Category: Conservative Review
Graham Platner Calls To Stack the Supreme Court and Impeach ‘At Least Two’ Sitting Justices
SKOWHEGAN, Maine—Senate candidate Graham Platner called to stack the Supreme Court and impeach “at least two” of its sitting justices, moves he said should be top priorities for Democrats should they retake the upper chamber next year.
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Abrahamic myth: How Islam rebranded the God of the Bible
One of the great canards of the post-9/11 world — promoted by theists and nontheists, conservatives and leftists, Democrats and Republicans alike — is that there are three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
But is that really true? If the three faiths worship the same God and preach His word, then there should be clear and compelling evidence of interconnection and aligned essential doctrines.
God’s sacred lineage
Abraham was God’s first patriarch, his descendants were God’s chosen people, and the Lord God guided them — at great cost and peril — to the promised land.
Why is there the need to graft on to this historically and logically robust faith history the tale of Muhammad, which is supported only by legend and perhaps shards of archeological data?
The Jews, meanwhile, were the people through whom God sent His son, Jesus Christ, the messiah. Jesus was a holy, just, virtuous, believing Jew, and what He taught springs directly from the Old Testament. His ministry was ultimately a futile effort to convince His ethnic brothers to follow Him as their redeemer.
Jesus was betrayed by His own people and crucified by the Romans. His death, in substitutive atonement for the sins of humanity, was followed by His resurrection, and the risen Christ tasked His apostles to spread His word beyond the Jews to the gentiles, thus laying the foundation for Christianity, a descriptive moniker that came into common use around the end of the first century A.D.
Biblical genealogy and history are intricate and logical. Like all genealogy and history of the ancient world, they have gaps (which do not diminish their spiritual authority), and a great deal of both spring from oral tradition, which was eventually codified.
The fact that biblical genealogy and history are written in such painstaking detail in both the Old and New Testaments give them each spiritual and chronological heft, as does the fact that scholars have recovered thousands of manuscript copies and fragments totaling hundreds of thousands of pages.
Legend, not lineage
This brings us to the issue of whether Islam is really an Abrahamic faith.
Abraham was father of Ishmael, by his slave Hagar, who was banished from Abraham’s household by Abraham’s wife, Sarah, even though she facilitated their union. God promised Hagar that Ishmael would be a great man and the father of many nations. Ishmael’s life and sons are detailed in Genesis 25 and then again in 1 Chronicles 1. Then he and his sons are never spoken of again.
The book of Genesis, written by Moses, likely dates to around 1200 B.C., even though its final form was not completed until centuries later. This means that the story of Abram, who becomes Abraham, is even older than that because it would have been told to Moses as oral history. So Abraham may have lived as long ago as 2000 B.C.
Yet Muhammad, the prophet of Islam who is supposedly descended from Ishmael, was not born until 570 A.D., which creates a time gap of more than 2,500 years. And for this span of more than two millennia, there are no documents that directly connect Muhammad to Abraham or Ishmael. There is only Islamic oral tradition or legend (known as Hadith), nearly all of which were produced a century or more after Muhammad’s death in 632 A.D.
Conversely, there is no doubt about the connection of the Old and New Testaments. They tell a continuous, coherent, logical, prophetically rich, and frequently archaeologically confirmed story of the journey of the Israelites to the promised land and the life and death of Jesus.
Why, then, is there the need to graft on to this historically and logically robust faith history the tale of Muhammad, which is supported only by legend and perhaps shards of archeological data?
Biblical appropriation
Even though there is no written genealogy from Ishmael to Muhammad, there is significant biblical appropriation in the Quran. In fact, plagiarism might be a better word.
For example, Allah created the heavens and the earth in six days (Surah 7:54; for the Quranic novitiates, the Quran is organized by the length of each Surah [chapter], from the longest, called the Opener to the shortest 114th, Mankind). Abraham’s name first appears in Surah 2. In total, Abraham’s name appears 69 times in the Quran; Jesus appears 25 times, Mary 34 times, and Moses 136 times. In 3:67, the Quran states that “Abraham was not a Jew, nor was he a Christian, but he was a Muslim hanif (montheist), and he was not one of the idolators.”
