Islam, the West, and the Purpose of Life
Fellowship Discussion Essay | 20 September 20, 2026
The meeting took up Thomas’s essay on the interview between Danny Bermawi, a former Muslim who became a Christian, and Jeremy Boreing, published by PragerU. Thomas explained that his working method is to take a video or article that interests him, have an AI draft an essay on it, and then revise; this one grew from 9,000 to 23,000 words over a week of revision, so a summary and outline were circulated with it. A guest, Mickey (introduced as Michelle), joined for the first time; she is a practicing Latter-day Saint, related to Susan by marriage, and described herself as more interested in religion than politics. Charlie had described the topic to her as whether Islam is a religion of peace or of conquest, and a friend or an enemy of the West and of Christ. The discussion ran in three movements: Thomas’s thesis and the questions it drew; a long turn on the nature of God, agency, and the purpose of life prompted by Mickey’s response; and a return to the problem of divinely commanded violence in the Old Testament and what it means for the Christian critique of Islam.
Notes marked Additional note were added in preparing this essay to supply references or corrections the discussion did not have at hand.
1. The thesis, as Thomas presented it
Thomas said that in a conversation with Charlie during the week he had been able to extract the essence of the long essay, and he gave it in the following order.
The problem. Islam is advancing in the West, and the West appears powerless to resist. The powerlessness is self-imposed. Because Islam is classified as a religion, and because the First Amendment protects free expression, the prevailing view is that Islam may say anything it likes and may not be criticized. Thomas said he had assumed the obstacle was the Establishment Clause, the idea that criticizing Islam would amount to establishing Christianity as a state religion, but had concluded in preparing the essay that the operative argument is a free-expression argument, and that both need reframing.
The witness. Bermawi was raised Muslim and set out to become a fanatic, to master his religion so as to defend it against every alternative. The deeper he went, the more he concluded that it was not a good religion, and he left it for Christ. His thesis, as Thomas summarized it, is that Islam has a political arm that cannot be separated from the religion, that the agenda of Islam is to bring the world under Islamic rule, and that the West should therefore be able to discriminate between Muslims who hold a revolutionary political program and those who do not. Thomas added the caveat that not every sect holds this program, but that enough do, and that the texts support it: the doctrine of Dar al-Islam holds that the golden age comes when Islam rules everything. He named the Twelvers, who await the twelfth Imam, as especially committed to it. He recalled the celebrations in some quarters after 9/11 as evidence that part of Islam supported it, while acknowledging that other Muslims were horrified.
Additional note. Dar al-Islam (“the abode of Islam”), paired with Dar al-Harb (“the abode of war”), is a term of classical Islamic jurisprudence rather than a phrase found in the Quran. The Quranic texts most often cited for a standing program of conquest are Surah 9:5 (the “verse of the sword”) and 9:29 (fighting the People of the Book until they pay the jizya, the tax on non-Muslims living under Muslim rule, which is what Thomas referred to later as taxing and subjugating those who worship the Book). Muslim scholars are divided on whether these verses are historically bounded to Muhammad’s campaigns or standing commands; the critics’ reading and the apologists’ reading both exist within Islam. “Twelvers” are the majority of Shia Muslims, including most of Iran, so the expectation of the twelfth Imam is mainstream Shia belief rather than a fringe; the militant, expansionist reading of it belongs to a subset.
Three action items. First, bar naturalization to anyone who holds a revolutionary political program against the Constitution. The naturalization oath already requires the applicant to support and defend the Constitution. Second, bar federal employment on the same ground; the federal oath of office requires the same. A Muslim who will not specifically renounce the political and revolutionary elements of his religion should be denied both. Third, and most important, change America’s heart and mind: stop fearing the label “Islamophobic,” and say plainly that the project of replacing the Constitution with Sharia is not welcome. Those who wish to live under Sharia should do so elsewhere. Those who wish to swear allegiance to a constitutional republic are welcome.
