Would you agree, whether you’re a true disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ or an atheist, that the Bible is a book of instruction? A book that teaches?

As a true believer, one who believes every word within the inerrant Word of God I know it is a book about man’s fall. About our inherent sinful and evil natures and our need for redemption, repentance, forgiveness, and our need for a Saviour. And that the whole Book of books theme is Jesus Christ.

Beginning in the Old Testament in the book of Genesis.

Let’s briefly begin there. In the Old Testament.

God’s* people. God’s chosen people. Those who knew God, believed God, and obeyed God.

For short periods of time.

Until they lusted after the ways, idols, practices of other peoples, other nations. Until they thought they knew better than God, that they didn’t need God and they turned to their own ways, turned to the ways and practices of other teachings, other beliefs, and abandoned the God of the Jewish and Christian Bible.

We have example upon example in the Word of God about what happens to God’s chosen people when they stray. When they place other gods, idols, other practices and beliefs ahead of the One True God, in essence, in fact, removing the One True God from their lives as they then created Him in their mind and lives as they saw fit, rather than how they knew they ought to live, ought to be, what they should be following, how they should be living. Knowing what they knew, or once knew.

And they always lamented, they always wailed, cried, and bellowed, “Why is this happening!? How could this be happening to us!? Why here, why now!?” I paraphrase, but that is the crux of their whining and crying, their anger and fear after they abandoned God of their own volition to serve something else. To serve self. To become selfish, bloated, corrupted within, immoral, and utterly foolish.

We should know all those lessons, all the instructions, and the results of rebellion. As well as the result of true repentance. Our God is a Good God, a loving God. A merciful and forgiving God though none of us deserves His mercy or forgiveness. The writing is plain and clear. Yet we treat it as if it’s just some old stories. Living as if what we read is not real. Can’t happen to us.

Familiar with the world’s idiom that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it? Why is it so among those professing to be God’s people that they ignore, refuse, don’t believe the history within the Word of God? They what? Imagine themselves immune? That the unchangeable God, God Who is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow is somehow going to view U.S. differently? Because we’re Americans? Because we live now and, well, that was way back then in ancient times when things were so different!

Ahh, what a foolish and lost people!

What an arrogant people. It is the professed Jewish and Christian people of America that have permitted this nation to erode and decay from within and to make the laws lawlessness, to elevate and permit every immorality, sin, and perversion under the sun to increase and dominate. Due to our rebellion and abandoning God, abandoning or attempting to alter the Word of God to suit us rather than our bowing humbly to serve and obey.

Are we the light of the world? Or the tinder allowing the fires of evil to burn greater in this land?

It isn’t the heathen, the sorcerer, the witch, the atheist, the democrat, or communist or socialist that has made this possible.

It is the turning from God, turning from the truth of the Word of God. To our own pleasures. To the mounting number of false teachers and their false teaching. Corrupting and perverting the truth of the Word of God and attempting to form our own god, abandoning the One True God. Abandoning the Word of God.

And the results are before us.

Nothing has ever changed in this world other than technology. Man’s knowledge increasing due to his fall from eating of that one tree — in blatant disobedience and then making excuses, blaming each other, blaming someone else for their choice to disobey.

There is no new thing under the sun when it comes to human nature. Nothing has changed.

When a nation, brought about by the Providence of God, as the Israelites were, or as America was — when those people rebel against the truth? Against God? Against the Word of God and set out to pursue their foolish and selfish ways? To make nationalism the things here of greater priority than God and the Word of God and living pleasing and acceptable unto the Lord? To believe lies and serve liars and false teachers and their teachings rather than adhering and obeying and living the Word of God? As they claim they love and do? When in truth they despise the Word of God and are not truly His in their rebellion, their lusts, their pleasure-seeking, their sin, their immorality, their following, and serving idols, false gods.

“How can it happen here? How can it happen to us?”

As they wail, shout, cry out and blame God — for what we have brought upon ourselves for our disobedience and foolishness, our love of the world, our love of money, making our work of more importance than our God, and sin more alive in our lives than our love of God and His Word.

Stop blaming the serpent. Stop blaming the person given as your helpmate as Eve did, as Adam did.

Stop being stupid lying foolish children of human nature, of the world, and begin being true obedient children of God! Begin learning, believing, understanding, submitting to, and living out the Word of God.

Stop making it all political, nationalistic, conservative versus liberal, and open your eyes people!

Before nothing but utter and perpetual darkness befalls U.S. all.