RELATED: Why progressives want to destroy Christianity — but spare Islam
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While Muhammad was quite open to biblical appropriation of names, he was not so keen on Christian doctrine: Muslims deny the Trinity (“do not say Three”; 4:171) and the crucifixion (“they did not kill him nor crucify him”; 4:157). The denial of the crucifixion leads to an implicit denial of the resurrection; if Jesus was not crucified, then He could not have been resurrected, but He was called to heaven by Allah himself (4:158).
The Quran calls Jesus “messiah” and righteous, but simultaneously denies that He is the son of God (“The Messiah, the son of Mary, was no more than a messenger, messengers passed away before him”; 5:75). In fact, in these things, the Muslims have much more in common with Jews than either group has with Christians.
Ironically, this trio of denials of core Christian beliefs puts Muslims in league with Martin Luther King Jr., who denied the virgin birth, which Muslims accept, but they reject Allah’s paternity of Jesus (see 3:45-47, 9:30, 6:100, and 112:3 for examples).
Muhammad writes that man does not have free will (2:6 and 2:7, among many others); Allah decides and animates all things (3:47 and 40:68). Allah will decide what both believers and nonbelievers do (16:93) and what will happen to them (24:40). Even nonbelievers who wish to believe will not be allowed to do so unless permitted by Allah (10:100).
Muslims are commanded to defeat nonbelievers in jihad (8:39 and 9:5); those who fight and die go to paradise, as do those who fight and live (4:74). Nonbelievers are to be treated as second-class citizens and pay tribute unless they convert, or they may be killed (9:29). Jews and Christians are regarded, respectively, as those who have earned Allah’s anger and those who have gone astray (1:6).
In the Bible, acts of sexual immorality are identified as an abomination to the Lord, right from the beginning of the Old Testament. Deuteronomy 22:5 says, “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth to a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are an abomination unto the Lord thy God”; and Leviticus 18:6-20 describes the Lord’s abhorrence for the sin of incest. Paul’s epistles showcase his scorn for sexual anarchy.
By contrast, Muslim men may marry Jewish or Christian women after the women convert, but sex with a believing slave girl is preferable in the meantime (2:221). Muslim men are also told that they may marry multiple women (i.e., polygamy), and they have no obligation to treat them equally (4:3). The “houris,” or wide-eyed, voluptuous women of paradise, await all believers (Surahs 44, 55, 56, and 78; the much-ballyhooed 72 virgins are not Quranic, they are from a Hadith of Muhammad).
The overall impression of the God of the Bible is that He is a holy and just God, whose moral boundaries and demands set exceedingly high standards of conduct, and Jews of the Old Testament repeatedly fail to hit their marks. Their failures allowed God to show Himself as merciful and loving because He relents in His anger and forgives His people, effectively giving them the chance to start again.
Different gods
It is true that the Quran also refers to Allah in this manner repeatedly. But that is just part and parcel of the appropriation.
The Old Testament’s story of God’s love for, and strife with, His chosen people over their conduct repeats many times because God’s communication through His prophets ultimately proves ineffective at bringing about the lasting behavioral and devotional change that He demands. The God of the Bible never gives up, however, because He loves His children and seeks their betterment only for their own good, a framing of morality that they simply cannot endure because it requires patience, reverence, and discipline.
In the New Testament, God decides to confront His people face-to-face, live among them as a man, and teach them by looking them in the eye. So He sends His son, Jesus Christ, who is eternal and has borne witness to the entire chronology of creation, to live a perfect and sinless life, teach the lessons of the Old Testament, and entreat His people — the first-century Jews — to follow Him in pursuit of salvation and eternal life.