Additional note. The oath provisions Thomas referred to are 8 U.S.C. §1448 (the naturalization oath) and 5 U.S.C. §3331 (the federal oath of office). There is a closer precedent for his proposal than the oath itself: 8 U.S.C. §1424 already bars naturalization to members of the Communist Party or any other totalitarian party, and to anyone advocating the overthrow of the government by force. That statute distinguishes political ideology from religion, which is the distinction Thomas’s proposal depends on. The constitutional tension he did not name is Article VI, which forbids any religious test for federal office; a bar framed as applying to a religion would meet that clause, while one framed as applying to a political program that some adherents hold would not.
All law is legislated morality. Thomas said the slogan “you cannot legislate morality” is the most foolish thing a person can say, because every law legislates some morality; the only question is which. American law rests on a Judeo-Christian moral framework, not exclusively but predominantly, and what is now called liberal democracy is consistent with that framework. America needs to get over its embarrassment about this and embrace it. Thomas said plainly that he is a Christian nationalist: America is a Christian nation and should embrace the Lord behind it.
What a Christian nation is. Thomas tied this to Susan’s testimony from two weeks earlier. Being a Christian is not holding a belief system; it is taking the person of Christ inside oneself. A Christian nation is a nation of people who have done that and who treat one another accordingly. The Great Commandment, to love God with all one’s heart, mind, and soul and one’s neighbor as oneself, contains all the law and the prophets, and loving God is the code name for living by God’s standard, which is God’s own way of being.
The theology underneath. For Mickey’s benefit Thomas gave the short version of his own theology. In 1987 he had what he called a Buddha experience: the realization that there is nothing which is not God. He has spent forty years trying to articulate why that is so. Every thought, emotion, object, and event is God experiencing himself; “in him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28). God began as a point of awareness and, through a long story, produced this manifestation, in which creatures with free will have the privilege of being God in a microscopic aspect and giving God an experience he chose not to force. Loving God is giving God the experience of life lived the way he would live it perfectly, and the Bible is the instruction manual, in stories, proverbs, commandments, and parables, for what God enjoys being and experiencing.
Islam in that frame. Islam, Thomas said, is a satanic imitation meant to pull people from the true God to another. Allah and Jehovah are two different gods with two different sets of commanded behaviors. Islam is essentially Old Testament religion plus additional material, mainly on enforcement: a performance religion without grace. Christianity is a grace religion that is also a performance religion, in that one commits to God’s way, but justification does not come by performing perfectly; it comes by taking God’s person within and living by that Spirit.
The posture toward Muslims. Thomas said that he has had Muslim patients whom he thoroughly enjoyed, shared Thanksgiving with, and counts as wonderful people. Muslims are children of God deceived by another god, and are to be loved. The ideology is to be opposed at every step. Anyone pursuing the project of replacing the Constitution is an enemy of the state, but should not be prosecuted absent a crime; such groups should be monitored so that unlawful acts become known. When terrorism occurs, the names and motives of the perpetrators should be spoken publicly without worrying about backlash against innocent Muslims because, as Christians, we look at people as Children of God, and love them, but we do not love an anti-God/anti-constitutional ideology. Americans should be open about their Christianity, open about the Islamic project, and evangelical about the message of Christ, preparing the nation as the bride of Christ without spot or blemish.
Separation of church and state. Thomas closed by noting that the phrase is not in the Constitution. It comes from Thomas Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, assuring them that the government would not interfere with them, and the Supreme Court elevated it to a quasi-constitutional principle in Everson v. Board of Education (1947). Criticism of Islam as a political program is therefore constitutionally available and needs no apology.
Additional note. Everson was a 1947 Supreme Court decision. The two clauses are the Establishment Clause (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”) and the Free Exercise Clause (“or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”); the free speech clause follows them in the same amendment. Michael later quoted the first two accurately.