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!

Isaiah 5:20 — King James Version

if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.

2 Chronicles 7:14 — English Standard Version

Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.

John 3:36 — English Standard Version

It isn’t the heathen, the unbeliever, the sorcerer, the witch, those sitting in bars and strip joints destroying and rotting our nation from within. It is the Jew, it is the professed Christian who is anything but a child of God, a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ. Rebelling. Serving and loving the world more than loving God and the Word. It is the Great Falling Away and the Great Rising Up of false teachers and their unsound doctrines, the people with itching ears turned to fables, loving lies and liars more than God and the truth.

We lower God and attempt to turn Him into some old uncle or relative in a rocking chair rather than coming to an understanding, a shaking, quaking, trembling awe-struck knowledge of what and who the One True God is. And what we’re to then do as a result of that understanding.

Understand?

And we profess to be His people? We profess with our lips to be Christian? Do we even know what it truly means to be a disciple of the Lord? Do we even know a little bit of what is contained in the Book of books, the Holy Bible?

I think not as is evidenced all over this dying and spiritually diseased and sick nation and its people.

* Remember, whenever the word “God” is written here on ACP it means — God the Father, God the Lord Jesus Christ, and God the Holy Spirit. The Triune God of three distinct individual living Beings while beyond our comprehension is never anything other than those three Divine and living Beings working together. Always. All Three are One. God is the Father, God is Jesus, God is the Holy Spirit. Nothing else will do dear ones. Even if this is beyond our present comprehension. Trust, obey, and take some time to think deeply on this matter and it isn’t difficult to understand — if one has spent time in the study of the Word of God and lives observing, listening, believing, and witnessing it all while applying it to what is contained within the Word of God.

Ken Pullen

Wednesday, January 5th, 2022

ACP — A Crooked Path

‘One Nation Under Allah’ Revisited

Wednesday, January 5, 2022

By William Kilpatrick

Reprinted from FrontPageMag

William Kilpatrick is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.  His books include Christianity, Islam, and Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West (Ignatius Press), What Catholics Need to Know About Islam (Sophia Press), and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Jihad.

I just came across a news item from last June about a girl (the class president) in a Fairfax Country High School who led the graduating class in a recital of the Pledge of Allegiance, but replaced “one nation under God” with “one nation under Allah.”

This caught my attention because about 11 years ago, I wrote a piece for FrontPage entitled “One Nation Under Allah?”  I noted that the founders were assuming a specifically Judeo-Christian understanding of God when they wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and I pointed out that substituting Allah’s name for “God” would create a number of difficulties.

For example, The Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal,” but the Koran describes Muslims as “the best of people” and speaks of Christians and Jews as the “worst of created beings.”  In addition, the Islamic law books specifically state that the value of a Christian or Jewish life is only one-third the value of a Muslim’s life.  Where’s the equality in that?

A similar difficulty arises if we try to put the First Amendment to the Constitution in an Islamic context.  The First Amendment prohibits the establishment of a state religion, but Islam is a theocracy.  It is intended to be a state religion.  For instance, the Constitutions of many Islamic nations are based on Sharia Law. And so is The Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam which was signed in 1990 by all the member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference.  After reaffirming “the civilizing… role of the Islamic Ummah which God made the best nation” and after affirming that human rights and freedoms must be “in accordance with the Islamic Shariah,” the document goes on to speak of “binding divine commandments, which are contained in the Revealed Books of God and were sent through the last of His Prophets…thereby making their observance an act of worship and their neglect or violation an abominable sin…”

The document goes on in this vein for many pages.  It was drafted in response to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights—which Muslim representatives refused to sign because it guaranteed various rights and freedoms which were contrary to shariah.

When one reads the Cairo Declaration, it becomes clear that Islam is intended to be a theocracy, not a democracy.  And that is only one of the problems with the “one nation under Allah” concept.

Another problem comes with the First Amendment’s free exercise clause.  The clause states that Congress may not prohibit the “free exercise” of religion.  Judeo-Christian practices usually pose no problem here, but as our society turns more secular, many Christian and Jewish beliefs and practices will come under increased scrutiny.