Despite all the travails, challenges, and even violence of the Bible, it is an uplifting story of love, trust, hope, and faith that ends in glory.
The same cannot be said of the Quran, in which an omnipotent god views his people as automatons commanded to do his will. Some verses abrogate others, and there really is no story told but just an endless series of dos and don’ts that end either in hell or paradise with wide-eyed houris.
Ask the people of Minnesota and Michigan and France and the United Kingdom how that’s working out.
Given the lack of a documentary interconnection, the doctrinal discrepancies between the two faiths as expressed in their central holy books raise this critical question: How is it spiritually conceivable that the two books represent the work of the same God?
Would the God who never gives up on His people and venerates marriage and family be the same God who commands men to marry unbelieving women only after they convert and have relations with slave girls while they wait? Would the God who empowers humans with free will and petitions them to follow Him to heaven by living lives of righteousness and virtue be the same God who commands the deaths of nonbelievers, specifically Christians and Jews (4:89), simply because of their unbelief? Would the God who sacrifices His own son on a Roman cross be the same God who appropriates the names, events, and stories of the Bible and relabels them to make them His own in a new book?
The Quran, like a bad Hollywood production, simply takes the biblical plots and characters and changes the name of God from “I AM” to Allah. Adam, Aaron, David, Elijah, Isaac, Job, Jonah, Joseph, Lot, Noah, Solomon, Zechariah, the Psalms, Gabriel, Michael, Noah’s ark, and even the Ark of the Covenant (2:248) all make cameo appearances.
Most importantly, would the God who wants peace and fights wars only against those who seek to eradicate His chosen people (such as the Amorites, Philistines, Canaanites, Hittites, Jebusites, and Perizzites) so that His people can live freely under His law be the same God who commands jihad and the imposition of sharia law, both of which seek to coerce conversion or kill those who will not convert?
Ask the people of Minnesota and Michigan and France and the United Kingdom how that’s working out.
Fruit reveals truth
To say that the God of the Bible is spiritually and doctrinally the same as Allah of the Quran beggars logic, ignores history, and requires that you willfully disregard the written word in each book.
The canard that Islam is an Abrahamic faith is a way of facilitating a connection between evil and goodness for political purposes in order to provide the evil with the fig leaf of acceptance by affiliation rather than by word and deed.
The God of the Bible, and those who follow His word, produced the freest, safest, cleanest, most generous, and most prosperous nations in human history. Islam, on the other hand, has produced — as the late Samuel P. Huntington wrote in his tour de force “Clash of Civilizations” — a cadre of nations that are never simultaneously at peace with all their neighbors and within their own borders.
That was true when he wrote it in 1996, and it is still true today.
Maybe the holy war now being waged between Islam and what remains of a weak-kneed and addle-brained Christendom is why Jesus says in both Matthew and Revelation that He comes with a sword to separate those who deny from those who follow Him.
When you consider whether it is at all likely that Islam is Abrahamic, remember what the redeemer says in Matthew 7:16-20: “Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”
That is all you need to know to stop saying — and believing — that Islam is an Abrahamic faith.
What’s happening in India demands every Christian’s attention — and Trump’s action
President Trump’s recent warning to Nigeria over the mass killing of Christians was both overdue and necessary.
At long last, Washington acknowledged what much of the West preferred to ignore — that believers are being butchered for their faith while bureaucrats issue statements and move on to the next photo op. Trump’s threat to strike Nigeria if the slaughter continues signaled a rare thing in modern politics: moral clarity.
Every church burned in India is a warning: Faith without freedom becomes folklore.
Now it’s time for that same clarity to be turned toward another nation, one that calls itself the world’s largest democracy and one that America counts among its closest allies — India.
New data from the United Christian Forum reveals a troubling trend. Attacks on Christians in India have surged by more than 500% since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in 2014. Over the course of a single decade, reported incidents climbed from 139 to 834. Nearly 5,000 individuals, families, and churches have been caught in the crossfire.