2. Questions and responses on the thesis
Charlie Hebdo. Charlie asked how the Charlie Hebdo story would have played out if the magazine had been in America rather than France, and what the difference between America and Europe is now. He explained for the group that the satirical magazine had published a cartoon of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, and that Islamist gunmen entered its offices and killed as many as they could. Thomas answered that America’s Muslim population is still small enough that its militants do not feel emboldened to act openly and expect to escape justice through political weight. Charlie objected that 9/11 was bold; Thomas replied that 9/11 was a covert strike, not an open project. Thomas said that in America such perpetrators would be prosecuted regardless of religious banner, because enough Judeo-Christian morality remains; if France had reached the point of tolerating such killing as cultural, it would already have been overtaken. He described the stages by which he believes a growing Islamic minority moves: from “why can’t we all get along,” to “we are a persecuted minority,” to legislating, to incorporating Sharia into the legal system. Charlie then read what he found: the three principal attackers of January 2015 were killed by French police within days and never tried; a later trial convicted fourteen people of providing support, with sentences from four to thirty years; seventeen people were killed in all, twelve at the magazine, a police officer, and four shoppers at a kosher supermarket.
Additional note. The turban-bomb cartoon Charlie described was drawn by Kurt Westergaard and published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005; Charlie Hebdo republished the Danish cartoons in 2006 and ran its own Muhammad covers afterward, which made it a target. The two brothers who attacked the magazine and the gunman at the supermarket were killed by police on 9 January 2015, as Charlie reported.
Terror as a chill on speech. Thomas said he does not place terrorism in the category of acts most Muslims would support. Its function, as he sees it, is intimidation: to neuter any opposition vocal enough to mobilize public support. He confessed that he himself is afraid to say publicly what he was saying in the meeting, and that he does not believe his fear is unusual; if each person imagined going public against Islam’s program of conquest and Sharia, few would feel free. He cited Salman Rushdie, who wrote a novel about Islam, had a fatwa issued against him, went into hiding for years, and was later attacked. Charlie named this as terrorism working exactly as intended, and supplied the legal term from First Amendment cases: a chilling effect on speech. Thomas agreed: there is a group within Islam that understands the power of terror, and the terror is aimed not at the nation but at the opposition.
Additional note. The fatwa against Rushdie was issued by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 over The Satanic Verses; Rushdie lived under protection for roughly a decade and was stabbed on stage at Chautauqua, New York, in August 2022, losing the sight of one eye. The attack on fellow soldiers Thomas mentioned was at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009, by Major Nidal Hasan.
The 9/11 disagreement. Leonard said that 9/11 was a lie, that there were not nineteen Islamist hijackers, and that Islam has long been used as a tool by others, including the Nazis and the Communists. Michael countered that the Nazis killed Muslims along with Jews and others, and that after 9/11 Muslim congregations uniformly condemned the attacks and President Bush stood with imams to say it was not about Islam; Leonard replied that it is strange to say the attacks had nothing to do with Islam while Islamists were used as the instrument in the propaganda. Susan called time. Thomas later gave his position: the conspiracy view is a minority position and, in his judgment, a disinformation campaign of the Soviet type, whose carriers are sincere but which was deliberately seeded; more to the point, whether or not one accepts 9/11 as the example, terrorism exists, and denying the Islamic connection to 9/11 throws away the clearest evidence that some part of Islam will use terror. He listed other examples: the shooting of fellow soldiers on a military base, suicide bombings in nightclubs, vehicles driven into pedestrians. Leonard’s summary of the opposing sentiment, “can’t we all just get along,” was left as the closing line of that exchange.
Additional note. On the Nazi question, both claims contain something. Muslims were not a target group of the Nazi genocide, so Michael’s statement that the Nazis wiped out Muslims is not accurate; but the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, collaborated with Hitler and helped recruit Bosnian Muslim units for the SS, which is the kind of use Leonard was describing. Michael’s remark that the Pope was “for the Nazis” refers to the contested record of Pius XII, on which historians disagree.
