God does not deny the immaculate conception, the divinity of Jesus or that Jesus died on the cross, let alone rose from the dead. (Quran 4:157)
• My God does not teach that a woman is worth half of a man.  (Quran 2:282)
• My God does not require that you be killed if you leave the faith.  (Quran 4:89)
• My God does not consider the mindless recital of scripture in an archaic language that the penitent doesn't even understand as prayer.  (Bukhari:V2B16N108)
• My God does not instruct the sons of prophets to divorce their wives so that the prophet can marry them. (Tabari VIII:1-3)
• My God does not instruct his prophets to renounce the trinity. (Quran 5:73)

Chances are you’re still not getting enough vitamin C to keep healthy.  You should be aware that the FDA’s requirement is only the minimum amount required to prevent clinical scurvy. 

Vitamin C is misnamed. Vitamin C is nothing more than ascorbic acid.  Ascorbic acid is a necessary metabolic enzyme, without which complex life would not be possible.  It’s used in many ways by the body.  It's a powerful antioxidant.  It's used as a catalyst for building good quality collagen, which is the connective tissue and building block for cell walls.  It is a critical component used in the manufacture of immunoglobulins used to fight infections.

Conventional wisdom states that we get enough vitamin C through our diet to satisfy all of our metabolic requirements.  If this were true, then it should hold true for all animals, since Vitamin C is fairly easy to come by, right?

The facts dispute this.  There are very few animals that get their vitamin C through diet.  Great apes, guinea pigs, and some fruit bat in India are the only mammals which do not manufacture ascorbic acid in their livers.  All other animals catalyze ascorbic acid from glucose, and do so in huge quantities.  Somewhere along the line, the common ancestor to great apes lost the ability to synthesize glucose into ascorbic acid.  In a temperate climate, this would have been an evolutionary death sentence.  In the tropics, however, it is possible to get enough ascorbic acid from diet to prevent immediate death through scurvy.  That doesn’t mean that enough ascorbic acid is ingested to completely compensate for the inability to manufacture it ourselves.

This is why guinea pigs are such useful lab animals when studying heart disease.  If you want to watch an animal quickly die a horrible death from high cholesterol, deny a guinea pig access to vitamin C.   

I once read a story about a fictional colonization of a planet that had no potassium.  The entire population suffered from chronic potassium deficiency, and those who held the keys to the sole source of potassium on the planet were kings.  I have also had friends who suffered from various genetic maladies that prevented them from producing certain enzymes necessary for proper digestion.  These conditions are manageable when understood, by limiting the diet.

Diabetes is a genetic disease which affects a few people.  It can be a killer, but is also manageable.  I have several friends who live very active, very normal lifestyles, by simply staying on top of their diabetes and managing it constantly.

If the whole human race suffered from chronic, subclinical scurvy, then how would we know it?  Wouldn’t that be considered normal?  Wouldn’t that be considered the “Human condition?”  Look at human medicine, compared to veterinary medicine.  There are a huge number of maladies that animals simply don’t seem to suffer, or from which they suffer very little.  Whenever such a condition is encountered, it’s a good bet it’s related to ascorbic acid deficiency.

Chronic ascorbic acid deficiency has played a huge part in human history.  We think nothing of it today, when we have fresh food available year round. Ascorbic acid breaks down very quickly when not in crystalline form.  Stored or overcooked food is very poor in ascorbic acid. Even up to the early twentieth century, the death rate in most communities would peak near the end of spring, as weakened members of communities succumbed to the debilitating effects of scurvy over the winter with no source of ascorbic acid.  This is confirmed by the funeral registers as far back as records were kept.  In the ancient and medieval world, wars were often decided by which army succumbed to scurvy first, as the military supplies were made for preservation and notoriously deficient in ascorbic acid.  It was not uncommon to find sailing ships completely devoid of life, as the crew had all died of scurvy.

Since ascorbic acid has a free electron, its presence in the bloodstream will serve to neutralize free radicals and render them inert before they can damage cells.

Many bacteria and viruses rely on free radicals, and in fact produce them to be used as weapons with which to open and gain access to cells.  The wholesale manufacture of free radicals by bacteria can cause massive cell damage in a localized area, which we experience as redness and swelling and inflammation.  A high concentration of ascorbic acid in the body tissues will “soak up” these free radicals, prevent swelling and inflammation, and also deny invasive infections one of their prime tools for gaining access and reproducing.  Ascorbic acid in high doses is a powerful anti-inflammatory.