Yet these grim numbers tell only part of the story.
Behind the statistics are pastors dragged from pulpits and beaten, churches reduced to ash, and people hunted like animals simply for choosing the Lord Almighty over the golden idols of their tormentors. What was once unthinkable — open persecution of Christians in the land of Mother Teresa — has now become routine.
Twelve of India’s 28 states now enforce so-called “anti-conversion” laws that criminalize anyone accused of bringing others to Christ.
In practice, these laws are less about conversion than coercion. They empower mobs and police alike to harass Christian minorities on suspicion alone. A man caught carrying a Bible can be accused of proselytizing. A prayer meeting can be framed as a plot.
The cruelty is not confined to law but seeps into everyday life.
In the heartland states of Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, Christian villagers have been driven out of their homes, denied burial rights, and told to renounce their faith or face starvation. Dalit and tribal Christians — the poorest of India’s poor — endure the worst of it. They are excluded from government welfare programs, denied housing, and forced into reconversion ceremonies designed to humiliate.
The Hindu nationalists behind these acts are not the flag-waving patriots America knows. They are absolute savages who have more in common with Islamist extremists than with any conservative movement in the West. No evil is too depraved for these fanatics in saffron robes. These are men capable of gang-raping elderly nuns in the name of purity. Their mouths recite prayers even as their hands commit sin.
Yet through all this, Washington has remained curiously quiet. India, after all, is an ally — a key counterweight to China, a trading partner, a member of the Quad alliance. And allies, we’re told, must not be offended. India receives tens of millions in U.S. foreign assistance each year, yet continues to slide deeper into majoritarian extremism.
RELATED: Bill Maher’s shocking defense of Christians — and what it reveals
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The relationship has become a study in contradiction: America exports democracy while subsidizing the suppression of it.
Trump’s stance toward Nigeria was bold because it rejected the idea that diplomacy must always defer to decorum. He recognized that moral authority is not something declared but something earned and easily lost. The same logic applies to India. If America’s partnership with New Delhi is to mean anything, it must rest on shared principles — not selective blindness.
There is a tragic irony in watching the world’s oldest democracy bankroll the world’s largest, while both ignore their founding creeds. Trump is uniquely positioned to change that. The president has shown a willingness to name the unnameable and confront regimes that others tiptoe around. His threat to Nigeria rattled the corridors of Abuja and forced the international community to pay attention.
A similar message to New Delhi — that America’s friendship cannot be a blank check for intolerance — would carry enormous weight.
To speak out would not be an act of hostility but of honesty. True allies do not flatter; they challenge. India’s leaders must be reminded that religious freedom is not a Western import but a universal right, and any nation that denies it will pay the heaviest of prices. If India wishes to stand shoulder to shoulder with the free world, it must first show it belongs there.
For too long, the West has treated persecution as someone else’s problem. But every church burned in India is a warning: Faith without freedom becomes folklore. The indifference of powerful nations emboldens tyrants and teaches them that human rights are negotiable.
The question now is whether America still believes in the principles it preaches — and whether Trump will demand that its allies do the same.
Because faith, like freedom, dies in stages — first ignored, then excused, and then erased. The erasure has already begun in India. What’s needed now is not another summit or statement, but a voice loud enough to pierce the silence. President Trump has that voice, the rare kind that can still move mountains. I, for one, hope he uses it.
The one virtue America lost — and desperately needs back
Faith is everything to me. I believe in Jesus Christ as my personal Savior, and I’m not shy about saying so. Many Americans feel uncomfortable talking about faith, and many others insist religion should stay out of the public square. I disagree. As a Christian, I want more people to know Jesus, who loves them more than they can imagine.
But I also know that people walk different spiritual paths. Some pray differently. Some worship a different god. Others reject religion altogether. America now holds more faith traditions — and more people with no faith — than at any point in our history. That diversity can spark friction, and as politics fills the void left by declining religious belief, many have turned ideological loyalties into a kind of substitute religion.