Mickey’s response. Mickey thanked Thomas for expressing views he had clearly spent much time forming, and said her own focus is religious rather than political, though she acknowledged she had introduced the politically charged subject by mentioning the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11. She offered three responses. On theology, she said that what Thomas describes as God she would describe as the Spirit: God is his own self, and she is her own self, and the beauty is in bringing the two together through the Spirit. She does not believe we experience our lives as God or for God; God wants us to experience life as ourselves, as his children, with him as a part of it through his Spirit, but we are not him. On politics, she said Christ was born into an intensely political situation, and people looked to him for an answer he had not come to give, and she resists applying his teaching to questions of who should be kept out of a country. Geography has changed; we are intermixed by technology; she asked whether we should fear a person crossing a border while the same discourse flows freely online. On fear, she said she has never been afraid to express her religious views, while acknowledging a sheltered life. Charlie noted that Thomas does not require anyone to share his view of God, and Mickey said she had not felt that he did.
Michael on exclusion. Michael, before leaving, said that what he valued in Mickey’s remarks was inclusion and acceptance, which he regards as the best of what religions offer, and that horrifying things follow when a religion excludes another. His examples: Rome’s treatment of Jesus and his followers as a threatening foreign religion; the persecution of the early Mormons by Christians, which he offered to Leonard, whose ancestor was driven out of Nauvoo; the Puritan witch ordeals; the seven centuries of war between Catholic and Orthodox Christendom; the Spanish Inquisition. One could say from this that all Christians are like that, but one need not, and the same restraint applies to Muslims. He quoted the First Amendment’s religion clauses and said that the thesis, as he heard it, begins by discarding them. Leonard answered that the early Mormons’ persecutors were simply prejudiced, and that the point about Islam is more nuanced than Michael allowed; Charlie added that Thomas had not condemned all Muslims. After Michael left, Thomas observed that Michael’s characteristic move is to take one instance and extend it to the whole, and that even when a qualifier is stated, the qualifier is minimized.
3. God, agency, and the purpose of life
Thomas returned to Mickey’s statement that God is separate from us and that each has his own experience, bridged by the Holy Ghost. He said that this is the orthodox view, the view nearly everyone holds, and that he himself finds it hard to escape; even he asks whether he is really part of God, giving God an experience. His view is a hypothesis, not a demand, and he believes it is a fundamental truth that God has deliberately hidden. He holds it because it resolves every problem he has applied it to, in physics and in religion alike: positions that seem mutually exclusive become intelligible within a holism in which the unity of life is seen. Mickey called that a beautiful thought.
Leonard on agency. Leonard said that in his scripture the work and glory of God is to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man, and that God, who enjoys immortality and eternal life, in a sense enjoys our lives whether we obey or not, because that is his work and his joy. He is part of us and we of him. What separates us is our own use of his gift of agency: we have sinned, and God looks on sin with the least degree of allowance, so he cannot interact with what is not cohesive with him except to help and influence. Agency is the core structure. Mickey agreed that the separation came through agency and that agency was thereby provided to all of us.
Additional note. Leonard’s two citations are Moses 1:39 (“this is my work and my glory, to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man”) and Doctrine and Covenants 1:31 (“the Lord cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance”), both from the LDS canon.
Mickey on the plan. When Thomas asked whether God intended agency or whether it arose by accident, Mickey said her creation story is less defined than her tradition’s, but she strongly holds to a pre-mortal existence and a purpose for this one. She loves the title Heavenly Father because it uses the family, which mortals can understand, to convey an eternal relationship. God has a plan; we accepted it, and it includes coming to earth, illness, caring for the sick, love, conflict, and coming to understanding. He wants us to learn who we are, but he will not lay it all out on the table. Asked why, she said the purpose is educative: as with children, whom Charlie and Susan homeschooled rather than confining to a system that defines what is important, God wants us to question, imagine, explore, and hypothesize, as Thomas has; he loves that, and he provides prophets and people sensitive to his communication so that we are not left aimless, but he gives us a great deal of space.
