By Walid Shoebat (Shoebat Sunday Special)
It took me a while to discover the cross. The one fascinating thing about the cross is its four arms. If they are indefinitely extended the cross will infinitely go towards all four directions. God used the cross to travel in all four directions to create a universal church. The cross is infinite and is universal.
But the crescent if it extends its arms, it can only continue until the circle closes.
So unlike the cross, the crescent is a ring. Islam is an endless loop. It is a circular argument where the Quran says that Allah sent the Quran to state that Muhammad was a prophet and to know that we must go back to the Quran because it says so.
But God is not a ring. He is infinite. Rings are but for weddings.
But here I was an 18 year old Muslim, single, I had no wedding ring, I never drank or had sex. I just came off the plane in 1978 from Bethlehem via Tel-Aviv landing in San Francisco. I was naive but well grounded in certain ancient wisdoms I acquired from living in a time where the modern was bordering on the ancient struggling with it but modernism did not prevail since traditions were more powerful than money.
I worked whatever odd jobs I got to make a buck in fast foods and liquor stores. At the liquor store all I saw were people come in and go out buying booze to get drunk or buy zig-zags to smoke weed, while at the graveyard shift working at fast food all I saw were people drunk or high coming to eat because they had “the munchies”. The customers first went to the liquor store to get their high and then came to eat to satisfy their bellies believing that they were living the life.
But I was not effected by these social pressures and I refused to comply. I was simply living in a land where sex was a handshake and immorality was running rampant.
I was thankful when God finally blessed the people with AIDS and and all sorts of venereal diseases but they still cursed Him.
Everything was about buying and selling products and ideas. Salesmen would daily arm-twist us to comply from when we turned on the television to driving on the freeways where giant signs and temptations covered highways, byways, streets and buildings. This was the ‘rampant capitalism’ they called ‘freedom’. Capitalism, I quickly observed, was a war on two major Godly virtues: frugality and contentment, the two secrets to real freedom.
For the first decade I lived on a strict diet of lentil pilaf with grilled onions, tomatoes and plain yogurt for lunch which cost me $.50 on average and a piece of cod fish at a cost of another $.50 which I dipped in flour and fried with olive oil for supper. I was very content.
As I lived in this culture I never have seen a people who loved to collect so much rubbish where the products came into these horseshoe shaped homes where the front door was the input and the output came out of the garage with a ready sign that says “garage sale”. It was a continual cycle of rubbish.
Never have I seen a people more enslaved where not one owns a home free and clear for when they even paid the damned thing off, here still comes the government who was still the landlord. He still collected the rent they called “property tax” where if you missed a payment he now become the homeowner and you are evicted homeless. It was a culture were law-abiding citizens paid more throughout their lives for no infractions, a heftier fine from what lawbreakers pay throughout their life.
It was a land where capitalism took women into concentration camps to compete with men for the monthly allowance where latchkey kids were raised by perfect strangers and were all the relatives were exiled to different states in search for new slave masters. Everyone was a trapped slave with only one right; you can abandon your latest slave master and solicit another to always beg for more to cover for toys (more rubbish) and credit card payments. I never fell for such traps.
I entered colleges where tables were setup in the yards calling to “legalize marijuana”. They did put on a facade of concern by combatting American tobacco while the Psychology 101 class taught us demonism under the guise of hypnotism and pseudoscience they called telepathy.
I quickly saw that a college education was something stupid which parents forced their children to attend where everything they planted from morals to values was being stripped away by educated professors. So I quickly learned how to program mainframe computers and I became a skilled software builder and in no time I was hired to build and design software for nearly three decades. I was thankful to all these Americans who taught me a skill or two.
All my life I rarely watched the news because it only created local earthquakes while it ignored the whole earth. But I had a very bad sense of direction where I got lost going around the corner to pick up an $.80 cents pack of cigarettes. Later on this too was taxed and the pack is now $5.00 which was my daily expense for food and gas. I was frugal living in a land where everyone was the enemy of frugality. So I fought the enemies of frugality by rolling my own pipe tobacco and even planted my own food. I was stubborn and all I wanted to do is to live like my grand parents did in Bethlehem.
Many were the times I would call friends for direction. My mind always wandered in a different world but one thing was certain for me; democracy is not for the stupid since the whole world in Noah’s time were dead wrong and only Noah was right. The collective view of the whole earth at the time ended up drowning in death and error.
People in Noah’s time were as dumb as people who like to purchase expensive oceanfront property
I was an introvert and to me popularity was the zebras gathering around the waterhole while wisdom was to make it last and only drink when the lion got his fill of the fastest popular pedigree zebras.