Interestingly, humans have evolved a response to this weakening by producing more cholesterol, which adheres to the inner walls of the circulatory system and literally “shores up” the arteries.  Eventually this reinforcement clogs the arteries and becomes fatal in itself, but statistically it keeps the individual alive longer, giving the offspring a longer period of available parental care.  This is a reproductive advantage, but not optimal.

The immune system’s response to an infection is to immediately create antibodies, and the ascorbic acid contained in the body tissues are robbed for this purpose.  That icky, achy sick feeling you have when you have a cold is not a direct result of the infection.  What you are experiencing is sudden-onset acute scurvy, caused by the sudden crash of the ascorbic acid levels in your body.

Heavy metal poisoning is a concern in today’s industrialized environment.  These metals get dissolved in our bloodstream, and they collect in fatty tissues, where they form catalyst centers for all sorts of undesirable chemical reactions in the body.  Ascorbic acid, being an acid, bonds easily with metals and helps chelate them out of the bloodstream into the kidneys, where they are passed harmlessly.

The next time you see such a study, be sure to look at the doses they were using to observe the effects.  Typically these studies consider 2 grams per day a high dose.  Orthomolecular advocates will tell you that this is about ¼ of a maintenance dose for a healthy human!  There are plenty of studies which show that Vitamin C has a significant effect on the duration and discomfort of a cold, but all of these studies start their doses at 10-20 grams and go up from there. 

Basically the naysayers are fighting a 3-alarm fire with a squirt gun, and drawing the conclusion that water has no effect on a fire.

It was several years after that that I started researching more about it and discovered the body of knowledge that surrounds this.  I have since adopted a continuous management of my ascorbic acid levels.  I haven't been sick in a very long time – the last time I was sick was with a norovirus which made my stomach so acidic that I couldn't ingest vitamin C.  I've surprised my family physician with extremely low cholesterol levels. 

Another thing to remember is that the half-life of ascorbic acid in your body is about 30 minutes.  To maintain reasonably high concentrations you must ingest it regularly.

Your body will absorb as much as it needs.  When the body reaches tissue saturation, it will stop absorbing it.  Ascorbic acid is absorbed in the upper digestive system.  What isn't absorbed will be passed to the lower digestive system.  There it will irritate the intestines and produce gas and eventually a mild, non-debilitating loose stool.

This knowledge will help guide you to determine how much is right for you.  A rule of thumb: for a healthy person, start with 35mg per pound of body weight per day.  Don’t take it all at once.  Find out what your bowel tolerance is: i.e.  how much you need to ingest in a 24 hour period to produce loose stool.  Then back off from that by about a gram.  This should be your maintenance dose.

When under stress, or when sickness or injury threatens, increase your dose.  You'll be amazed at how much you can ingest without reaching bowel tolerance when you’re sick.  When I've felt myself coming down with something, I've gone as high as 2 grams an hour for 14 hours, without reaching bowel tolerance.  This kept me from being more than marginally symptomatic.  I once caught a bug that was going around the office.  This one was nasty, most people were taking two or three days off work, and fully a third of the office was out at one point, and many more were miserable.  By megadosing at the first signs of symptoms, I experienced only a slight stuffiness that never fully developedinto a runny nose, and otherwise felt fine.  Coincidental?  Come on, I've been around a few decades, and I can tell when I'm about to really get sick.  This was one of those times.

I typically start the day with 1000mg, and then 500mg per hour for the rest of the day.  This can be difficult to keep up with.  I sometimes set my watch to beep at me on the hour to remind me.  I carry a small plastic vial in my pocket with cheap 500 mg capsules.  Don’t spend a lot for your vitamin C.  Ascorbic acid is all the same, and the cheap bargain stuff at Safeway is just as effective as the designer stuff you get at the specialty nutrition stores.  I see no reason to pay for a brand name.

It’s a fundamental precept of Islam that Islam is an Abrahamic tradition in the same vein as Judaism and Christianity.  This fiction serves to legitimize Islam and raise it to equivalency with the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Muslims believe that Muhammad was a descendant of Abraham through Ishmael.  In Islamic tradition, Adam built the original Ka’aba in Mecca.  When Hagar and Ishmael were turned out into the desert of Paran by Abraham, they wandered  the desert and were on the verge of death when Hagar discovered the well of zam-zam, which saved their life.  Later, Ishmael and Abraham were to have gone to Mecca to rebuild the Ka’aba. 