The purpose of learning. Thomas said “life is for learning” is a common enough sentiment to be a song lyric, and he saw it young; the question is, learning for what end? Mickey said the purpose is multifaceted: the brain is multi-interested, we must learn to provide for ourselves, and civilization has learned everything from smelting iron onward. Susan then read 1 Corinthians 15:24-28, in which Christ delivers up the kingdom to the Father when he has put all enemies under his feet, the last enemy being death, and the Son himself becomes subject to the Father “that God may be all in all.” The purpose of earth life, she said, is to be back in God’s presence, which requires that we accept and embrace God’s ways: love and doing right to one another. There may be other reasons along the way, but that is the end. Thomas asked her to state it again and then said that was the answer he had been missing: we are learning God’s ways. That gives learning urgency, substance, and focus. Learning to look both ways before crossing, or to assemble a part, becomes learning that God has order in his world and that one must find it to assemble things his way.
Charlie added a saying Armond had quoted in the past year: the purpose of knowledge is not knowledge but action. Thomas placed that under Susan’s point: the only purpose of any action is to please God, which in his theology means giving God a good experience. Mickey took the next step: what actions please God, and what does living like Christ look like when one wakes in a physical world with no God standing there to demonstrate? That is her life’s quest. She named serving, helping, creativity (God wants us to feel the pleasure of creating), sharing, and putting two things together in the brain, which she believes is formative and preparatory for a life with God we cannot yet see. Thomas said all of this fits inside his envelope of God experiencing everything through us.
Additional note. The saying Charlie quoted is often attributed to Aristotle but does not appear in his works in that form; the nearest source is Nicomachean Ethics II.2, where Aristotle says the inquiry is undertaken not to know what virtue is but to become good.
Christ with us, or in us. Mickey said that when she reads of the atonement, she does not so much picture Christ experiencing all her pain in twelve hours in the garden as she experiences the garden’s effect in the way Christ is with her day by day, in challenge, exuberance, discovery, and creativity. He is with her rather than in her, by a miracle she cannot explain, and that is how she experiences being one with him.
Leonard flips the picture. Leonard said he would turn Thomas’s thesis on its head: it is not that God experiences us but that we are here to experience God. God is so far beyond us that our purpose is to get a glimpse of where he is, so that we want to be like him and with him. Moses on Sinai and Christ in the garden show that it can be done. Christ’s whole life was submission to the Father’s will, and that is what we must do, not the reverse. The commandments are like laws that protect a society; God, far ahead on an eternal path, calls his children to come. He recalled Lehi’s vision of the tree whose fruit is the love of God. The purpose of life is to know God as intimately as Christ did, to be at one with him, which is what atonement means; we should take truth wherever we find it, in Muhammad’s writings, the Bhagavad Gita, Buddha, or Christ, with discernment, since lies are abundant too. Immortality, he added, is a mysterious word; some men in scripture, Elijah and John, chose it.
Charlie on the boy and the ball. Charlie told a story that circulates among Latter-day Saints: a boy asks his father to play catch, the father says he has no time but loves him, and the boy says, “I don’t want you to love me; I want you to play catch.” God knows how slightly out of reach our understanding is of what he lives. Charlie agreed with Mickey that God is with us in our stuff; he would like to spend every day on a mountaintop communing with God, but he must pay the rent and the insurance. God does not spoon-feed; he makes us scratch and dig for every advance in knowledge, invention, art, and good behavior, and that makes them precious.