All the wisdom I learned I later discovered did not belong to me. They were already in the Bible which I once started to read as if it is a book on wisdom passed down to me by my grandparents who learned it from the majority Christians living in Bethlehem where crescents and crucifixes tipped many mosques and churches.
All my life I asked about the purpose for living. It took me a few decades to conclude that God appointed the odd whom people ignored while the devil appointed the famous whom people worshipped. I always wondered, if “the people” made Rick Warren as America’s pastor, why then should I listen to “we the people”?
And when it came to the Bible I quickly found out how the wicked allegorized everything in it so that the serpent in the garden of Eden was simply an allegory for evil. But I knew better. Even if we took the devil as an allegory for evil, evil still stung, poisoned and was extremely lethal.
Then I attended the church. In the church, freedom they said was that everyone has the right to interpret scripture while civil laws were not open to anyone’s interpretation. Why? Civil laws if everyone was allowed to interpret besides the lawyer and the judge would cause a chaos.
The Freedom of Speech they said was that everyone has a right to have an opinion, even the opinion on who should live and who should die. This became a right. Even the eugenists had a right to speak regardless that these are a perfect example of hypocrisy for eugenists only omit themselves from the process of elimination. The only thing about such opinions as the eugenicist is that this opinion-maker would never volunteer himself to become the first martyr for his opinion. But no cause is true unless the advocates are willing to die for it. Yet there is only one religion that its advocate was God where God was willing to offer God to die for it.
If everyone is supposed to be free to have whatever opinion including the right to interpret scripture, all we will get are a people left to themselves to repeat old mistakes over and over again. In fact all systems without the church setting up moral laws end up establishing slavery which is the cheapest mechanism for industrial production. Human beings always end up laboratory experiments where thinkers torture the slaves to accumulate evidence for their thesis. To the state the individual means nothing where all sacrifices must be made “for the people” and “by the people”. This was the story of Christ where one man had to die that the nation not perish (Jn 11:48-50). And what system did they use to crucify Christ? It was democracy where the majority vote counted deciding the fate of the only Son of God.
But they told me that this decision was good since the Son of God had to die.
No He didn’t. We deserved to all go to hell. It was only God’s Grace that was good. But God giving His Son was not done in order to rescue a majority, it was done so that a few enter the narrow gate while the bulk majority end up in hell. Sin entered via a democracy of two where the people unanimously made a choice but Judgment and salvation came from one single individual: Jesus Christ.
I realized that mankind belongs to God and not to self or to a nation. The wise realizes that his body does not belong to him but to God and so killing oneself is evil. Yet evil people believe that the body of a fetus is worth killing because they claim that freedom mandates that their body and the body of their children belongs to them. I wondered what difference is this from Islam?
Today Protestants believe in “birth control” which was popularized by Margarette Sanger, the founder of American Eugenics Society. But the only one who finally succeeded in instituting Eugenics was Adolf Hitler. So in reality it is the devil who is in control of all who practice birth control. It was the Manicheans who taught that suicide is noble since it is sacrifice and that a sexual perversion is good because it prevents life. The end results of the teaching by Calvinist leader John F. MacArthur are the same for he states:
Nothing in Scripture prohibits married couples from practicing birth control, either for a limited time to delay childbearing, or permanently when they have borne children and determine that their family is complete … In our viewpoint, birth control is biblically permissible. At the same time, couples should not practice birth control if it violates their consciences (Romans 14:23)—not because birth control is inherently sinful, but because it is always wrong to violate the conscience. The answer to a wrongly informed conscience is not to violate it, but rather to correct and rightly inform one’s conscience with biblical truth
So behold your Bible interpreters! Behold your freedom to interpret moral laws! Behold how you claim that the Holy Spirit speaks through this man!
Saying that “Nothing in Scripture prohibits married couples from practicing birth control” is like saying that “nothing in Scripture prohibits married couples from playing golf” as if “golf” and “having babies” are but the same thing. Is it not God Who opens the womb and closes the womb?
Then to say “In our viewpoint, birth control is biblically permissible” is as if the Bible gave an allowance since there is no such thing as “birth control” found in scripture.
And then to say “couples should not practice birth control if it violates their consciences (Romans 14:23)” when Paul in Romans 14 was simply trying to reconcile Jewish versus Non-Jewish dietary laws which presented a challenge to the early church.
God said “Do not tear God’s work because of food” but to this heretic it was ‘do not have children because of golf!’.