Abrahamic Descent
Of the descendants of Ishmael, we are told that they will be too many to count, and that his hand will be against everyone, and everyone’s hand will be against him (Genesis 16).  The claim of Abrahamic descent through Ishmael may very well be valid, but without any evidence to support it.  Such a claim would not have any weight in a court of inheritance law, given that there is no documented chain of descent.  There are no records of Mecca or the Meccans that predate Islam.  There is a rich, detailed, continuous tradition and genealogy  of the descendents of Isaac documented in the Old Testament, but nothing but roaring silence regarding those of Ishmael throughout the entire 2000 years that the old testament covers between Abraham and Christ.  Nothing is known of these people, what trials they endured, what victories they celebrated, what gods they worshipped for 2 millennia. Without any documentary evidence to substantiate it, Islamic claims to Abrahamic blood descent are circumstantial at best, and more likely completely specious. 

Islam claims that the covenant of Abraham belongs to the heirs of Ishmael, not the heirs of Isaac.  Ishmael was indeed the firstborn, but was only a recognized heir in Isaac’s absence, since Isaac was the firstborn legitimate heir.  God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 15 was by implication to him and his children through his wife Sarah.  Since Sarah was childless, they became impatient for God to fulfill his promise, and Sarah offered her Egyptian servant Hagar as a surrogate.  When Hagar became pregnant, she began to deem herself superior for being able to provide an heir.  Sarah realized her mistake and banished Hagar. Hagar returned and submitted to Sarah.  When Isaac was born it became clear that the presence of Ishmael and Hagar would be a potential threat to Isaac, because his legitimacy usurped the illegitimate Ishmael’s claim to be heir to Abraham.  They were banished again, this time permanently.  This banishment, never disputed in Islamic scripture, clearly demonstrates Ishmael’s inferior claim to be the heir of Abraham.  This inferiority is confirmed, as Ishmael’s descendents failed to record their history, and effectively disappeared from history until Muhammad resurrected them for his own purposes.

The Life of Ishmael
According to Islamic sources, Hagar was turned out into the desert of Paran, with the suckling Ishmael at her breast.  Accounts differ whether she was on her own or accompanied by Abraham to Mecca.  Regardless, she was left alone near Mecca, and in desperation for her child dying of thirst she ran back and forth between the hills of Safa and Marwan seven times.  Allah took pity on her and sent an angel to dig the well of zam-zam with his heel.  The water allowed her to live in Mecca, and she was joined by a tribe of Jurhum.  Ishmael grew up there and learned Arabic. Later, he married a Jurham woman.  Abraham visited him, and advised him to put his Jurham wife away.  He did so, and married another one. Abraham came back, approved of the second wife, and together he and Ishmael built, or re-built, the Ka’aba.

There are some practical problems with this story.  The most obvious is that Mecca is in a basically uninhabitable valley, in the middle of a sun blasted desert, a thousand miles from the promised land where Abraham lived.  A thousand miles through the Arabian desert is not something to take lightly, and not something to be done without a very good reason.  Given that there would be no sustenance for any pack animals used, everything must be carried on such a trek.  It would take at least two months of hard, constant travel to make this trip, assuming you had a good idea of where you were going and how to get there.  There is no practical reason why Abraham would travel so far, nor is there any evidence or indication that he ever did so.  Abraham was a herdsman, and the only times when he is depicted in the Bible as being away from his herds for any length of time is when he was on a military campaign, which this obviously wasn’t.  Moreover, it has him making this trip not once, but at least twice, and perhaps more.

Ibn Ishaq records that when Muhammad helped restore the Ka’aba, it was barely head-high, and had no roof.  Much was made of putting a roof on the Ka’aba during Muhammad’s time, using timber from a shipwreck discovered near Jedda, because some offerings had been pilfered from the unprotected shrine.  The account details placing of stones, and no mention is made of mortar.  So we are to believe that Abraham made a four-month round trip journey through trackless desert wastes in order to build a head high pile of rocks and call it a shrine?

Sorry, I don’t get it.

Muslims would be quick to point out that Abraham obviously made this trip because Mecca is a holy place.  My question is then why didn’t he stay there?  Surely a man of Abraham’s obvious devotion to God would want to reside close to the holiest place on Earth.  Further, if Mecca is so holy, why didn’t Moses lead his people there after they left Egypt?  Why were the ten commandments delivered on Mt Sinai, instead of at Mecca?