Susan’s grafting allegory. Susan set out the picture she has assembled from Scripture. Since Adam and Eve, mankind is cut off from God by sin, on a path to death. When Christ died for our sins, the Father accepted his death in place of ours. When a person believes deeply in Christ and takes him as Lord, which is not a small thing, since it means continuing to follow him, Christ grafts him back into the tree like a severed limb, and the life source runs through him again, with the fruit of the Spirit. Many who believe in Christ are not yet connected because of an unforgiven grudge, since God cannot forgive us if we do not forgive others. One who accepts Christ and then goes on living as before, without repenting, will lose the connection. Whether Christ is in us may be gradual: she is not keeping all the commandments and yet feels the connection, and suspects it will be greater as she keeps more. The connection is priceless, and one wants to share it; it is contagious, and people who see peace and love in someone will say they want it. We can stumble and repent. The new heart wants to please God, whereas the cut-off heart desires the things of this world, which are opposite to God’s ways. Mickey said she loved the image: wind and heat loosen the graft, and if worldly influences are not countered, it breaks. Susan agreed: the relationship must be nurtured by prayer and Bible study. Mickey added that without a taste for it one will not seek it, and that it is part of mortality to offer the sweet fruit and have it rejected or laughed at.
Additional note. The grafting image is Paul’s in Romans 11:17-24, where Gentile believers are wild branches grafted into the olive tree of Israel and warned that they too can be cut off. Susan’s phrase “life source” matches John 15:1-6, the vine and the branches. Her point on forgiveness is Matthew 6:14-15.
Leonard: this life is nothing. Leonard said we put too much emphasis on how we feel and what we do here; Christ’s message was that this is nothing and one must look beyond the mortal prison, which nonetheless gives the opportunity to draw closer to God by choice. God does not force, unless someone begins destroying others’ agency, and even then he usually lets things ride and the consequences come after this life, which is more a beginning than an end; he noted the word “replenish” in Genesis 1:28 as suggestive of reconstitution.
Susan: the choice changes everything. Susan said there is a wildly different experience once one has chosen to obey the Lord. Before that choice, one may pray and ask what to do and still flounder. Once one has said “I want your way, I want Christ as Lord,” and inclined the heart to it, the life source running through one changes outlook and desire, and affects every decision every minute, even when God does not speak directly. One still has to lean on God in situations one does not understand. She pictured Christ on the mountain before choosing the apostles (Luke 6:12), a sinless man still struggling with the Father over whom to choose, and imagined Judas being the hard case. Leonard said the hard part was choosing which one would betray him, since the betrayal was necessary for the final work. Susan said her picture has been that Christ’s understanding grew through his life and that the Father led him step by step, so he may not have gone up the mountain with that knowledge; Mickey said that whether he knew or not, the purpose was there. Charlie said it seems unfair to Judas, who like all of us as a child wanted to do something great; none of the Bible’s characters knew they were Bible characters. Leonard said Christ knew their hearts; Judas held the Old Testament expectation of a Messiah who would save the people politically, and betrayed Christ to force him to stand up as that Messiah, not seeing the whole picture; none of the apostles really understood, having been taught by their rabbis as we are all taught by ours.
James 1:5-7 again. Susan reread James 1:5-7 in the New Living Translation, as she had the week before: ask God for wisdom, but be sure your faith is in God alone, for a person of divided loyalty is a wave tossed by the wind and should expect nothing. The King James can leave the impression that one only needs enough faith that the prayer will be granted; this rendering asks whether one wants God’s way no matter what, or only when it is convenient. She then tied it back to Islam: what needs to happen is that people turn to God with their whole hearts, in prayer, fasting, and reading, and as more people become truly about the Lord, that is where the answer to Islam and everything else will be. Leonard added James 4:8, “draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you,” and observed that “upbraideth not” in James 1:5 means God does not hold back: ask him and watch out. Susan and Charlie agreed; Charlie said he stopped praying for strength long ago because the answer was always a disaster.
4. Domination, sacrifice, and the violence of the Old Testament
Where does domination come from? Mickey asked the question that shaped the last hour. Every religion, Islam, Christianity, even Confucianism, begins with an experience of heaven and a desire to share it, and then slides: others must agree, and if they do not, they are wrong, and then they are to be conquered. She cited the children of Israel destroying everyone in the land as an example she cannot wrap her mind around.