So to such heretics life was evaluated as a diet and conscience was evaluated as God and therefore worshipping self by saying “it is always wrong to violate the conscience”.
And if Jesus said the key is to look for the fruit where he cursed the tree that bore no fruit; wouldn’t it then be key in recognizing evil because it too shuts up the fruit of the womb before its time?
At least the pagans had children and they dedicated them for the god of nature and fruitfulness. The pagan then renders the Fundamentalist theology as barren and worse than the pagans. A pagan is not just someone who denies the existence of the biblical God, he is someone who strips away from what is God’s and is why Christ said to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s for they forgot to render to God what is God’s.
One therefore is not to practice tax-evasion but he ought not evade God’s commandment to being fruitful and multiplying. This is why we find such few “ifs” in the Bible where Christ said if you love Me you will obey my commandments. Salvation is not just a mental belief that He saves.
I never heard strange interpretations. When I argued about works they yelled “Christ alone” and “salvation is only through Christ”. But preaching a single-liner like this is like saying that birth can only come through sex.
While it is true that sex alone brings life I ask: but what about a marriage contract, man’s responsibility to provide, to love his wife and be willing to die for her while she frugally and carefully deals with his money? Without these, this “sex alone” would be no salvation for the poor child!
They would say that my views on salvation are of no relevance since I am no theologian. It is as if matters of salvation should only be their opinion and the opinion of the theologian while only the priest and a millennia worth of Church fathers should not count. Amazingly, only these Catholics are not allowed to interpret.
If all can interpret who then can prevent the madmen? Who then can stop the Manicheans? I have seen friends go mad left on their own with no one to instruct. Heck almost all whom I knew in the counter Jihad Movement have gone the way of the eugenist.
It is then the church and not the Bible that prevents the sane from going mad which Christ Himself instituted “the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth.” (1 Timothy 3:15)
In reality the Catholic is more fundamental than the fundamentalist. Only the Catholic Church decided what Four Gospels the fundamentalist reads while all others gospels were cancelled only by the authority of the Catholic Church. So even the very New Testament the Protestant reads he reads because such authority he gains from the Catholic Church.
Therefore, the fundamentalist is still under the authority of the Catholic Church since it did not canonize the Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Marcion, Gospel of Basilides, Gospel of Truth, Gospel of the Four Heavenly Realms, Gospel of Mary, Gospel of Judas, Gospel of Philip and many other gospels.
So even what the Protestant does not adhere to in these other gospels he does so under the authority of the Catholic Church, not the Protestant reformers.
One cannot put any book on the witness stand asking it to interpret itself. What the Protestant in reality claims is not “scripture alone”. This is a myth. What the fundamentalist protestant did was to re-establish new church fathers to interpret: Theodore Beza, Martin Bucer, Heinrich Bullinger, Johannes Hus, Luther, John Calvin, Andreas von Carlstadt, Wolfgang Fabricius Capito and Martin Chemnitz.
And yet today we even have modern Evangelical church fathers who now interpret where the multitudes follow. These are nothing like the others before them. Today they all turned out complete heretics like Joel Osteen, Rick Warren, David Barton, Ted Haggard, Bill Hybels, T.D. Jakes, Diane Knippers, Beverly LaHaye, Joyce Meyer, J.I. Packer, John Piper …
While these prohibit simple icons of images these made themselves the new icons of the fallen church.
The sane will lay side by side any of the double-spaced junk books these sell on the shelves of bookstores and compare them side by side with the writings of Polycarp, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Ignatius, St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, St. Augustine, St. Saint Gregory the Great, St. Athanasius, St. Gregory of Nazianzus and St. John Chrysostom and what they will find is that God either changed his mind drastically to become the devil or that the latter fundamentalists are the sons of the devil.
The question I asked thousands of times which no man answered is this: did the Church Christ promised to build only came about in the sixteenth century?
What I finally found was that the most effective channels of God’s grace that work to communicate between God and His people are the ones most hated. These are the seven sacraments.
But Baptism they say is not for infants. However, preventing infants from being born they said was a sacred right and a sacrament.
The Eucharist they say is no miracle. However, the miracles of the tele-evangelist are.
Confirmation they say does not provide a special outpouring of the Holy Spirit while they claim they have the Holy Spirit who has countless contradictory interpretations of scripture.
Reconciliation or Confession to a Catholic priest they say is unnecessary for intercession, while the pastor can do intercessory prayers galore and it is accepted as a sacrament.