Genesis Chapter 21 details Hagar’s exile to the desert.  This is done shortly after Isaac’s birth.  Genesis 16:16 tells us that Abraham was 86 years old when Ishmael was born, and 21:5 states he was 100 when Isaac was born.  If Ishmael was a suckling babe at the age of 14 as Islam has us believe, it’s no wonder that Abraham cast him out!

Genesis 21:21 tells us that Ishmael was raised in Paran, and took an Egyptian wife.  This makes sense, since Paran is the desert area just south of Judah, and north of Midian.  Genesis 16:1 tells us that Hagar was an Egyptian, so she would have naturally sought one of her people for a daughter in law.

Further, we know that Ishmael lived and settled not far from Hebron, where Abraham and Sarah were buried, because in Genesis 25:9 he helps Isaac bury Abraham.  At this time Isaac was 75 years old, and Ishmael was 90.  (Genesis 25:7-9). 

Ishmael’s descendants lived not far from the promised land, either, for we find in Gen 28:9 that Isaac’s son Esau was forbidden to take a wife from among the Canaanite women, and married one of Ishmael’s daughters, Mahalath.

None of these would have been possible if Ishmael’s base of operations was Mecca, which was a thousand miles from the Hebron valley.  There is no case in history of non-seafaring peoples carrying on social and economic intercourse at a distance of a thousand miles that early in history.  This is pure fantasy on behalf of Muhammad and his credulous followers.

Theology
Islam claims that Abraham was a Muslim.  What does it mean to be a Muslim?  The common definition of a Muslim is “One who submits.”  Abraham had a close relationship with God, in fact he frequently demonstrated through sacrifice that nothing was more important in his life than God.  But this was not blind submission as a slave, as Muslims understand the word.  Abraham frequently questioned God, and in fact boldly negotiated with him regarding the fate of Sodom and Gomorra (Genesis 18:23-32). 

The statement of conversion, the Shahada, requires that for one to become a Muslim, one to state that “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger.”  How could a person who lived before Muhammad be a Muslim, since the Shahada would have been nonsense beforehand?

The hallmarks of Islam can be found in the five pillars of Islam: Monotheism, observance of Ramadan, daily prostration in prayer, paying the Zakat, and the Hajj.  Of these, only monotheism was practiced by Abraham.  He observed no holy months, he paid no temple tax, because there was no temple.  I have already demonstrated that he never made the hajj, for there was no reason to before the Ka’aba was built, and no reason to suggest that Abraham built the Ka’aba and then for some reason returned to Hebron.  He prayed constantly, but did so in reverence, only prostrating himself when overwhelmed by the presence of God.  There is no record that he prayed in any particular direction.

If any of these things were part of Abraham’s theology, there would have been some mention of them in Judeo-Christian scripture.  There would have been some remnant of these observances left over and continued.  Moses, who was given a very detailed and precise set of laws filled with exhaustive minutiae, has no record or even trace of four of the five pillars of Islam. 

We know from Biblical history that the ancient Israelites were very susceptible to seduction by other forms of worship, and pagan belief systems.  Only reference to the written scripture was able to draw them back to God in many cases.  There are many records in Hebrew scripture that detail how difficult it was for the Hebrews to keep faithful to the God of Abraham.  What is the possibility that the  Meccans could have done so with no scripture with which to guide them, no written tradition, no record of any prophets, judges or Kings?

Islamic scripture is very clear that Meccans were polytheist worshippers of a moon god cult which was prevalent throughout Arabia in the 7th century.  It was common practice in Arabia at the time to worship stones, particularly unusual stones.  The rare iron  meteorite would be thought to have particularly special religious significance.  The Ka’aba was a shrine to the rock idols and moon God, not unlike many similar ones found throughout Arabia and Yemen.  The chief deity of the Meccan Ka’aba was Allah, long before Muhammad came along. Circumambulation of a holy structure was a common form of worship in this cult, not unique to Mecca.  There is no similar form of worship anywhere else in Judeo-Christian tradition.

Islam’s claim to Abraham has no basis in scripture, and defies common sense.  There is no evidence or rational reason to place Abraham within 800 miles of Mecca at any time in his life.  Many of the stories of early Mecca may have some root in legend of early Arabian settlers of the area, and Muhammad changed the names to coincide with Biblical characters.  This sort of adoption of Biblical figures is common in  unlettered communicants of early Christianity - witness the local legends of Jesus having visited Cornwall in England before he started his ministry in Palestine.  Muhammad’s claims of Abrahamic descent were designed specifically to lend him legitimacy as a messiah to the Jewish population of Medina.  He routinely adopted Jewish scripture wholesale, and made it part of his Koran.  The problem is that he did not understand the underlying themes of the Jewish scripture, and adopted only the stories, never the meanings.  The Jews, comparing his tortured rendering of their stories to their actual written accounts, recognized that he was a poseur, and rejected him as relevant to their belief system. 