Sacrifice. Leonard said the common thread through all the prophets, apostles, and Christ is sacrifice, up to the sacrifice of their lives, and he tied it to Matthew 25, in which what is done for the least is done for Christ; he asked what those men and women experienced that made them willing. Mickey said some of it comes from commandments from heaven, as with Adam’s sacrifice, which he offered without knowing why. She said she believes in evolution, including the evolution of the capacity to understand God: when Christ came in the meridian of time, the law of sacrifice was fulfilled, animal sacrifice, which had become offensive when offered without love, gave way to the sacrifice of a broken heart and contrite spirit, and she doubts we will ever fully understand why animal sacrifice was required.
Susan answered that God implemented it because he was dealing with hard-hearted people, and that from the start it foreshadowed Christ’s death for our sins, a ritual to be understood later. The sheer volume of ritual reoriented them to attend to what God told them; it was so time-consuming that one either obeyed or did not, with no fence to sit on. Leonard said many sat on the fence and just wanted to be fed; Susan said the fence was itself disobedience. Mickey added that sacrifice from a herd that sustained life was a physical lesson in giving up resources to God. Leonard said men typically corrupt an ordinance over time and build a business on it, which is what Christ found in the temple; he suggested Christ deliberately stirred them to the point of wanting to kill him, because he had to die, and that everything in the Gospels should be read as planned by the Father, with the fig tree and the “destroy this temple” saying as hints no one understood. Susan objected that she does not think Christ’s perspective was to provoke his own killing; he was obeying the Father, and the death followed, and to say otherwise sounds like manipulation and would be off-putting to many. Leonard asked whether it would change anything if it were so, then accepted Susan’s framing: the Father led him in everything needed for the outcome. He added that Christ condescended from God’s presence, risked it all as we do, and was perfect because he chose wisely every time. Susan said: he obeyed. Leonard said: obeying is a choice.
The conquest problem. Susan returned to Mickey’s difficulty and made it a task for the group. When Christians object to Muslim violence, non-Christians answer that the Israelites did the same, and so did the Crusaders. She said this is a real stumbling block, that she does not yet have a good answer, and that the group ought to develop one alongside its critique of Islam.
Leonard answered first: God knows hearts. When he commanded Joshua, he knew the hearts of the people of the land, who had become so wicked that he ended it before they went further and did more damage; he trusts that foresight. Mickey said idolatry was a large part of it, and that the gods of the nations arose from trying to understand and manipulate the environment. Leonard added the flood and Sodom as precedents, and said Lot would have been consumed had he stayed; we should learn by precept as quickly as possible rather than by sad experience.
Thomas gave his answer from his unified view. God wanted the experience of his word proliferating in the land, and a people utterly committed to evil cannot cohabit with what is committed to their destruction. Mickey said it still hurts her heart; Thomas and Leonard said it hurts God’s heart too. Thomas continued: this is the passage that everyone who wants to discredit Christianity reaches for, “what kind of God commands genocide,” and the word does the work of condemning the whole program. He offered these points. God wanted to restore the garden, a people who long for his rule; he had done the same at the flood, finding one man of his own heart. God cannot be in relationship with what is irrevocably committed to evil, any more than a body tolerates a disease. The sympathy that recoils at killing anything is understandable, since we all have hearts; he had drowned a glue-trapped mouse the day before to end its suffering and found it awful. But God hates evil, and in commanding Israel to execute the judgment rather than doing it himself, he was having his people execute his own heart toward evil. This is a good God who hates evil, and we need not apologize for him. He cited Paul’s potter: who are you to answer back to God, when the potter has power over the clay (Romans 9:20-21)?
