Christians who pray to Allah?

Two years ago at an evangelistic tent meeting, I was confronted with a difficult dilemma as the guest speaker attacked those who "pray to Allah." I was reminded of this dilemma last week by news of Christian opposition to the construction of a mosque in New York City.

With Rev. Pat Robertson and Sarah Palin leading, national Christian politicians have challenged the construction of a mosque near where the two WTC towers came down, because it would desecrate the site where many victims are interred. So now, Christians and Muslims who have worked together since 9/11 to make the NYC mosque a center of religious understanding and a place of peace between Muslims and Christians must struggle against the loud voices of bigotry in America.

The many people of good will in Big Horn County have a message for these folks. We here know about religious bigotry since the introduction of Christianity, when Crow and Cheyenne people began to suffer religious divisions. In the past decades respect has built for our different religious expressions. We are now better able to work together for the common good. This contrasts with our national religious and political leaders, and major media pundits. They should listen to us.

I'd like to tell them about my dilemma of two years ago.

With my wife and me were our good friends, a family from Kenya, the father a Christian pastor and theology student, his wife a teacher, and their two young daughters. I knew our friends have Muslim friends, and participate freely with them in religious dialogue, parenting and schooling children, and other affairs. I knew also from them that there are many Arabic speaking Christians in Kenya whose Arabic Christian Bible proclaims the message of Jesus the son of "Allah," because their Christian Bible uses the Arabic "Allah" instead of the German "God", or Crow "Akbaatatdia," or Cheyenne "Ma'heo'o," or Spanish "Deo," for the Supreme Being, initially unnamed in ancient Hebrew.

I could feel their discomfort at hearing an American Christian evangelist speak so negatively about a religion with which they are intimately acquainted. I was equally shocked with his ignorance about the millions of Christians worldwide who read their Christian Bible in Arabic, with its many references to "Allah," the equivalent of our German word "God."

I felt compelled to leave. But I had many friends present in the congregation that evening, and did not want to just get up and leave with our guests. I caught myself imaging the piece of my mind I would like to tell the evangelist, since I had no reasonable way to give it to him. I sat and pondered.

I thought about the millions of born-again Christians who pray to Allah in the name of Jesus. I thought about the fact that Muslim-majority armies have not for centuries invaded nor are currently occupying by force any Christian-majority nation, while Christian-majority nations' soldiers are doing so in Iraq and Afghanistan. I thought about the significant portion of all Muslim fundamentalists who are pacifists, while Christian fundamentalists have largely forgotten their pacifist history.

Most of all, from two years service in the Far East, I remembered that the vast majority of the world's Muslims, far from being obsessed with a passion to kill Christians, know how to live together peaceably with Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and other faiths, shopping at the same stores, their children attending the same schools and playing in the same parks.

In the tent meeting, the rhetoric increased in intensity. All who use the word "Allah" to invoke the Supreme Being in prayer were lumped together with the militant Islamic extremists responsible for the World Trade Center bombing. I began regretting my silent assent to what the speaker was saying.

Suddenly I felt myself standing up, interrupting the evangelist with these words,

"You must be mistaken, since I know Christians who pray to Allah in the name of Jesus." The congregation froze. He responded by reasserting his condemnations, insisting I was mistaken. I asked him if he approved of the German, Crow and Cheyenne words for the Creator, but not the Arabic word. After the service I left a note requesting dialogue on the issue. There has been no response.

This prompted an interesting discussion with our friends, who were at least as shocked as I was with my behavior at a Christian service of worship.

Next morning, just before their departure, we prayed for deliverance in the Christian media from the frequent undercurrent of bigotry against Islam. We praised God for the few Christian media speakers who follow Jesus' example with religious conflict as recorded in John chapter 4 of the New Testament. Then we parted.

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT  59034

Tea party? Really?

This new one is far from the original Boston tea party. Now it's 2010 and both parties are right in step with the lambs on our back 40, who would bloat and die if I would indulge their emotions and let them go after the new alfalfa I seeded.

Listen to the propaganda bloat that passes for democratic debate, promoted by the new "Tea Party" leadership, corporate and media backers, etc. It goes something like this:

"The best government is the least government. End taxes! End regulation! It's time for real change."

Look at 1773.
Yes, the original Boston tea party was about taxes, but not whether there would be taxes. It was about who was doing the taxing. There was a history of the British crown taxing American colonial citizens' purchases of imports, and then that money pot sailed away right back the Atlantic with the next clipper.

Yes, it was about big government, a big British government with no vote or voice from the colonies. It was NOT against the growth of government on the land in which these citizens lived, for which they soon elected representatives. In fact, they are among those we venerate in our high school history classes who helped our fledgling government on this land grow constitutionally, to the benefit of all of us today.

Yes, it was against government regulation passed by the British parliament to "teach the colonists a lesson" and force them to submit. But it was also for new regulations to break the oppressive collusion between the British crown and one of the first multinational corporations, the East India Tea Company. That collusion smashed what sovereignty the colonies enjoyed and destroyed fair competition in overseas trade.

Now it's 2010.
Look at Republicans and Democrats who distrust the modern tea party. The "racism" controversy recently in the news is nothing more than a sham. The real issue is loss of collusion benefits, which would happen if either party started adopting priorities similar to the original Boston Tea Party. The fact is, there are huge benefits to both parties today from collusion between government and big business. And that, my friends, is the biggest bipartisanship our Congress can muster. Few politicians of any party want that changed.

Our citizenry, raised by mainline radio and TV, love pretense and surface rhetoric; we like that luscious look and smell, deep green and tender, of government sham-regulation of big business for the benefit of all the people, but in reality no change, so the few, the richest, benefit the most.
Unfortunately, we sheep give our votes to the sham of ending big government. We roll over and ignore the deception and theft from our own pockets.

Take the government's recent sham crackdown on Goldman Sachs. After packaging and selling mortgages they knew were bad, they got off scot-free with their deception and theft:

1) No further investigation of fraud.

2) No jail sentences (The S & L scandal decades ago led to 1000+ sentences).

3) A fine payable to the Securities and Exchange Commission of a fraction of the profit made from the scheme.

4) No requirement to pay back their ill-gotten wealth; no restitution.

5) The system of secrecy and deception stays in place.

The media still hypes the biggest fine ever levied against a Wall Street corporation. Hidden in its back pages are the data: millions in profits from the deception.

Sometimes it takes a fringy documentary news source to plumb reality and feed it to the mainline media, who then cannot afford to ignore it, like the recent WikiLeaks version of the Pentagon papers.

I would applaud a reincarnation of the Boston Tea Party. I hoped the Obama presidency would deal with the sham in the collusions. So far I see same old same old across the political spectrum.

Meanwhile my sheep, resentfully munching the tough old brome and wheat grass of the wild meadow strip along our channel, stop and turn west, sniff their noses in the morning breeze and exclaim in chorus, "Baa-a-a! We want our fresh green alfalfa, and want it right now, early this morning when our stomachs are empty." Sometimes we, like sheep, would be better off munching on what's best for us, not what our TV and radio pundits put out to titillate our tastes and thinking habits.

Oh, for some help in our country and on this back 40 to take rational charge of these colorful delicious delusions! Slowly, carefully, transparently and honestly, with the kind of courage and determination absent in Washington right now in either party, and disappointingly absent in the new tea party.

Previous columns and comments: http://greenwoodback40.blogspot.com/

David Graber