Confession to a priest works because it prevents a sin from being a secret working on the cleansing from the inside by aid of an attorney if you will who is qualified to explain the sinners infractions. The most lax of all church observances is the confessional where forgiveness by a priest is made easy.
Protestants however made forgiveness a mystery since sin remains to be discovered and therefore, the sinner is unaware of his own depravity thus unable to gain forgiveness for sins he must account for since scripture clearly says that no unclean can enter heaven.
Anointing of the sick as in “the last rights” they say is unnecessary for the forgiveness of sins while Scripture in James 5:14-15 clearly states: “Is any among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord; and the prayer of faith will save the sick man, and the Lord will raise him up; and if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.”
Yet heretics like John MacArthur would chop up the words in bold above when it comes to the elders anointing the sick.
I discovered that people who claim to obey the Bible the most chop it up the most while people who obey the church the most follow the Bible the most.
The sacrament of Marriage, which is the only means for pro-creation they say is necessary but couples do not necessarily have to have more children than their conscious demands became a new sacrament.
The sacrament of Holy Orders which Catholics chose to take from the Levitical order to set apart the priesthood, yet the other side, the Protestant chose only the 10% tithe from the Levitical order mounting the most enormous wealth to the ones with the biggest stadiums and they made that a sacrament.
It puzzles me every time I say all this in America; that the first response I get is from ‘Bible believers’ who instantly point at the immorality within the priesthood from someone who forgot that 97% of his people had premarital sex. Such observation is especially true when 97% of the claims by accusers of the Catholic Church are 100% inaccurate because the devil encourages heckling more than listening.
This is why if speech was made of silver reading original sources is made of gold. This is why I wonder at times why the most ignorant keep harping over their “freedom of speech” when they are the least who exercise their freedom to read both opposing views.
I have never once met a person who says that they are not for freedom, yet everyone I met are afraid of reading up on their enemy’s mindset lest they themselves convert to become the enemy.
My definition of Protestantism is simply interpreting scripture to defy the Catholic Church’s interpretation of scripture.
The one question one needs to ask is which one was there first, the Catholic Church or the Protestant ‘reformation’? This is why in reality mankind is more interested in denouncing the enemy more than they are interested in defining a belief system and is why Islam came along, to strictly defy Catholicism and is why it is at war with it and persecutes Catholics and Orthodox, rarely do they persecute Protestants.
But arguing over religion they say causes quarrels and therefore, the subject, they say, must be avoided. But reality is that quarrels start because people stop arguing and begin sneering.
I find that most who argue insisting we only quote scripture tend to act as if they smoke the Bible. They use the thin paper for zig-zag where if smoking marijuana was the subject of discussion they simply treat the issue as ‘venial sin’ and when I smoked tobacco at the entrances of their churches it was treated at times as a ‘mortal sin’ all the while they threw out my son for speaking against sodomy claiming that he should not exercise his “freedom of speech” for the cause of ‘love’.
These compare this sin to a child stealing from a cookie jar since in their private interpretation “sin is sin”. They expected God to give them a breakdown from the Bible on all what it meant and perhaps He should have sent us The Book Of Calvin which details a systematic theology with chapter and verse.
I finally discovered that this worship of love actually produced the worst form of hatred since their false god loves everyone except the ones who exposes sodomy. How does this god of theirs the god of love especially when they ignore the victims; the youth being daily brainwashed to believe that sodomy is just another lifestyle. These do not even realize their level of sin and how their premarital sex is abhorring to God.
America they say is the beacon of “religious freedom”. Yet I have never seen a people who attack the word “religion” more than Americans. ‘Love’ they say should be the dynamo for everything we do, except that they failed to give it, and instead they always offered ‘prayers’ as if one is to pray to elevate his key when it drops to the ground instead of picking it up to open the door. It is as if God condemned works and Jesus insisted that we only ‘pray’.
Yet almost everyone I saw walked around with a bundle of keys. Even key for religions. Everyone offered their keys to unlock the gate to God. I had such a key. I had thought it opened the door to paradise until one day I tried the key and the grooves just did not match the holy lock. I ended up finding out that every dogma on life and eternity from every religion besides the original church rejected one verse regarding keys; Peter’s keys.
Why would Peter only have such keys? And since Protestantism is solely an attack on things Catholic, they would argue endlessly on the word “this” in “thou art Peter and upon this rock”.
They say that this “this” is Jesus and not Peter. They say that “the rock” here is Christ.
