Paul Gray

August 20, 2007 12:00am

WE should all start calling God “Allah”, says a Roman Catholic bishop in the Netherlands, Bishop Tiny Muskens.

“Allah is a very beautiful word for God,” said Bishop Muskens. “What does God care what we call him?”

That is a very interesting question for a Christian leader to ask. According to the Christian Bible, there is an answer.

We’re supposed to call God “father”, as in the prayer, “Our Father”.

There’s also a passage at the end of Matthew’s Gospel where the first Christians are told by Jesus to baptise all nations “in the name of the father, the son and the Holy Spirit”.

You do not need to be a believer to understand the historical importance of these words. The Jews were the first to promote the metaphorical idea of God as a “father”.

The Christians expanded the idea of God into a Trinity, “father, son and Holy Spirit”, as the New Testament says.

The message was still “one God”, but three persons in one God. The Muslims did not like that idea at all.

They thought it was a heresy, promoting the idea of three Gods, not one. So ever since they have insisted on the mantra that “there is no God but Allah”.

Even now, Christians are often referred to as “polytheists” by some Muslims.

In light of this, why a Roman Catholic bishop would want to tell the world at large to start using the Muslim name for God is anybody’s guess.

What the story says about today’s world, however, is patently clear.

A kind of insanity has set in. Some call it political correctness. Others call it post-modernism.

A better term might be “loss of purpose”.

Liberal church leaders are not alone in losing sight of what they’re meant to stand for. Whole slabs of Western society, particularly its intelligentsia, have lost sight of the positive aspects of their own society’s heritage.

It is this obvious loss of societal purpose, within the intelligentsia in particular, that fuels popular support for political stunts like the opportunistic call for an end to Muslim immigration by a resurrected Pauline Hanson.

Of course, Pauline Hanson is not alone in urging an end to Muslim immigration.

Former senator John Stone and others have made similar calls. Stone’s more reasoned case is that immigration policy is one of the few areas in our democratic society where government policy can make any difference at all to social conditions.

So if Muslims are a threat, immigration policy should, logically, be used to reduce that threat.

In my view, government policy should be directed to creating favourable pro-Western, or at least anti-terrorism, propaganda within the Islamic world.

Therefore, calling for an end to Muslim immigration because all Muslims are a problem is not a sensible way to proceed.

It simply helps the terrorists in their crusade to paint the West as anti-Muslim.

In 2007, as ever, we need to beware of opposing foreigners simply because they are foreigners.

Arguments to justify such prejudice will not stand the test of history.