The fundamental problem that all Muslims face with this and many other claims is that the Koran is a record of memorized verse.  The written word will trump oral tradition every time.

I don’t have to point out to anyone that the dialogue between the left and the right has pretty much completely broken down in this country, to the point where the two sides simply aren’t talking to one another. When they do talk, they talk past one another, not to one another. Each sides talk to the positions that they accuse the other side of having, which may or may not have anything to do with the positions actually held.

I don’t think this serves either side very well, because politically we have begun to find it acceptable to compromise our positions in order to prevent the “other” guys from getting into power. 

I’ve been scratching my head, trying to figure out why otherwise intelligent, rational people have such disparate ideas about how things should be run. The only thing that I can come up with is that liberals and conservatives must be operating under completely different underlying assumptions, and aren’t aware that the other side does not share those assumptions. Some things seem so obvious that they don’t seem worth mentioning, so when someone says something that is plainly contrary to a core assumption, our first reaction is to brand that person as an idiot.

This theory bears itself out in conversations with liberals, which I have a seemingly infinite supply of, living near Portland, Oregon. When I have stepped back from issues that we disagree vehemently on, and questioned the assumptions which lead to these disagreements, I have invariably found that the other side has a completely different set of assumptions. This has the potential to turn into a huge discussion, so I’m only going deal with one assumption here and save others for future installments.

The Myth of the Zero Sum Game.

One day a few years back, after martial arts practice, I was having a couple of beers with fellow martial artists. They were all considerably younger than I was and all liberal. I proposed the question; “Is the economy a zero sum game?”

The unanimous response was “Huh?”

Okay, if I earn a ton of money and get rich, does somebody else automatically get poorer as a result? 

There was some shuffling of feet and intent peering into half-empty beer glasses. Those who knew me knew that I had just laid a trap. They weren’t sure how, but they were loathe to step into it. One brightly androgynous young lady, confident in her idealism and confident that she had strength of numbers on her side, announced “Of course! How could it be any other way?”

And that, boys and girls, is a fundamental postulate, one that is taken as gospel by many on the left, and one that is considered patently absurd by the right. It is so fundamental that no one ever thinks to question it from either side.

The funny thing is that there is precedent for both sides being right.

Let’s consider basic economics. The foundation of economics is production. Workers produce goods, and then trade those goods for other goods or services. Note that I started with producers of goods, not providers of services. Service providers, although they play a valuable role, cannot exist without goods producers. Goods producers can do just fine without service providers.

The most fundamental good of all to produce is food. The producers of food must produce enough food so that the entire population – producer and providers and those who do neither – can eat. Failure to do so means people die. Let’s remember this, because we’re going to come back to it in a moment.

There are two types of goods that can be produced: Durable and perishable. Durable goods keep their value. They can be traded, hoarded, and traded again. When durable goods are consumed, the result of their consumption is other, hopefully more valuable, durable goods. Perishable goods have a shelf life, after which they are either consumed or have no value. Consumption of perishable goods yields nothing of value, or value that is transitory. Consume firewood, and the resulting heat is valuable, but doesn’t last. Consume gasoline, and the resulting motion has no lasting value. Consume food, and the result actually costs money to dispose of. Consume pig iron, and the result is probably a product which has value, hopefully more value than the original pig iron. Food is perishable, pig iron is durable.

 The wealth of any community large or small may be measured in terms of the amount of goods it is capable of producing. Now let’s back up 500 or 600 years and examine the sorts of economies extant up to that time. Before the industrial revolution, all production was done by muscle power. If a man or animal did not do some sort of work, nothing was produced.

Because of the phenomenal expenditure of muscle power necessary for any sorts of production, pre-industrial economies were dominated by food production. This is where the majority of the workforce was employed, and what consumed most of the productive capacity available. Artisans and skilled producers of durable goods were highly valued, and ensured they kept their value by associating in exclusive guilds which jealously hoarded the secrets of their production.

Think about this for a second: Most of the productivity of a community is going to disappear within one year, either consumed for sustenance or spoiled. 