They say this while ignoring that the “thee” in “I [Jesus] will give unto thee they keys of the kingdom of heaven” is handing over such keys to Peter. Jesus also told Peter “and whatsoever thou [Peter] shalt bind upon earth it shall be bound also in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven.”
Any sane mind can see that Peter and not strictly “Jesus alone” is to speak for heaven in binding and loosing.
Then they would ask and ask a multitude of questions: was Peter supreme and infallible? Did Christ confer papal privileges on Peter’s successors? Was Peter the first Bishop of Rome? Did Peter himself or the rest of the apostles recognize his divine appointment? …
It is the similar questions Lucifer asked the wife of the first appointed authority: “Did God really say that you must not eat from any tree in the garden?” (Genesis 3:1)
They would instantly argue “in the Greek language, ‘rock’ is petra but ‘Peter’ is Petros; they are two different words. Petra they say means ‘rock,’ while Petros meaning ‘little pebble’. Therefore, Jesus isn’t even mentioning Peter when He says ‘upon this rock’. All this plus “Jesus is the only Rock” and “Jesus is our only shepherd”.
Yet in scripture we find God is the “rock,” and in Isaiah 51:1-2 Abraham is also a “rock” and David in 2 Samuel 5:2 and in Ephesians 2:20 Christ shares the foundation with the “apostles and prophets.”
And as for this “Rock” is concerned, in John one we find: “Thou art Simon the son of Jona. Thou shalt be called Cephas, which is interpreted Peter” (John 1:42). The word “Cephas” comes to the Greek language from the Aramaic. Kepha means “rock” which is etymologically linked to the Greek word kephale (head).
So Peter is both “rock” and “head.”
But they still argue that it was Andrew who invited his brother Simon to follow Jesus (John 1:40-42). It was Andrew who confesses to Simon that they have found the Messiah. Andrew therefore was the first disciple called by Jesus.
Yet in Matthew 10 we find “And the names of the twelve Apostles are these: The first, Simon who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew the publican, and James the son of Alpheus, and Thaddeus, Simon the Cananean, and Judas Iscariot, who also betrayed him” (Matt. 10:2-4).
So which of the two was first? Did God err?
Hardly. St. Matthew says “the first is Simon who is called Peter”. While St. Andrew was called first, Matthew here is not giving us a sequential list of the apostles but a hierarchical list.
And in Mark 3:14-19 and Luke 6:13-16 the Bible makes it clear, Peter is named first while St. Matthew’s word “first” is in the Greek, protos where we get words like “prototype” to mean Peter was both top in sequence and rank. Even Paul uses this same word “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the chief [protos].”
Not only was Peter the center of authority throughout the New Testament but even Christ told him “I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and thou, being once converted, confirm thy brethren” (Luke 22:31-32). It was to Peter that the authority of confirmation was given making Peter the foundation “rock”.
For two millennia Peter was taught to the church as the first leader where Paul after his conversion spending three years in Damascus went to Jerusalem to see Peter where he “tarried with him fifteen days.” To St. John Chrysostom the reason Paul went to see Peter first because Peter was “the leader of the band” while Origen writes that Paul acted so “because of [Peter’s] office, no doubt.” (De Praescriptione Haereticorum, XXIII.)
Then when all ammunition runs out, they would argue that the word “Pope” is not in scripture so you counter “neither is the word protestant” and then they counter back saying that they are not “protestant but Christian” and we counter back “and so are we” but why only they insist on finding labels in scripture? Then they would argue that Paul wrote more scripture than Peter and we counter that Paul wrote more scripture than Jesus. So what?
Yet all of them call evil good and good evil. Evil can easily masquerade as good to the naïve! There must be then a key for everyone to easily find—a key that unlocks your heart to see your inner soul.
The key to know if you bare fruit is this: “All who hate God love death.” (Proverbs 8:36) To love God then is to fight birth control, love life, not just to love our own life, but also everyone’s, to hate evil, not just one specific evil but all evil.
But the noble mission is identified when one rids all ‘the faithful’ from ignorance. It can only be accomplished by stepping on the toes of all who say they adhere to the one true God; Jews, with conservative and reformed, Muslims with all their sects and Protestants with all sorts of squabbling rival denominations.
The honest is recognized because at times he exposes his own sect to win some, while the wolf never crosses the line within his own sect because he fears loosing all. The honest intends to lose most and only gain some for his wisdom falls under Christ’s “He who has found his life will lose it, and he who has lost his life for My sake will find it.” The same should be when we deliver our message, we always try to lose knowing always that we will only gain but few who seek “the narrow gate”.