Susan added that the peoples of the land were not innocent: every man is born with the light of Christ (John 1:9), so even without Moses they had something from God that they were disobeying. Thomas took this further. People are born with the light and then trained in a colony that has found a way to perpetuate evil without destroying itself, a sustainable culture of evil, and that is the problem with Islam: a sustainable culture of evil fourteen hundred years old, the mirror image of the Jews, who have sustained a good culture for four thousand. This connects to Susan’s thesis of the two sons: Isaac and Ishmael, good and evil, both established by God as a polarity, something to push against, without which there is nothing to learn and no direction to grow. God evidently has a plan for Ishmael, since he has not been destroyed. Thomas said he had recently listened to a long, sympathetic history of Islam that presented it as Old Testament religion, people trying to worship God in their own way, and that it whitewashed the additions: the subjugation and taxation of the People of the Book, the killing of pagans in Surah 9:5, the claim to rule all. A few small twists make it a religion incompatible with worship of the true God, a false god almost identical to the true one, just off enough. All of it, he said, is God’s plan, and life is for learning is embedded in the play.
Additional note. On Isaac and Ishmael, Genesis 17:20 has God promising to bless Ishmael, make him fruitful, and make of him a great nation, and Genesis 21:17-20 says God was with the boy. The “two sons” pattern in Genesis (Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, Esau and Jacob) is a pattern of election, the covenant line versus the non-covenant line, rather than a declaration that the non-chosen son is evil; the group may want to keep that distinction in view when the pattern is applied to Islam. Susan’s questions about the conquest may also benefit from the following lines of response, which the discussion touched but did not draw together: the conquest commands were addressed to one people, for one land, at one time, and no standing command to repeat them exists in either Testament; the New Testament explicitly removes the sword from the kingdom’s means (John 18:36, 2 Corinthians 10:4, Matthew 26:52); Christians who committed atrocities are condemned by Christians on Christian grounds, whereas the critics’ reading of Surah 9 treats conquest as fulfilling the founder’s command; and the “light of Christ” argument Susan offered establishes that the nations of Canaan were accountable rather than innocent. These are lines the group could develop, not settled answers.
Pruning. Mickey said she had never felt challenged by the cleansing stories until she became a mother, since a mother’s heart wants the best for everyone and finds the idea of a child becoming evil hard. What helped her was the thread Susan had introduced: we are God’s olive grove, which is why scripture is so full of groves, trees, and planting. The Lord prunes, weeds, cuts, and regrafts, arranging and forming his planting, and if one can move beyond “all life is sacred” to God protecting and building his kingdom and the children who love him, the stories become more palatable.
Who would you trust? Charlie asked who on earth today any of them would trust to know the mind and will of God well enough that, if he said “kill that city, every one of them,” they would believe and do it. He said he would not. Susan said that is not how it works in the new covenant; Charlie said he did not think so either, but the question stands. Mickey asked how God accomplishes the weeding now. Susan answered that he does it through people who have come into relationship with him, which spreads by contagion: the tares convert into wheat now that the Spirit is available to everyone who seeks, which was not the case in the old covenant. Mickey suggested that when Paul was sent to the Gentiles, the house of Israel had become strong enough that God could branch out and grow the family; Susan replied that it was rather that Israel was refusing its God, so the invitation went out to the highways, as in the parable of the wedding feast, and the prophecy is that the Gentiles come in first and then help the Jews see that Christ is the Son of God, the last first and the first last. The two agreed that God had prepared Gentile hearts to receive him, however that came about.
Back to 9/11. Charlie closed the loop: the hijackers were following their prophet; Muslims who do such things are like the ancient Israelites in that they believe in someone who has the mind and will of God and think they are doing God’s will. Susan added that they are also promised a large reward, which Mickey called as twisted as it sounds; Susan said it is aimed at those who will not act for the love of God, and Mickey said it is worldly bait for those the Spirit cannot reach.
5. Closing
Susan closed in prayer, thanking God for his goodness, righteousness, truth, mercy, and grace, and for the fellowship, and asking that everyone learn, understand, and grow through the week and return able to edify one another. Mickey said she would rarely be able to attend, since her own church meets at the same hour.