How can anyone get rich in such an economy? The answer is easy: you steal it. You can either set yourself up as some sort of government, which has the right to help itself to the food production of all the populace, or you can go as far as claiming ownership of the very means of production – the people who do the producing. The guy actually doing the production has no chance to get rich, because he simply can’t produce enough by the sweat of his brow to accumulate enough to be able to pay someone else to do it. Those in the service industries do have a chance to get rich, if they can manage a way to market their services to enough producers to take advantage of economies of scale. Their success is closely tied to that of the producers, and in a horse-drawn economy, economies of scale are difficult to come by.   Those in political power have the best chance of getting rich, because they have no need to give any sort of value for that which they take, and can do so by fiat and force of arms. Often it’s politically safer if you’re in political power to go abroad and steal from someone else, so you don’t live in fear of your own people, and in fact you can buy their loyalty by paying them with plunder. 

This sort of situation gives rise to heroes like Robin Hood, who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. This was not deemed immoral, because in this sort of economy the rich probably got that way by robbing in one form or another from those who did the production. Good kings were those who laid the whip of taxation lightly, and who provided service for their income, in the form of protection and justice. 

Wealth is this system is based on the quantity of recent production – typically the production of the previous year, which will be worthless within a year. The amount of wealth in a community is therefore relatively fixed at any given period of time, and subject to consumption that usually equaled or exceeded the ability to produce. While not precisely a zero-sum game, this agrarian based economy is close enough to a zero-sum game that the principle effectively holds: If you’re rich, chances are you stole it from someone else. In this economy, money is the root of all evil; or rather, the love of money is the root of all evil. An entirely just system would punish the robbers by redistributing the wealth to ensure that the producers shared in the fruits of their labor. This way of thinking was deeply ingrained in the justice systems developed over the centuries, and Karl Marx attempted to adapt its dynamic to the industrial revolution.

Economics changed dramatically with the industrial revolution. The development of machinery which did not base its power on muscle power greatly magnified the productive capacity of the individual. For the first time in history, durable goods composed the greater part of the productive capacity of a population. As machinery became more sophisticated, and the productive power available became amplified, production of perishable goods became a relatively insignificant part of the economy. 

Now think about this: Most of the productivity of a single person may be hoarded by that person, and traded for the productivity of others. It never disappears, it never spoils. 

The efficiency that a single person can achieve, and that person’s ability to literally reach a global marketplace, means that the producer himself can now gather wealth and become rich. This is not simply because people have the power to produce more. Because a person can trade their surplus production for someone else’s surplus, Efficiencies of specialization are realized. The wealthy person does not need to steal from other people to get rich. His productivity is such that he is capable of living a very comfortable life purely on the basis of his own production. 

The truly wealthy in this economy are not robbers, they are people who have developed ways of producing something of value to the community on a vast scale, with the most efficiency. Because one person cannot do this alone, this person often employs other people to produce under his direction. The ability of a person to produce for his or her employer is rewarded by the employer. If the employee feels his compensation isn’t commensurate with his productivity, he’s free to shop his productive abilities to other employers who may value his abilities more.

In this economy, Robin Hood is not a hero, he has become an evil villain. In this economy, wealthy people are enjoying the fruits of their own productivity, and doing so as much by trade as by production. To take from such a person is to steal the from the best of the people who Robin Hood formerly championed.

Because the economy is predominantly durable goods, production has lasting value. Consumption is relatively minor compared to production, so the total wealth of a community is constantly expanding. It is not a zero-sum game. If one person gets rich, he does so because he has mastered efficient, valuable production. He has not taken anything from other people. The liberal may argue that he has achieved his wealth from the production of other people who are in his employment. This is true, and those people were compensated accordingly, in a mutually agreed upon employment contract. The employer is obligated to compensate his employees commensurate with the value they provide for him, or they will defect to another employer who appreciates their value more.

And herein lies the fallacy of the liberal propensity to try to equalize the wealth disparity. The urge to be Robin Hood denies the fact that industrial capitalism has a perfect mechanism for rewarding those who contribute the most to society, and penalizing those who contribute least. The intelligent liberal should seek not to redistribute wealth by force of arms, but to work to level the field of opportunity for everyone to realize their full productive potential. This cannot be done when non-productivity is rewarded, and the most productive are punished.

There is much more to be said on this subject, and others have said it better than I can. Please read a critical excerpt from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Take the time to read the whole passage and understand it, for in today’s economy, money is the root of all good. To deny this is to invite certain catastrophe.