But Islam presents a massive challenge to the free exercise clause, because there are many religious practices in Islam that not only run counter to American customs, but are also illegal.  Polygamy is an accepted practice in Islam and it is sanctioned in the Koran. And, following the example of Muhammad, child marriage is also widely practiced. Moreover, female genital mutilation is considered a religious duty in some Muslim nations. Should Muslims be free to practice these religiously-sanctioned customs in the U.S.? It’s not an academic question because Muslims often bring these practices with them when they move to other countries.  Apparently, a significant number of the 50,000 Afghan refugees recently admitted to the U.S. are child brides. Once such practices take hold in a society, it is difficult to put a stop to them. Although FGM and polygamy are outlawed in European countries, they are still widely practiced, and authorities often tend to look the other way rather than take the risk of getting entangled in sticky domestic situations.

The free exercise clause was written with one particular religious tradition in mind.  The “self-evident” truths that the founders spoke of in the Declaration are not self-evident in every religion.  The irony is that the protection of the free exercise clause is extended not only to the Jewish and Christian religions but also to a religion that explicitly rejects both Christianity and Judaism, and also vehemently rejects the belief that “all men are created equal.”

Right now, that may not seem like a major problem. That’s because Muslims in the U.S. are still a small minority, and most of them are not disposed to make an issue of their right to polygamy or to subjecting their daughters to FGM, or of depriving others of their free speech rights.

But we only need to look to Europe to see that, as the Muslim percentage of the population grows, so do the demands for special rights and protections for Muslims.  The European Court of Human Rights has already ruled that criticism of Islam is a crime. The court explained that the religious feelings of Muslims outweigh the free speech rights of critics of Islam.

You may think that this can’t happen in the U.S., but it’s already happening.  The Democrats in the House recently passed a bill that, in effect, makes “Islamophobia” a crime.  And, increasingly, “Islamophobia” is being defined simply as any criticism of Islam.

The bill, which was sponsored by Representative Ilhan Omar, is unlikely to pass in the Senate, but rest assured that the attempt will be made again.

Some Americans may think that limiting criticism of Islam is a good thing.  It’s easy to believe that such a move will lower tensions and increase inter-religious harmony.  But, as former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy points out, the purpose of anti-Islamophobia legislation is to “intimidate analysts and commentators into ignoring the straight line from bellicose verses in Muslim scripture to sharia-supremacist ideology to…terrorist attacks.”

The Islamophobia industry in America has already managed to inhibit legitimate discussion and examination of the Islamic faith.  If Islamophobia becomes a crime, Americans will be left even more in the dark about the radical side of Islam.

“Sharia supremacism,” writes McCarthy, “[is] a systematically discriminatory and misogynist ideology that is antithetical to our constitutional republic.”  It is also antithetical to the Judeo-Christian belief system that informed the writers of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

The Constitution is a marvelous document, but parts of it are problematic.  The “free exercise” clause, for example, is wide open to interpretation.  And a lot depends on who is doing the interpreting.  The Mormon practice of polygamy was banned by Congress in the 1880’s, and the ban was then upheld by the Supreme Court.  But will a future Supreme Court, under pressure from the anti-Islamophobia forces, reverse the ban?  Don’t discount the possibility.

The ultimate irony is that the religious liberty protections of the Constitution could be used to transform America from a nation inspired by Judeo-Christian principles to a nation subject to Islamic law.

That conjecture may seem like an unwarranted projection of current trends. Some may think it absurd. But Islam has a long history of turning Christian lands into Islamic lands. And in America today, much of what was thought highly unlikely only a year or two ago has now come to pass. And what was once thought absurd has now become the norm. There are signs, moreover, that the whole concept of religious liberty is heading in a direction that is both absurd and self-destructive.

In early December, a satanic display was installed in the Illinois Statehouse in Springfield by a group called The Satanic Temple (TST). The display featured a bronze statue of a baby Baphomet—a mythical creature whose image is often identified with the Devil.

That’s bad enough, but the baby demon, complete with horns, dragon wings, and cloven hoofs, and lying naked in a bed of swaddling clothes is installed next to the nativity display in the Statehouse Rotunda. It’s a scene that both Christians and Muslims would find offensive.

The Baphomet baby is obviously intended by the TST as a mockery of the Christian faith. But, of course, that’s what satanists do. The question is, why did officials of the State of Illinois go along with the mockery? Did they also harbor an anti-Christian animus? Did they think that the equal protection clause in the Constitution means that Satan must be given equal time with Christ? Or did they simply fear a lawsuit from the TST?

Whatever the case, the symbolic display is mainly symbolic of our society’s confusion over religion. If you are indifferent to the basic beliefs upon which your nation is founded, you may someday find yourself governed by an entirely different set of beliefs—most likely a system that has little concern for religious liberty, or for any other kind of freedom.