America’s diversity guarantees disagreement. It always has. But even in conflict, we can find places to unite.
The risk is obvious: These differences can push us toward a breaking point. The warning signs already surround us. In a moment like this, we need grace.
What grace demands
In Christianity, grace is God’s love poured out freely. Eternal life is His gift — not because we earn it or because we are good, but because God is good.
On Earth, grace takes a more practical form. It means giving each other the benefit of the doubt. It means forgiving mistakes. It means choosing generosity instead of suspicion. And it means approaching someone else’s beliefs with curiosity rather than contempt.
For reasons I still struggle to understand, Americans have stopped trying to understand one another.
Last year, I hosted a meeting of community, business, and faith leaders in my hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The agenda was full of topics that normally light a fuse: poverty, economic exclusion, racial tensions. Before we began, I admitted that some of the terms we would use carried heavy baggage and that I might say something imperfectly myself. I asked only one thing: a little grace.
That simple request set the tone for the whole day. People pushed through the hard conversations and started looking for solutions. We found common ground in places no one expected. The debate stayed calm because everyone extended grace before they demanded it.
I wish that spirit were more common today.
Why grace is hard — and necessary
Too many people explode at the first sign of disagreement. They judge others more harshly than they judge themselves. They dismiss someone with a different view as beyond redemption. The unspoken thought is always the same: Why bother? They won’t listen to me, so why should I listen to them?
RELATED: Dear Christian: God didn’t call you to be a ‘beautiful loser’
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It’s a natural impulse, but grace calls us to something higher. It reminds us that the person across from us carries the same human frailties we do.
Grace does not mean surrendering your convictions. It does not ask you to dilute what you believe or pretend serious disagreements don’t matter. It simply asks you to respect the strength of someone else’s convictions, even when you oppose them. It asks you to accept that everyone is imperfect — including you. And because each of us hopes for forgiveness when we stumble, grace asks that we extend that same forgiveness to others.
America’s diversity guarantees disagreement. It always has. But even in conflict, we can find places to unite. Recovering that unity starts with a simple choice: showing each other a little grace.
Do We Really Need to Slash the Debt?
John Tamny, the free-market economics commentator who edits RealClearMarkets, comes out swinging in The Deficit Delusion: Why Everything Left, Right, and Supply-Side Tells You About the National Debt Is Wrong. Perhaps this isn’t surprising, given the book’s title. It can feel like Tamny is a kid walking through the elementary-school playground, randomly shoving other kids—some of whom are bigger than he—as he attacks one op-ed writer after another for, allegedly, misunderstanding the national debt.
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In the Mind of McNamara
One of the few aspects of the Vietnam war about which most historians agree is that Robert McNamara horribly mismanaged it as secretary of defense. There is no agreement, however, on how McNamara did the nation such a disservice. For those who view American intervention in Vietnam as unnecessary and inherently futile, McNamara is condemned for getting the United States into the war and then for refusing to get it out once he himself became disillusioned. For those who view the intervention as a noble cause that could have ended victoriously, McNamara’s principal failing was his imposition of severe restraints on the military.
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Courage Under Fire
First came the water pouring down the slopes of Japan’s Mount Fuji on October 19, 1979. Then on top of the torrents came the fire that killed 13 U.S. Marines and burned dozens more. Though investigators afterward may not have consulted the Bible, they ended up attributing the unusual mix of elements involved to the same force that, per the Book of Exodus, enveloped ancient Egypt in hail and fire. “It was an act of God,” investigators concluded.
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The grace our cruel culture can’t understand
A friend of mine, Tessa, spent her teenage years aboard a 71-foot sailing yacht with her family, a vessel that demanded real seamanship. Long before GPS, her father read the stars, charts, and maps with the precision of a seasoned navigator, steady with a sextant and calm in a storm.
Life aboard that yacht was demanding but wonderful. The family and small crew sailed from port to port, creating memories that lasted a lifetime. Her father handled the galley as confidently as the sails. Every meal bore his touch in equal parts skill, joy, and flair.
‘Stay. I’ll teach you.’ Those words are the melody of mercy and the quiet assurance that keep weary caregivers from giving up.
After many months, he decided to bring another hand on board to help with the sailing and cooking. While docked in the south of France, Tessa met a young man living alone on a boat in dry dock. He was surviving on oatmeal and sharing it with a cat. Something about him stirred her compassion, and when she learned he had sailing experience, she introduced him to her father.
Seeing potential, the captain asked a simple question.
“Can you cook?”
“Sure, I can cook,” the young man replied.
To find out, the captain assigned him a meal for the family: pork chops, potatoes, and vegetables. When the food was served, everyone quickly realized the truth. The meal was so bad that they threw it overboard.
The family and crew sat silently, watching to see what the captain would do. He had every right to send the young man away — throw him overboard like the meal. But he did not.
He smiled. “Stay,” he said. “I’ll teach you.”
And he did.
That moment changed the young man’s life. From then on, he learned from the master day after day in the ship’s galley. When his time with the family ended, he carried a letter of recommendation that earned him a position in a fine restaurant. Years later, he managed a marina, bought one, and built a good life — all because one man refused to throw him overboard.
I already knew Tessa’s father, so hearing that story from her carried special meaning. I could picture the scene, the tension in that little galley, the expectant faces, the quiet pause before the verdict. But what the captain did was more than kindness; it was redemption. He saw failure, yet chose to restore and teach.
What a great picture of the gospel.
Christ finds us floundering in our own sin. We may bluff our way on board, convinced we can handle life. But when the Master steps into view, our self-made confidence collapses.
And here is the wonder: the Redeemer does not leave us in shame. He saves us, then teaches us.
That order matters. Salvation first, sanctification after. We are not accepted because we can learn; we are taught because we’ve been accepted.
That is grace. And it’s also the heart of many caregivers’ journeys.
Most caregivers never planned this voyage. Some of us bluff our way on board, thinking we’ve got this figured out. Others climb aboard unaware of how poor our skills really are. But it doesn’t take long to find out — we come up short.
We think we can “cook” until the storm hits, a diagnosis, a disability, an accident, and we realize we’re in over our heads. The meals we serve, our best efforts, often come out burned and bitter.
But Christ, the steady Captain, doesn’t throw us overboard. He teaches us, patiently and personally, in the galley of daily struggle.
C.S. Lewis once observed that God is not content to leave us as we are; He is shaping us into something far better than we imagined. That shaping often happens in the quiet, ordinary places where so many caregivers live.
Some of His lessons come softly: how to sit in silence beside a hospital bed, how to pray when words run dry, how to rest even when sleep won’t come. Others are harder, such as learning to forgive those who don’t understand or to accept help when pride tells us to refuse.
Over time, we learn, not because we are gifted, but because He is faithful.
Every caregiver I know can point to moments when someone showed them that same mercy: a nurse who stayed late to explain a procedure, a pastor who listened instead of lectured, a spouse who forgave a sharp word. Each of them reflected the Redeemer’s voice: “Stay. I’ll teach you.”
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Tessa’s father not only knew his way around his ship’s galley; he knew his way around any kitchen. His name is Graham Kerr, and the world knew him as “The Galloping Gourmet.”
But this story isn’t about fame or food. It’s about redemption that becomes instruction — grace that saves, then sanctifies.
Christ does that with us. He is not merely a teacher or navigator; He is the One who walks on water and calms the seas. He doesn’t choose us for our skill; He redeems us for His glory. And He doesn’t give up when we burn the meal.
For family caregivers, that’s good news. We don’t have to be perfect; we only have to stay aboard.
“Stay. I’ll teach you.”
Those words are the melody of mercy and the quiet assurance that keep weary caregivers from giving up. Under the Master’s hand, even our failures serve His purpose.
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